Month: August 2011

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department filed suit Wednesday to block AT&T’s $39 billion deal to buy T-Mobile USA on grounds that it would raise prices for consumers. The government contends that the acquisition of the No. 4 wireless carrier in the country by No. 2 AT&T would reduce competition.

By Steven Greenhouse / New York Times / Originally published August 26, 2011

At Woodstock, Joan Baez sang a famous folk ballad celebrating Joe Hill, the itinerant miner, songwriter and union activist who was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1915. “I never died, said he” is the song’s refrain.

Hill’s status as a labor icon and the debate about his conviction certainly never died. And now a new biography makes the strongest case yet that Hill was wrongfully convicted of murdering a local grocer, the charge that led to his execution at age 36.

By John Lawrence / Will Blog For Food / August 30, 2011

Grover Norquist has never been elected to office yet Republican politicians are pledging their obeisance to him. Norquist is one of the most powerful unelected men controlling US politics.

His motto is “I want to shrink government down so small that I can drown it in the bathtub.”

by Lucas O’Connor / Issa Exposed / August 29, 2011

Questions have been swirling for months about Darrell Issa’s purchase of the office building at 2067 West Vista Way. In addition to previous questions about the property, it appears that one of the principals who negotiated the deal also made his only federal political contribution ever to Issa’s campaign.

The number of San Diegans using food stamps to help supplement their income has increased by 89 percent since January 2009, according to the County’s Health and Human Services Agency.

For several years the number of people using food stamps, also known as the CalFresh program, in San Diego, in comparison to other cities across the country was extremely low. In January 2009 San Diego’s food stamp program had 122,878 recipients. In July 2011, there were 232,255 food stamp recipients in San Diego almost double the number in less than two years.

For most of last week, the OB Rag ran our latest San Diego mayoral election poll, and Bob Filner won it easily hands down. He garnered 46.7% of the vote which included 169 respondents.

“None of the above” was also a choice, and it came in second with 17.2%.

Among the Republicans running, Carl DeMaio topped the field with a meager 13.6%, followed by Nathan Fletcher with a single-digit of 8.3%, and then Bonnie Dumanis bringing up the rear with 7.1%. Combined, the GOP candidates won 29% of the vote.

See this blast from the past! Originally published Aug. 29, 2011. A decade ago and redistricting was the thing.

Well, it’s now official. The neighborhood of Ocean Beach will remain in District 2. This is significant, as it means that OB will remain in a district with other beach neighborhoods that have similar interests and needs.

Some of the country’s best-known multi­national corporations closely guard a number they don’t want anyone to know: the breakdown between their jobs here and abroad.

So secretive are these companies that they hand the figure over to government statisticians on the condition that officials will release only an aggregate number. The latest data show that multinationals cut 2.9 million jobs in the United States and added 2.4 million overseas between 2000 and 2009.

Vista rally time has been corrected! See inside.

RNs to sponsor soup kitchens, food pantries, speak outs on the need for jobs, healthcare, education, housing – and outline the RN plan on how to pay for it.

Local actions planned for San Diego include a freeway overpass flash mob and soup line.

From Maine to California, nurses, joined by others fed up with the ongoing economic crisis, will call on Congress members in their local district offices Sept. 1 to support a tax on Wall Street financial speculation, a revenue source fast becoming an international norm, to pay for healing the nation.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / August 28, 2011

Friday, August 26, was Women’s Equality Day. Sadly, it’s a bit of a misnomer. Besides, how many people actually know what it is that the day celebrates? It surely is not equality. Women don’t have equality. Even I don’t have equality, and I am no pantywaist — but the same rights, responsibilities and opportunities as men? Oh my goodness, no. Women, as a class, have not yet achieved any of that.

Information Overload and the “Post Idea Age”

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, “The Elusive Big Idea,” Neal Gabler makes the case that we are living in a “post-idea” age where mundane observations have taken the place of big ideas. We have left behind the Einsteins for entrepreneurs. As he puts it:

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

It’s that time of year again, time to honor a San Diego community tradition going to back to the age of grunge, bungy jumping and line-dancing: it’s time for the annual Paddle for Clean Water at the Ocean Beach Pier, celebrating its 20th anniversary on Sunday, September 18th from 9:00 am to 12 noon!