Month: March 2012

Occasionally, we’ll post an update on the comings and goings on Newport Avenue – the main business street in OB. And even less occasionally, however, we’ll showcase news from ‘off-Newport’ – updates away from the main business district, where there’s also village and commercial life.

And that’s what we found on Thursday, March 15th, as we cruised the back streets, allies, and beaches of ‘Off-Newport’ and hereby file this report:

Finally! OB Streets Are Being Striped!

It has finally happened. Certain streets in OB are being stripped. Sections of Sunset Cliffs Boulevard and Cable Street were having their final yellow strips added. Cable Street itself over the past several years has taken a number of hostages in the tire world, as it’s pothole were infamous. Now, with the new pipes, the new asphalt, and now the stripping – the community can begin to settle back after having its roads torn up for over a year.

New Seawall Means Expanded Beach at Bermuda

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We’re all happy that the Ocean Beach branch library has reopened. The “grand” reopening was on Saturday, March 10th. Closed for months for repairs, it was back to busy as usual when we visited it on Thursday, March 15.

The library – really one of the hubs of the village – has new rugs, new roof, new paint, some new furniture … and perhaps, soon, will have new hours. Especially if Mayor Sanders and the City Council glide some money toward expanding the library’s hours, which was promised.

Here’s todays Doonesbury cartoon No. 5 for Friday, March 16th.

Jeff Light, editor of the revamped San Diego U-T, the guy who made the decision to black-out this week’s Doonsbury cartoons because artist Gary Trudeau is drawing about women’s reproductive rights, came on the OB Rag the other day and left a lengthy comment as to why he made the decision.

While we really appreciate Jeff coming onto our site – something his predecessors would never have done and which is a sign of the drastic difference he has made on the newspaper – we believe his reasoning falls flat. Here’s his comment from Wednesday in full:

You know, sometimes people with strong feelings get worked up and do things that they probably realize, deep down, are out of bounds. … So, Rush Limbaugh calls some poor woman a slut, …. To me this is all the same sort of thing.
I didn’t kill those strips for any partisan reason. I run Doonesbury every day. …

April, in 2011, was the last time I had company sexually, after nearly a year of fun in the hay – with a beautiful woman I met a while after my wife died.

This has been some kind of experience because I have always very much enjoyed “doin’ the do.” And so did, Nancy, my sexy soulmate of 34 years, through and through. She was 62 when she left and I was 71.

We had such a rich sex life. Both of us were fit and young in spirit, still eager, up for it (pun somewhat intended) both on planned date nights, a couple of times a week, or spontaneously. Whichever came first.

Regional Water Quality Control Board Unanimously Adopts San Diego Bay Cleanup

The Regional Water Quality Control Board (Regional Board) on Wednesday, March 14, unanimously ordered a cleanup of the 143,400 cubic yards of toxic sediments from the bottom of San Diego Bay. After a 20-year battle, the polluters will be held accountable, and the bay will have a chance to return to a cleaner state.

In addition to celebrating the long-awaited cleanup order, San Diego Coastkeeper and Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) asked the Regional Board to require that the cleanup actually achieve the alternative cleanup levels that the Regional Board staff has determined is safe for public health and environment.

“The Regional Board should be applauded for finally acknowledging this pollution and the harm it causes to human, environmental and economic health,” said Jill Witkowski, legal director at San Diego Coastkeeper. “It’s about time that we make those responsible for the pollution clean up their mess.”

Originally posted on March 15, 2012

A few words about political cartoons, U-T’s Steve Breen, and the blackout.

Over the past few days Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau has depicted a woman’s experience in a Texas abortion clinic. The woman has been introduced to the shaming room, pronounced a suspected slut, and has been Rick Rolled, as Governor Rick Perry casts aside the woman’s own doctor’s health assessment to present a legislative edict of his own.

Trudeau has been a comic strip artist since 1970. He is also a Pulitzer Prize winning comic strip artist ( 1975), and political satirist and social commentator. It is therefore not a surprise that his cartoons riff off of the mainstream news and delivers them up with a distinctive point of view. This is what political satirists and commentators do.

That is what U-T San Diego’s own political cartoonist, Steve Breen does—he draws political cartoons that represent his own distinctive point of view. Breen was born in 1970, the same year that Trudeau became syndicated, and he has won two Pulitzer Prizes (1998, 2009).

Looks like the few remaining fire pits on the beaches of Ocean Beach … and the remaining on other areas … will be “saved” once more. Mayor Jerry Sanders said on Tuesday, March 13, that “San Diego’s 186 fire pits will be fully funded for the first time in three-and-a-half years.”

The San Diego U-T reports:

Due to a projected $16.5 million budget surplus, the city again will pay for them on its own. It costs $120,500 annually to maintain the concrete structures, but the city struggled with budget deficits as high as $120 million in 2010, which kept the pits on the chopping block.

Underwater Homeowners Start To Lose Patience

By Tom Fudge / KPBS / March 14, 2012

Rolling Hills Ranch looks like a pretty plush neighborhood. Three thousand square-foot stucco homes line the winding streets, and they’re framed by a panorama of nearby mountains. …

Use Of Pigs In Medic Classes Sparks Protest

By Steve Schmidt / 10 News / March 14, 2012

It’s about training the finest medics in the world. It’s about cruelty to animals. When it comes to the goings-on at secluded Covert Canyon, an outdoor training facility near Alpine, there’s little that the two sides in the issue agree on. …

San Diego Rents Third Highest in Nation

By Don Bauder / The Reader / March 13, 2012

By Sheila Johnson

Last December, on a visit to Japan, I had a chance to spend a day being driven around Sendai and its environs to see at first hand some of the earthquake and tsunami damage of March, 2011. We did not go anywhere near the ‘dead-zone’ around Fukushima’s nuclear reactors, but what I saw was shocking enough — lamp-posts bent like pretzels by the force of the water, entire towns wiped from the map, and rice-fields that would normally have been covered with rice-stubble instead scrubbed clean of all topsoil.

Even worse, these rice-fields had been covered, I was told, by six feet of sea water. How long, I wondered, will it take for the salt to be leached from the soil so that rice can grow there again? And what about the nuclear fall-out and its damage to soil, plants, and animals?

A Day FOR the 99 Percent!

by Monty Reed Kroopkin

The Occupy movement is rolling out a new tactic. It is building on several months of successes and aims to take it ‘up a notch’. May 1st — May Day — is the World Labor Day honoring the workers killed in Chicago in 1886, striking for the eight hour day. It is also the day each year that working class solidarity is reaffirmed and our demands for a better world renewed. Occupy is organizing for it, everywhere, as the next major step.

Last Fall, as the Occupy Wall Street movement spread to more than 2000 cities worldwide, SEIU International Union President Mary Kay Henry issued a statement of support. She said, in part:

“As part of a peaceful, united movement we can do so much more to demonstrate the increasing urgency of the crisis our country faces and shine a light on those responsible.”

“The whole community (of Ocean Beach) will be changed,” Bishop Jim Mathes told a recent gathering of the Episcopal faithful from across the country.

At a recent “community gathering” in San Diego of roughly 300 Asian, Black, Latino and Native American clergy and laity from across the Episcopal Church was held. Organized through the Ethnic Ministries offices of the church, the agenda for the “New Community Gathering” included community engagement and mission focus.

During the meeting, they were welcomed by Bishop Jim Mathes of San Diego. It was reported via the Church’s press that Mathes stated:

“the diocese is also in the process of relocating its headquarters to the Ocean Beach area, where it currently provides 3,000 service contacts monthly in the form of 12-step groups, meals, legal and medical assistance, even haircuts.”

And it was reported that he continued to state:

Government budgets at every level now include allocations aimed at fighting an ephemeral “War on Terror” in the United States.

By Stephan Salisbury / TomDispatch.com – AlterNet / Originally published March 4, 2012

At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California. American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere.

There should have been no surprise. Those flash grenades exploding in Oakland and the sound cannons on New York’s streets simply opened small windows onto a national policing landscape long in the process of militarization — a bleak domestic no man’s land marked by tanks and drones, robot bomb detectors, grenade launchers, tasers, and most of all, interlinked video surveillance cameras and information databases growing quietly on unobtrusive server farms everywhere.