Serving OB, the Peninsula and San Diego Beaches
Here at OB Rag central, there’s no one left as we’ve all gone camping.
But we’ve left an OPEN THREAD – so readers can speak their minds and express their thoughts – someone will be monitoring comments to let newbies in. Just add your comments at the bottom here and we’ll see you next week.
And don’t forget – the good folks over at San Diego Free Press are still in town, so use this weekend to check them out.
Every July 4th for the last upteen years, OBceans and their friends mass on the beach during the fireworks. And as soon as the explosions and bright stars are gone, they open up on each other with marshmallows, as part of the annual tradition that began 29 years ago. It ‘s part of our culture now.
And yet each year, the marshmallows wars seem to grow and include more and more of OB’s seafront. Last year, for example, revelers took the fighting onto Newport Avenue, down the street, up Abbott, over to the Pier.
And the mess was incredible. The same thing happened the year before, with notable stains of black marshmallow goo on the Veterans’ Memorial Rock and Park. Community volunteers – not enough – emerged over the next several days to clean off the junk. But hey! enough is enough!
The City of San Diego has unfurled its plan to stem erosion of the Sunset Cliffs. In essence, the plan calls for pipes to be drilled through the cliffs, drains installed at the base of the cliffs, and to dye and texture surrounding hill and cliffsides so they appear “natural”.
The plan, presented by city associate civil engineer Paul Jacob, was given to a community meeting on June 20th, attended by about 30 concerned citizens at the Jim Howard Hall at Robb Field. Martin Jones Westlin wrote up a report for the Peninsula Beacon, published a week later.
From Surfline
The San Diego County Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation will be hosting this year’s Morning After Mess on Thursday, July 5th from 9:00 am to 11:00 am, meeting at four coastal San Diego County locations to clean up after July 4th holiday crowds and festivities: the Ocean Beach Pier, Belmont Park in Mission Beach, the end of Pacific Beach Drive, and the South Harbor Jetty in Oceanside.
It’s a regrettable reality, but while summer weekends and holidays bring tourists and visitors to San Diego’s world-class beaches, those visitors and tourists often leave mountains of litter and garbage in their wake. Few holidays generate more garbage or trash on our beaches than the Independence Day holiday on the 4th of July. Last year, the Morning After Mess cleanup recovered 1,025 pounds of trash, as well as 255 pounds of recyclable material.
Coalition to STOP TPP Announces Week of Protest
and an International Community-Based Conference
From June 30 to July 8, the secret, super-treaty negotiations known as the 13th Round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Negotiations are being held here in San Diego at the Hilton Bayfront Hotel. The Coalition to STOP TPP hereby announces a week with rallies, a march, various other protests, and a week-long international community-based People’s Conference: A Better World Is Possible!
The 11 nations involved in the talks are the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Canada. Japan has indicated a desire to join. The economic power of this group is more than 40% larger than the 27-nation European Union. The claimed purpose of TPP is to promote development and create jobs. But their reality is different. Though the contents of these negotiations are secret, what is not a secret is that the impacts of the TPP on these Pacific Rim nations, on peasants, on farmers, on workers, on their natural resources, on the environment, will be devastating. Some people describe the TPP as “NAFTA on Steroids.”
By E.J. Dionne Jr. / The Washington Post / June 28, 2012
He’d have a lot of things to do. He’s a fine public speaker and teacher. He’d be a heck of a columnist and blogger. But he really seems to aspire to being a politician – and that’s the problem.
So often, Scalia has chosen to ignore the obligation of a Supreme Court justice to be, and appear to be, impartial. He’s turned “judicial restraint” into an oxymoronic phrase. But what he did this week, when the court announced its decision on the Arizona immigration law, should be the end of the line.
Not content with issuing a fiery written dissent, Scalia offered a bench statement questioning President Obama’s decision to allow some immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children to stay. Obama’s move had nothing to do with the case in question. Scalia just wanted you to know where he stood.
By Kent Paterson/ Frontera NorteSur / Originally published on June 21, 2012
Almost from nowhere, the 132 Movement not only succeeded in mobilizing thousands of young people in street protests against one Mexican presidential candidate and media monopolization, but recast Mexico’s elections by thrusting questions of money and politics, economic power and corruption and education and citizenship into the center of the political process.
In Aguascalientes, Mexico, a group of young people passed out leaflets to passerby in the city’s busy downtown. A young woman wore a homemade poster that protested the murders of women in the state of Mexico, while her companions distributed leaflets that flashed a satiric image of former Mexico state governor and current presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto.
Both candidates for Mayor of San Diego are viewed as fighters, but only one has repeatedly and habitually demonstrated a genuine concern for the people he is elected to serve.
Carl DeMaio and Bob Filner have both been described as “snarly.” Maybe they are but Bob has got a lot of snarling to do to match Carl.
I mean Bob pretty much, from what I’ve seen personally, as a friend of his over the years, only snarls at the likes of the promoters of injustices in our society like the fat cats in high positions and places who spend their lives conniving how to deny us “regular” folks a nice slice of the American Pie, not caring whether we live or die.
City Heights has got religion. A distinctive characteristic of my community is not only the sheer number of religious establishments located here, but the diverse forms that religious expression takes. There are the storefront Evangelical and Pentecostal Christian churches that have sprung up along University and El Cajon Boulevard, with names like La Esposa del Cordero, the Shepherd’s Wife, and signs with the exhortation Pare de Sufrir, to stop suffering.
There are Buddhist temples, botánicas, a mosque, a tiny Russian Orthodox church, and familiar Catholic and Baptist churches as well. Religious services are conducted in Spanish, Creole, Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese, to name just a few of the languages routinely spoken besides English. I do not know if other languages besides Arabic are used at the mosque located adjacent to the Somali neighborhood known as Little Mogadishu. There are also shamans and babaloas living quietly among us.
In my last column I began the story of someone I call Jose, and what led to his financial crisis. In this column I look at the Kafkaesque process he went through in his failed attempt to save his home from foreclosure. The experiences I describe here are neither rare nor random. The difficulties Jose and his family encountered in trying to get their bank to re-evaluate their loan were all too representative of the random sample of people I interviewed. The tragic fact is that the delays that Jose’s family encountered were not the result of inefficiency, but rather a deliberate policy to protect banks.
Banks do NOT want foreclosures rapidly resolved because that would bring these properties down to market value, reflecting badly on their bottom lines. Thus families like Jose’s are the deliberate casualties of a war of attrition that banks have waged on the public to protect their economic interests. For the remainder of this article, please go here.
Originally published at San Diego Free Press
“The process of public engagement [in developing the County of San Diego General Plan] had hundreds of hearings over 10 years…So the implication is that anything that is coming forward now would be inconsistent. It would be amazing if there is going to now be wholesale General Plan amendments.”
San Diego County Planning Commissioner Michael Beck, Nov. 9, 2011 interview with KPBS
Last Wednesday, June 20th, the County Board of Supervisors held a hearing for 137 private property requests that would require amending the County’s new General Plan, …
Clearly the vetting process at the State Department needs some updating from the Google dartboard they must be currently using, I thought to myself a little over a week ago, last Friday. After all, the last rumor I heard about the OB Rag / San Diego Free Press staffers was we were all under investigation by Homeland Security for our Occupy Movement support. But unlike some other thoughts I have, at least there was a basis for this one.
Say Keep it goin' to the OB Rag
with your donation today!
Copyright © 2026 OB Rag
Recent Comments