Month: October 2015

Hannah Steria showed me into the cramped back office of the only licensed medical marijuana storefront in City Council District 2, the Point Loma Patients Consumer Cooperative, one of the only places in the building where we could do an interview in private. The place was crowded with patients and staff – two friendly security guards were very visible. We were about 2 miles as the seagull flies from downtown Ocean Beach – and this was OB’s closest licensed pot storefront.

Somewhere on Santa Monica Avenue in north OB, the Giant Pumpkin Lives!

OBceans are making Halloween a lit-up “holiday” – and are stringing up (usually) orange lights and digging up front yards to make graves -as new polls show adults are taking over the night of ghosts and spending goblins of cash.

By the year 2100- a mere 85 years from now -, scientists project that temperatures will have melted polar ice enough to have raised ocean water levels in the Pacific nearly 10 feet. If this does occur – and it seems likely – north Ocean Beach will have a new beachfront, with Bacon Street being the new Abbott Street, right at the water’s edge. According to maps just released last week from a group of scientists who have studied climate change, the projections of the effects of sea levels rising for coastal communities around the globe, including Ocean Beach and the rest of San Diego, are very disquieting.

The Ocean Beach Planning Board is holding a “special meeting” tonight, Wednesday, Oct. 21. The one-item agenda is on the…

By John Lawrence

We live in a sick society where little kids play violent video games, you can’t flip through the channels on a TV without seeing drawn handguns, and hunters use automatic weapons to kill innocent animals.

It’s a culture of violence in movies and TV, a culture of violence in video games and a culture of violence in terms of unending wars and people blown to smithereens every night on the nightly news.

It was disheartening to me to see a few days after the horrific mass murder at Umpqua Community College, pro gun demonstrators protesting the American President as he landed there to give comfort to the families who had lost loved ones. Where were the anti gun protesters?

Lt Carter Informs OBMA at Crime Prevention Meeting

By Lois Lane

If you want to be a video star, don’t count on the Ocean Beach video cameras for fame, much less fortune.

Soon to be installed in Ocean Beach – at the beach between the OB Pier and the San Diego River (Dog Beach included) – will be ten police surveillance cameras all pointed at the areas deemed most critical by the San Diego Police Department.

As far as the OB Rag can tell, police – with the support of one OB organization – are making a near uni-lateral decision without a community-wide debate – about the installation of police surveillance cameras at OB’s waterfront.

Lt. Bill Carter of the SDPD filled in members of the Ocean Beach Mainstreet Association (OBMA) Crime Prevention meeting on Tuesday, October 20 with the details. He will be making similar and updated information available to the regularly scheduled meetings in Ocean Beach.

By John E. Thickstun

There are only two possibilities here in San Diego: STVRs (short term vacation rentals) are either “Visitor Accommodations” under the Municipal Code, or they’re not a listed use in the Municipal Code.

In either case, STVRs are not permitted in residential zones.

STVRs are Visitor Accommodations –

“Uses that provide lodging, or a combination of lodging, food and entertainment, primarily to visitors and tourists”

Hotels, motels and bed and breakfast establishments are Visitor Accommodations. Visitor Accommodations are unlawful in all residential zones. They are a non-conforming use.

In years past, candidates totally ignored the failed war on drugs and the harms of marijuana prohibition

By Tony Newman / AlterNet

During the first Democratic debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) became the first major presidential candidate to say that he would support legalizing marijuana if given the chance. Asked whether he would support an upcoming ballot measure on legalization in Nevada, Sanders said:

“I suspect I would vote yes. And I would vote yes because I am seeing in this country too many lives being destroyed for non-violent offenses.

Editor: We wanted to introduce OB Rag readers to something similar to our online newspaper – the South Bay Compass – edited by Barbara Zaragoza. Barbara covers the South Bay – including the border – like the OB Rag covers OB, the Peninsula and other beaches. Plus she and the SB Compass are increasingly becoming associated with our online associates at the San Diego Free Press – and by extension with the OB Rag.

By Barbara Zaragoza/ SouthBayCompass

Huckabee’s Visit

The Times of San Diego reported that former Arkansas governor and Presidential hopeful, Mike Huckabee, visited Border Field State Park on Saturday, October 10th. Standing alongside former congressman, Duncan Lee Hunter, Huckabee talked about illegal border crossers, saying: “They’re not coming to make beds and pick tomatoes. They’re coming to sell drugs. They’re coming to commit crime and to bring the mayhem that they have in their hearts upon the American people.”

By Terry Ratner

In a split second, a face makes its first impression on us.

Each photo tells a story, but it probably doesn’t tell the same story to any two people.

By Jim Miller

Recently Thomas B. Edsall penned an interesting column in the New York Times asking “How Did the Democrats Become the Favorites of the Rich?” where he observed that while the gulf between the two parties is still very wide on many social issues, on economic issues, Democrats have “inched closer to the policy positions of conservatives, stepping back from championing the needs of working men and women, of the unemployed and of the so-called underclass.”