Month: November 2016

Last weekend, OB People’s Food rolled out the drawings and plans for its organic cafe and juice bar.

Our good friends Judith and Wayne Starker were at the ground-breaking ceremony and sent these photos of the plans to us.

Here they are – without comment – for your viewing pleasure.

Is It All Just a Coincidence?

By Judi Curry

You can’t live in Ocean Beach/Pt Loma and not notice the continual work being done on the water pipes throughout the entire neighborhood. You can’t live in Ocean Beach/Pt. Loma and expect not to find detours where just yesterday you were able to drive right through.

You can’t live in Ocean Beach/Pt. Loma without noticing sand bags in front of drainage ditches on many of the residential streets of the area. And you can’t live in Ocean Beach/Pt Loma without noticing the huge amount of water cascading down the streets.

So is it a coincidence that many of us received water bills this week that were higher than any previous month? Is it any coincidence that those of us that have taken measures to reduce our water usage are appalled at the amount of our water bills for the months of September-November?

OB Rag editor Frank Gormlie spoke at Sunday’s San Diego Free Press contributors’ meeting Sunday, Nov. 13th, on developing a “culture of resistance” and the renewed importance of a free and progressive press, now that Trump is president-elect.

By Alexandra Rosenmann / AlterNet / November 14, 2016

Glenn Beck, Louis C.K., Meg Whitman and Cher were all adamantly anti-Trump this election and quickly became some of the most notable to compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.

But since Trump was elected, Mountain View High School history teacher Frank Navarro was placed on administrative leave for drawing the same parallels in the classroom. The California high school history teacher, also a Holocaust scholar, was asked to leave the school early, two days after election day.

Back in mid September, the OB Rag ran a readers’ poll, titled, “What will you do if Trump is elected president?” and published the results on September 23rd.

The results were interesting but not promising for the future (see below). So we decided to run another poll, now that Trump is president-elect and thousands of Americans have been in the streets protesting since the election.

On Tuesday, November 15th, Native Americans, environmentalists, and nurses will stage a protest at the San Diego Army Corps of Engineers office as part of a national day of action calling on the Army Corps and President Obama to revoke permits for the Dakota Access Pipeline.

There will be speakers – including local Native American leaders who’ve traveled to Standing Rock – and music. Organizers will sign and deliver individual postcards to the Army Corps.

By Geoff Page

Well, it appears what I suspected about the City’s eagerness to add language to the Municipal Code (MC), after the debacle on Emerson and Evergreen Streets in Roseville, is true. I objected to the new MC language that the City told everyone would “correct” the deficiency in the MC that allowed a 40-foot tall building.

My objection was that this was just a maneuver on the City’s part to avoid further litigation from other projects, that the language was redundant of what the MC already says. By adding this language, the City was able to set a future date, before which any affected projects would be exempt and that is exactly what the City has done.

There was a groundbreaking event for People’s Organic Food store’s new organic cafe and juice bar on Saturday, November 12th. It will be located just east of the market, where Tiny’s bar used to stand.

The battle over Balboa Park, the new design for the Panama bridge and the controversy over the Plaza de Panama project, is going on today, Monday, November 14th down at City Hall.

Preservationists have mobilized their forces this morning to the City Council Chambers.

By Jim Miller

I spent the days after the election, one that I too had hoped and predicted that Clinton would win, mourning and comforting despairing friends, colleagues, and students afraid of what the future will bring.

Where I teach at San Diego City College, the majority of the students are part of the America that Trump hates. There is terror at the thought of family members being deported, unease at the prospect of discriminatory policies based on religion, race, gender, and sexuality, and fear of a cynical climate-denying opportunist bent on sealing the fate of the endangered natural world.

Protests, vigils and rallies against the Trump presidency continued across the nation into the third night since his election Tuesday – up into the early hours Friday morning.

Nearly 230 Americans were arrested just last night, Thursday – with at least 185 in Los Angeles and 29 in Portland after police declared the demonstration there a “riot” using tear gas, pepper spray and rubber baton rounds to disperse the crowd – that had been estimated at 4,000 during an earlier march.

Thousands of protesters have surrounded Trump’s buildings in New York and Chicago, there have been freeway blockades, street take-overs, high-school walk-outs – …. Protests and marches occurred in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Denver, Minneapolis, Madison, Wisconsin’s capital, and Milwaukee, Columbus, Ohio, Baltimore, Dallas, Oakland, California, Richmond, along red states cities like Atlanta, Dallas, Omaha and Kansas City, Mo.