Month: March 2017

By Jim Miller

Many progressives were upset after the national Democratic party leadership recruited Obama’s Labor Secretary Tom Perez to block Minnesota’s Keith Ellison in the race for DNC chair and even more dismayed when Ellison lost very narrowly in the second round of voting.

While Perez immediately made Ellison Deputy Chair and did what he could to foster unity, it was evident to numerous observers that putting in a guy who, despite a pretty solid record on policy, supported the TPP and clearly represented the interests of the Clinton wing of the party was a mistake.

From Indivisible San Diego:

More than six hundred San Diegans marched from Dog Beach to the Ocean Beach Pier this morning with a demand to impeach President Trump. The protesters created a performance art project by standing in patterns to spell the messages “RESIST!” and “IMPEACH!” on the sand. Drone cameraman Caleb Serban-Lawler of Sabre Springs captured the images.

Nearly 500 people showed up today, Saturday, March 4th, on the sands of Ocean Beach and spelled out the word “IMPEACH”. This all came down just north of the OB Pier.

Just earlier in the morning, about 200 people spelled out the word “RESIST” north at Dog Beach. That crowd then marched south along the beach to the other gathering and filled up the letters.

After pleas from the public for action, the City Council failed to lead

By Norma Chavez-Peterson, Executive Director / ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties

The majority of the San Diego City Council demonstrated an inexcusable failure in leadership Monday, Feb. 27th in their decision to accept the 2-year independent study of police traffic stop data, but disregard its recommendations.

The Council had before them the results of an SDSU study, requested by former Councilmember Marti Emerald in 2015 to address community concerns about racial profiling by San Diego Police Department officers, …

A reader sent us this photo, with the message,

“This sign was hung on the pier just in time for the Wednesday farmers market.”

Downtown San Diego’s Experience Has Given Us Lessons

By Murtaza Baxamusa / Rooflines, the Shelterforce blog

It is often convenient to blame city planners for the affordable housing crisis. After all, those affected have no other public forum to vent their concerns, least of all toward those who are profiting off of the crisis on a project-by-project basis. Sadly, this blame is often misguided, because planners do not produce housing.

A case study of the profit-maximizing, decision-making that is driving the affordability crisis is downtown San Diego. Construction cranes are up all over, …

By John Lawrence

Amazon Go is the latest job destroyer by virtue of the fact that it is a grocery store with no check-out lines.

High tech devices will monitor every item you put in your high tech grocery basket so you just load up and go. Your credit card will be charged the correct amount. It isn’t clear if a robot will bag your groceries or if you’ll do that yourself.

This feat of automation is only the harbinger of things to come. With artificial intelligence and robots, jobs will be automated out of existence except for a few software engineers who will design the various systems.

An 81-unit luxury housing project is coming to the Midway District of Point Loma.

Called “Driftwood”, the development will be located on a 2-acre lot – which is now empty – at the corner of Kemper and Kenyon Streets and will include 3,137 square feet of retail space. It’s next to the new West City community college campus. Midway Drive is a block away from Kemper.

Accord to SDMetro:

Driftwood will consist of stacked flats within a three-story, elevator-serviced building with interior common hallways and stairwells.

Meeting Wednesday night inside the community room of the OB Rec Center, the Ocean Beach Planning Board found themselves with a full agenda.

By the end of the evening, they had approved a remodel / addition to a single family house on Santa Monica, formed a sub-committee on short-term vacation rentals, reviewed recent applications for alcohol permits, enjoyed a full discussion on a proposal to modify their bylaws about signature gatherings, and confirmed their upcoming annual election details.

“Teaching Fire Fighters how to swim and perform river rescue is not acceptable.”

By Ed Harris

On December 15th, 2016 San Diego Lifeguard River Rescue team members were holding a deployment briefing prior to an imminent storm.

Fifteen minutes before they were to deploy, they were given a new standard operating procedure. The new SOP was part of an executive order mandated by the new Fire Chief.

There were several changes that have a negative operational effect on the Lifeguards as well as a negative budgetary effect for all of us.

A big change is that now San Diego Fire Dispatch will handle inland calls for water emergencies and that Firefighters will automatically dispatch multiple engines, trucks personnel and a helicopter to calls that have been successfully handled by a few Lifeguards for over 40 years.

The OB March 4 Impeachment is gaining momentum as it will happen this Saturday, March 4th, where participants will spell out “Impeach” just north of the OB Pier.

There will be a Beach Clean-up and March from Dog Beach to the Pier, says the facebook and the main event will be to “Replicate Human Protest Banner from Ocean Beach, San Francisco,” just that here in Ocean Beach, San Diego, participants will spell out “IMPEACH”. The OB Rag and Indivisible San Diego support this action.

When the 3 two-story modular units planed for the south-east corner of Voltaire and Abbott were approved by the OB Planning Board in early September 2014, one of the applicant-owners stated to the Board unequivocally that he planned to live in one of the units. Now that they have been built, it appears that the units – at least one of them – are listed on Airbnb – for $229 to $349 a night.