Month: October 2017

The OB Planning Board Project Review Committee meets Wednesday, October 18th, and has two projects on its agenda.

The first is the 4 condos project at Abbott and Muir and the second is the Houlton Family bluff repair project. The Project Review panel is a sub-committee of the OB Planning Board and makes recommendations to the full board. The meetings take place at the OB Rec Center, 4726 Santa Monica in the Community Meeting Room. They start at 6pm.

By Joaquin Antique

Being an occasional column featuring sights and sounds from Ocean Beach and Point Loma.

Overheard

My nephew was surfing Dog Beach a few years back and he heard some distant thunder.
Two other guys were talking to each other about the situation:

First Surfer: Do you think we should get out of the water?

By Kathy Blavatt

After years of blight at 4706 Del Mar Avenue in Ocean Beach, the 1919 cottage and other structures have been demolished.

OB historian Ruth Held described the property many years ago as having a beautiful garden.

Editor: We have all read about the horrible fires and devastation north of us. This account was sent to OB Rag staff member Judi Curry by a friend living in the Bay Area, who has given permission to post.

I am going up today to look around. I am still shut out of my neighborhood. The boys are staying at the beach.

Reflecting on the current reality, and thought I’d share, since some folks who haven’t been here yet are driving in this weekend …

We walk around in masks, and know what N95 means. We regularly ask if you “saw flames or just smoke.” We gather in parking lots to watch our hillside, discuss “back fire,” and argue over white vs. black smoke. We end conversations with strangers with “Be Safe.”

Last week in the second part of my review of Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” I noted how the complicity of neoliberal Democrats with the aims of the Right is one of the reasons why fighting the Koch brothers of the world has been so difficult.

Thinking they are reasonably compromising or engaging in a savvy war of position, these Democrats are instead simply crab walking us over a cliff.

By Norma Damashek / San Diego Free Press

Dangling participle – a piece of a sentence in search of its true identity. Here’s an example: Sitting in the boss’s chair, deadly disease runs rampant among homeless people on the streets of San Diego.

What’s wrong with this sentence? Something’s missing. We can fix it this way: Sitting in the boss’s chair, Mayor Kevin Faulconer twiddles his thumbs while deadly disease runs rampant among homeless people….

An equally correct alternative might be: Sitting in the boss’s chair, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors lazily ignore their civic responsibilities as deadly disease runs rampant….

Once we get the grammar right, the picture becomes clear. Locally-elected officials – by choosing to ignore their political duty

Roseville developers’ runaround in progress

Editor: This article by Julie Stalmer originally appeared in the San Diego Reader on October 6th. Since its publication, the City’s Development Services Department (DSD) got back to Julie .

By Julie Stalmer/ San Diego Reader / Oct. 6, 2017

Since moving into the Roseville neighborhood in May, Toni Popoki Reed had not seen much happening in the vacant lot across the street. She knew of the housing project that broke ground there in 2016. She was aware it had stalled sometime early 2017 but didn’t know why. She was surprised when, mid-September, she saw something other than the weeds getting taller on the corner of Garrison Street and Locust Street.

By Frank Gormlie

Members of the “No Target in OB” group hosted a forum Wednesday night, October 11th, and the message from all the presentations is, the boycott of Target Express in Ocean Beach is on, baby!

About 40 people crammed into the meeting room of the OB Rec Center to view a good power-point presentation by Kim McGinley with updates and messages the group wants to get out to the community about why a boycott is necessary. McGinley pressed the message, “it’s not a done deal yet,”

This month the online OB Rag is ten years old! We started publishing during the fires of late October 2007.

And we’ve been going strong ever since! A lot of that is due to the solid support OBceans and friends have given us.

By Josh Weber

My family just got robbed of our rent.

We have two girls and a baby on the way, so this is extremely tough … for the first time since my oldest was born, thoughts of homelessness cross my mind.

We were trying to move from one place to another. It’s the same size as where we lived before, just cheaper and a further commute. Finally we could save a little, and our kids would still have their own room and space.

We were struggling to get in with individual agents, each charging us around $100 for applications or credit checks.

Second of Two Parts

In one of the most provocative incidents involving self-styled Neo-Nazis since Charlottesville, about 25 men in masks and bandanas descended on a progressive book fair in Houston, Texas on Sunday, September 24th. They set off smoke bombs, shouted “sieg hiel!”, “blood and soil!” and generally harassed folks at the event.

It was a story totally missed by mainstream media, but observed by reporters from AlterNet who filed a report, picked up by other progressive news sites: