Month: December 2020

By Paul Krueger / Voice of San Diego / December 14, 2020

In 1971, a young Pete Wilson was elected mayor of San Diego on a platform of “smart growth.” I covered City Hall as young reporter in the ‘70s, and remember how Wilson’s strategy resonated with voters, who wanted to avoid Los Angeles-style sprawl by densifying neighborhoods south of Interstate 8 while limiting patchwork growth to the north.

But 50 later years later, many residents in our core neighborhoods are living with the unplanned consequences of that strategy: dilapidated, expensive and overcrowded housing, congested streets and inadequate parks and schools.

Staying up late last night, I spent a good amount of time trying to wrap my brain around this Republican effort to use the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election.

The fact that over half of the Republican representatives in Congress and 18 GOP states attorneys general have filed “friends of the court” briefs in support of the Texas AG’s suit to overturn the 20 million votes of people in four battle ground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia has made me livid.

I searched for analogies and comparisons and parallels in an attempt to grok it all, to understand what it really meant, despite the frivolous nature of the law suits, and especially what it meant to the rest of us.

The Reichstag fire came to mind. So did the firing on Fort Sumter.

Despite a tide of public opposition, the newly-sworn in City Council voted to install Jen Campbell as San Diego’s new Council president Thursday night. The vote was narrow: 5-4 vote after nearly seven hours of public testimony. The lone Republican still on the Council, Chris Cate, got to play spoiler and voted for Campbell.

As the Union-Tribune reported:

“The vast majority of the roughly 300 residents who spoke at the meeting lobbied council members to choose Councilwoman Monica Montgomery Steppe as council president instead of Campbell.

From the OB Town Council:

A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.

For a brief moment, we embodied this idea last weekend at the 2020 OB Holiday Reverse-Parade. In the midst of intense uncertainty, OBceans came together safely to continue a 41-year tradition of marking the beginning of the Holiday season in Ocean Beach.

Over 625 cars waited in line to come through the reverse-parade. We’re so thankful for this community and the ways you continue to show up and spark joy. We all need that type of communal joy, as the saying goes, now more than ever.

Public Service Announcement from CNN:

Although all 50 states have certified their election results and the Supreme Court swiftly rejected an emergency request from Pennsylvania Republicans to block election results in the commonwealth, the justices are now grappling with a new controversial bid from Texas, supported by President Donald Trump and 17 other Republican-led states.

They are asking the Supreme Court for an emergency order to invalidate the ballots of millions of voters in four battleground states — Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — even though there is no evidence of widespread fraud. Here’s what you need to know:

By Jerry Wallingford / San Diego Union-Tribune Op-Ed Page / Dec. 3, 2020

A new law that takes effect in California on Jan. 1, 2022 will make it difficult for lawyers trying criminal cases to exclude people of color, or members of other specified groups such as those related to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or religious affiliation, from sitting on trial juries.

Historically, trial lawyers have been permitted to use a “peremptory challenge” to keep a prospective juror off of a jury, without providing a reason for the exclusion. In the 1970s and 1980s, first the California and then the United States Supreme Courts devised rules known as the Batson rules, which were intended to keep lawyers from using peremptory challenges to strike jurors because of their race.

The Batson rules have been ineffective. A recent study by the UC Berkeley Law School, entitled “Whitewashing the Jury Box,” found that California prosecutors “still disproportionately exercise peremptory challenges to exclude African Americans and Latinx people from juries.”

By Cathie Jolley, Gary Wonocott, Greg Knight, and Mandy Havlik

The City of San Diego is headed into one of the toughest budget situation we’ve seen in decades. A city government that is already financially burdened with a pension debt and budget deficits now braces for a looming shortfall of Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) revenues as a result of the COVID-19 public health crisis that has devastated our local tourism industry.

The need for a strong, steady hand to lead the City Council has never been greater than at this moment. It will require someone with the ability to address the many challenges of recovering from the pandemic, our housing affordability crisis and navigating potential budget cuts to essential services.

A Musing Rising from a Photo Taken a Few Years Ago

by Ernie McCray

As usual
my mind,
as the minds
of dreamers do,
was just wandering,
musing
as I scrolled through
a picture or two
and one made me pause
for a moment or two,
one of me
smiling
all relaxed,
kind of, if you ask me,
sharp as a tack,
looking like the world
had my back
on a warm sunny
Southern California day.

Here are some wonderful photos of what will be long-remembered as OB’s historic “Reverse Holiday Parade.” They were lifted right off the Ocean Beach Town Council’s facebook page (and we don’t know who the photographer(s) are). Neither do we know who is in the pics or what groups were being displayed – although some are obvious.

The reverse parade had stationary floats and residents drove by in their vehicles in the parking lot of Dog Beach.

Just remember, there’s only one Santa – but he was there.