Author: Frank Gormlie

Local beach residents want no part of the recent elimination of trash cans by the City of San Diego along walkways and viewpoints at the cliffs and beaches. They are registering their opposition by leaving mounds of rubbish and trash where trash cans once gallantly stood.

Nearly two weeks ago, the City of San Diego announced that it was permanently removing about two dozen trash receptacles from Ocean Beach to La Jolla. The cans removed were at walkways and viewpoints – not the actual beach and parks in between.

One out of every 150 Americans was there in Washington DC yesterday, January 20, 2009. Nothing before yesterday had ever seen such a press of humanity that demonstrated on Tuesday. So many grand words have been spoken or written about President Barack Obama’s inauguration, that we dare not add anything mediocre. We had risen yesterday in anticipation, and turned on the tube early to watch history and try to be part of it. The crowds were what amazed me. Seeing faces with tears rolling down glad cheeks were what got me the most. Watching so many young Americans happy and excited, seeing so many African-Americans beaming, and viewing the plain diversity of the crowd made us all gasp with pride. The relentless chants of “Obama, Obama!” echoed my shouts into the night air the evening he was elected.

A memorial for Donnie Truesdail is being planned here in Ocean Beach for next Thursday, January 22nd. His family and friends hope it will allow all the different people touched by the local musician and music teacher to come together and express their sympathies.

The planning for the memorial, however, is being done in the dark shadow cast by the California Highway Patrol’s conclusion that Donnie’s death was a ‘suicide.’ Their conclusion is based on faulty evidence.

The Ocean Beach branch Library has no better friends than Dorothy Shumway and her family. Over the past year, this long-time OB family donated nearly $13,000 to the OB Branch of the San Diego Public Library. Dorothy Shumway, now 83, and her family wrote checks that totaled $12,900 at two different times during 2008, and sent them to the San Diego Public Library Foundation ear-marked for our local branch. This incredible act of generosity by one family in support of the Ocean Branch Library, particularly since the branch has just fought a successful, if temporary, battle to keep its doors open, does need to be recognized by the broader community.

This morning, the San Diego Union-Tribune ran a brief story of the death of an Ocean Beach musician and school teacher, Don Truesdail, who was killed by a truck on Interstate 5, the morning of Tuesday, January 13th. Unfortunately, the paper reported that Truesdail, 34, had jumped in front of a truck, with the implication that he had committed suicide.

The only word that Truesdail had committed suicide was this:

“Investigators said witnesses called 911 after seeing a man on the freeway shoulder jump in front of a truck. The driver, who pulled over after the accident, was not injured.”

Ever since the story appeared on the U-T’s online version, comments have poured in from Don’s friends and family, outraged at the suggestion that he had killed himself.

Activist San Diego’s 2009 People’s Ball A Gala Event to Celebrate The End of an Error! Democracy under construction! Inaugurate…

Last week the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that the City’s Police Department has decided to purchase a mobile observation tower. Paying the $119,000 price tag with funds from a Homeland Security grant, the SDPD has already tried the tower out out on numerous occasions, and expects delivery of the two-storied platform in February.
Police told the U-T that they had used the tower at the beach over Labor Day, had used it at UTC during the recent holidays and at Qualcomm when the Raiders played the Chargers. “It has assisted us in making arrests, ” police Capt. Shelly Zimmerman told the newspaper, “and has certainly been a huge deterrent.” We’re told that the El Cajon police use a similar tower at Westfield Parkway Plaza shopping mall to “monitor crowds.”

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Late last Friday, December 19th, Republican tech “guru” Mike Connell was killed in a private plane crash in Lake Township, Ohio. He was reportedly the only one on board, and no one on the ground was injured when it went down in a residential neighborhood. Best known as the well-connected GOP computer operative who had been at the center of every Republican scandal over the past 8 years, Mike Connell was a key witness in the King-Lincoln v. Blackwell lawsuit regarding fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election in Ohio.

On Saturday, December 13th, the Union-Tribune ran an innocuous article entitled, “DA ends probe of land sale to college,” over on page B-3. Staff writer Jennifer Vigil described very matter-of-fact-ly how the District Attorney “had cleared everyone involved in a land sale to the San Diego Community College District that benefited two politically connected developers.” Does this bury the scandal? It’s such a small scandal and involved our former ‘ballpark czar’ Mike Madigan.

I’ll never know for sure, but it’s possible that I was once on, ahem, extremely intimate terms with W. Mark Felt, the leak artist formerly known as Deep Throat who has now passed away. Journalists and many others lionizing the former FBI official — rightly — for his contribution in helping to bring down Richard Nixon, should not overlook the fact that Felt was one of the architects of the bureau’s notorious COINTELPRO domestic spying-and-burglary campaign.

In D.C. yesterday morning, the Iraq Ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaida’ie, paused during a presentation to address a handful of women from CODEPINK who were holding signs in the audience reading “Free al-Zaidi” and “al-Zaidi speaks for me.” The signs were to show support for the Iraqi journalist who was taken into police custody after throwing his shoes at President Bush during a Baghdad press conference on Sunday.