Serving OB, the Peninsula and San Diego Beaches
by Lucas O’Connor / Two Cathedrals / August 16, 2011
We recently touched on mayor candidate Nathan Fletcher’s transparently unethical hiring practices, paying for campaign staff with taxpayer dollars. Today we turn the spotlight to another mayoral candidate, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis.
By Barbara Ehrenreich / TomDispatch.com / Originally published Aug. 9, 2011
I completed the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. Even secretaries in some hi-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. In San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, “Make love not war,” and then — down at the bottom — “Screw it, just make money.”
Appalling: BART tactic may be first time a government agency disrupts cellphone service in the U.S.to quell planned protests
By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd /AlterNet / August 13, 2011
Thursday night [August 11, 2011] , a protest was planned in the Bay Area Rapid Transit to protest the latest police shooting of an unarmed man. But protesters found themselves without cell service, and now a BART official admits that cell service was shut off to quell the action—violating citizens’ First Amendment rights.
By Lyneva Mottley
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 46 years since August 11, 1965, the day the Watts uprising began.
I’ll never forget the fear that I felt watching the chaos unfold. I was shocked but not surprised: you could feel the anger and frustration building up during that hot summer.
The booming California economy was providing little opportunity for people of color. Public policy was benefiting the already fortunate and was leaving behind those who were already disadvantaged. In California, as in the rest of the country, African American and Latino families were reaching a boiling point that could not be contained any longer. Over the following two years there were a number of additional riots in Chicago, Newark, Detroit and elsewhere.
By Robert Reich / Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Americans are deeply confused about why the economy is so bad – and their President isn’t telling them. In fact, the White House apparently has decided to join with Republicans and blame it on the long-term budget deficit.
Before I turn to the President, though, let’s be clear: The lousy economy is due to insufficient demand. Consumers – who are 70 percent of the economy — can’t and won’t buy because they’re running out of cash. They can’t borrow against homes that are worth a third less than they were five years ago, and most consumers are bad credit risks anyway because they’re losing their jobs and their wages are dropping. They also have to start saving for the kids’ college or for retirement, which will cut their spending even more.
Obama is a willful player in an epic drama of faux-politics.
By James K. Galbraith / AlterNet – Deutsche Welle / August 8, 2011
Political news travels slowly, and in my casual observation progressive Europeans have held on to the myth of Barack Obama as a good man much longer than most progressive Americans did. How could a young black American from Chicago and Harvard be otherwise?
By Monty Kroopkin / Special to the OB Rag
On August 3, 2011, thousands of County employees were amazed to see an email sent out by the County’s Human Resources Department “on behalf of” their union. The workers are members of Service Employees International Union Local 221 (SEIU 221).
That same day, paid union representatives appeared inside the Mission Valley Family Resource Center and at the County Administration Building…
SAN DIEGO – The Fair Political Practices Commission was notified of potentially fraudulent activity by the Comprehensive Pension Reform for San Diego campaign committee on August 3rd, including the video documentation of paid-signature gatherers using a phony petition to supposedly “lower gas prices” as a bait-and-switch that resulted in voters signing petitions for ballot measures that eliminate a retirement safety net for city employees.
Group hacks mostly rural sheriff sites, steals data for international arrests of its members
LONDON (AP) — The group known as Anonymous said Saturday it has hacked into some 70 mostly rural law enforcement websites in the United States, a breach that one local police chief said had leaked information about an ongoing investigation.
By Thom Hartmann / OpEdNews / August 6, 2011
Have you seen, anywhere, in any media, or even heard reported or repeated on NPR, the following sentence?
“We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.”
By Michael Moore / MichaelMoore.com / August 5, 2011
From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, “When did this all begin, America’s downward slide?” They say they’ve heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent’s income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free).
That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer.
Editor: San Diego billionaire Irwin Jacob wants to redevelop Balboa Park, and the City of San Diego gave tentative approval recently in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). In response, SOHO -the Save Our Heritage group – has sued the City. Then in reaction to the suit, the City Attorney has immediately moved to have it dismissed as “frivolous”.
SOHO Files Suit Over City of San Diego’s Approval of the Plaza de Panama Circulation & Parking Structure Project
On August 2, 2011, Save Our Heritage Organization (SOHO) sued the City of San Diego regarding its failure to comply with state environmental laws …
(Come inside for the remainder of this post.)
City Attorney Moves to Dismiss SOHO Lawsuit
Preservation group declines, vows to press forward on overturning Plaza de Panama memo
City Attorney Jan Goldsmith struck back Wednesday against SOHO over the group’s challenge to proposed changes to the center of Balboa Park.
(Come inside for the remainder of this post.)
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