Civil Rights

Our Constitution does not give President Trump “emergency powers” and he can’t suspend it whenever he perceives there’s a national emergency. So says Constitutional expert and Dean of UC Berkeley Law School, Erwin Chemerinsky. And I believe him over Trump and any of his sycophants.

Two decades ago, I met Chemerinsky after one of his “Constitutional Law” lectures – as he was one of the professors hired to teach hundreds of us San Diego law school graduates how to take the California State Bar. Totally impressed with his sweeping grasp of the Constitution, I followed his career over the years. At some point, he became the very first dean of the brand new law school at UC Irvine. Now, he’s at Berkeley – and today he wrote an Op-Ed piece for the LA Times, “Trump’s border wall woes”.

If Trump tries to simply invoke emergency powers and build a wall between the United States and Mexico without congressional approval, it would “constitute an unconstitutional and dangerous expansion of presidential power,”

By Jacob Snow, Technology & Civil Liberties Attorney, ACLU of Northern California / ACLU Speak Freely

Recently, a patent application from Amazon became public that would pair face surveillance — like Rekognition, the product that the company is aggressively marketing to police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — with Ring, a doorbell camera company that Amazon bought earlier this year.

While the details are sketchy,

The OB Hardware store at 4871 Newport Avenue is about to celebrate being one-hundred years old, having first opened in 1919. We don’t know yet how they plan to celebrate and we don’t know the details of the original days on a dusty street called Newport. But we wish them the best – one hundred years for a business, especially these days, is a very, very long time.

The storefront, formally called OB Paint and Hardware, has been at its current location for about 5 or 6 years, having moved just a few doors down from the space they occupied literally for decades.

Thank god for MediCal

OB Rag Extends Its Offer for Groups or Small Businesses in Ocean Beach or Point Loma

Do you have a small or home business – or are you a member of an organization or group that does public service?

How about one week of free advertising on the OB Rag? You send us the display “camera-ready” and we’ll post it our website for a week.

The OB Rag has between 1,000 to 2,000 readers a day – most by far are from the city and county of San Diego.

This is all part of our support for local groups and small businesses.

Here are the details:

Pam Kragen at the San Diego Union-Tribune has just come out with “San Diego’s Best Vegan Restaurants” – and she lists three from Ocean Beach.

Kragen begins with declaring “vegan food has been named among the top six global culinary trends of 2018, and San Diego is well ahead of the curve,” and then she lists several new vegan eateries that have opened around the county recently along with some ‘oldies but goodies’ – a total of 24 eateries in all.

(Turns out the list is not so much a “best of” but more like a showcase of what’s out there.)

Here’s what Kragen says about OB’s vegan places on the list:

#SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh is a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.

He says a lawsuit or indictment would interfere with the President’s ability to protect national security.

An estimated 4,000 San Diegans rallied at the County Administration Building / Waterfront Park, listened to music and speakers, then marched down Harbor Drive and back around on Pacific Highway to a second rally. All to keep families together

The demonstration was one of 750 protests scheduled around the country

This makes sense. The NFL is big business in a capitalist political economy, thus class conflict is expected and not new. Over the decades it has produced a NFL Players Union (NFLPA), player and game officials’ threatened and real strikes, a management lockout and lots of strikebreaking scabs.