Category: Are You Kidding?

By JW August / November 25, 2024

It’s been 27 years since I interviewed Chauncey Marvin Holt in a Lemon Grove home. Over the intervening years, what Holt revealed in his intriguing  life story has bedeviled me.

A documentary I would produce from the interview included many details on his role with organized crime, in San Diego and elsewhere, and how it played out in the most dramatic murder of the 20th century — the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

A more recent interview with attorney Michael Aguirre, former City Attorney for San Diego, about the confidential arrangement he had with Holt reignited my decades of interest in the late Holt’s story.

Just this past July, President Joe Biden released documents related to the JFK assassination, three decades after Congress ordered papers related to the murder to be released, although not all of the documents. With 4,684 documents still to be released, the final chapter of the murder has not been written, and there probably is a chance it never will be.

At the time of the June 4, 1997, initial interview with Holt, I was an investigative producer with 10news and was asked by friends and colleagues of Holt to “do his story.”

Times of San Diego

A racist term for a Native American woman will be removed from nearly three dozen geographic features and place names on California lands, the state Natural Resources Agency announced Friday.

Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022 signed a bill into law that bans use of the word “squaw” in future place names and ordered the agency to rename all places that used the slur, including on streets, bridges, public buildings and cemeteries, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

TIJUANA, MEXICO — The signs at the union rally were lettered in red and green on a white background, reminiscent of the Mexican flag.

“!Con DeMaio al Norte!”
(“With Demaio to the North!”)

“!Si, se puede, jefe!”
(“Yes, we can, boss!”)

“!Te amos Carl!”
(“We love you, Carl!”)

The setting was a south-of-the-border parade on Tijuana’s famous Avenida Revolucion, where a union representing undocumented workers hoping to migrate to the United States endorsed Republican candidate Carl DeMaio for San Diego mayor.

In the spirit of bipartisanship, compromise, and reaching out to our friends and fellow citizens on the other side of the aisle, here The OB Rag offers its Voter Guide for the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary.

See you at the polls!

OCEAN BEACH –Bankers representing News Corporation announced that its Fox News division had agreed to purchase The OB Rag, a local news website based in San Diego.

“With this acquisition,” News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch said in a prepared statement, “News Corp silences an increasingly important voice for social justice and expands its local coverage to boot.”

CUPERTINO, CALIF. — Giving new meaning to corporate social responsibility, Apple Inc. announced it is “bringing home” more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs currently held by workers in foreign countries.

“As a leading corporate citizen of the United States,” the company said in a press release, “Apple can’t help but feel some sort of responsibility to its fellow Americans. So why not start hiring them?”

Apple plans to spread the employment across ten different U.S. cities, bringing each city an average of 70,000 new jobs, all with full benefits, by the end of 2013.

“We basically just gave our outsourcing team a different task,” Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook told The OB Rag. “Instead of scouring third-world countries to find where workers come cheapest, we surveyed America to find areas where these new jobs would make the most sense.”

Hey, local politics geeks, to celebrate this New-Hampshire-primary Tuesday, let’s morph the candidates for mayor of San Diego with the candidates for president of the United States!

Carl DeMaio seems akin to Ron Paul: a conservative outsider with a quirky personality who seems to enjoy rattling cages on both sides of the aisle.

As a candidate, CarlPaul would sport a perpetual disdain for the effectiveness of government, an admittedly eyebrow-raising characteristic for someone seeking more time as a government employee. Because government sometimes is ineffective, and sometimes worse, CarlPaul’s cranky message would carry more than a little truth and earn the support of a diverse range of disenfranchised folks with axes to grind, including many axes of the not-very-sharp variety.

Xiang Jo — a 14-year-old laborer on an iPhone assembly line in Suzhou, China — just wanted to pay homage to someone whose vision transformed the world.

Jo had no idea the homage would cost him his job.

The trouble started Thursday morning, when word of Steve Jobs’ death spread through the factory where Jo and dozens of other young Chinese use the toxic chemical N-Hexane to clean iPhone touch screens.

Following up on our first foray into the wonders of Google Art Project, we once again stroll a gallery of…

If you haven’t checked out Google Art Project yet, you’re in for a treat. The site uses a technology similar…

In an email recently reviewed by The OB Rag, nine-year-old Tucson shooting victim Christina-Taylor Green confirmed that she is in…

Here’s an audio/video project cobbled together from publicly available information… a reaction to President Barack Obama’s emphasis on job creation in his “State of the Union” speech last week.

Just want to point out that American corporations are creating plenty of jobs all the time!

Click the title to see the video…