Category: Election

By Anonymous Point Loma Resident

I noticed that City Councilmembers Jen Campbell and Joe La Cava — who is council president — have items before the City Council meeting on January 27, excusing them from attending council meetings.

La Cava gives specific dates, Campbell does not.

Given Jen’s general lack of concern for residents of District 2 and her absence from District matters, this open- ended recuse from some/ all/ unspecified meetings is troublesome.

There are more and more calls to invoke the Constitution’s 25th Amendment as Donald Trump’s poor mental state becomes more and more obvious. These calls have accelerated since Trump’s deranged statements and efforts to seize Greenland. The 25th Amendment allows for the removal of a president if certain substantive criteria are met.

As Josh Fiallo at the  Daily Beast on Jan. 20 reported

Trump, 79, posted 33 times in 45 minutes on Tuesday [Jan.20], claiming he “has done more for NATO” than anyone and sharing conspiracies about Dominion voting machines, non-existent voter fraud, and a clip of his 2017 Inaugural address, among other things.

The flood of posts, which come as he threatens to shatter relations with longstanding European allies by demanding that the United States seize Greenland from Denmark, immediately renewed calls for his removal from power.

Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger asked on BlueSky, “Are we watching a real-time mental health crisis with Trump?” shortly after Trump’s mad barrage ended. “Seriously.” …

By Ron Donoho / San Diego Sun / January 16, 2026

Was San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria hoping to turn the page on public outrage over new parking fees by ignoring the topic during his 2026 State of the City address?

If so, the tactic backfired.

Those fees – in place at Balboa Park and also covering 17 blocks in downtown San Diego – are what many people still wanted to talk about after the mayor’s glaring omission in his annual speech. It was delivered on January 15, and the setting for the second year in a row was the 250-seat City Council Chambers at City Hall.

TV newscasts, online reports and other headlines focused on parking fees. Leaving the topic out of his address didn’t tamp down the ire. It stoked flames of discontent.

After the city faced more than a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar deficit in its last annual budget, one of the hot button fixes by the mayor was implementation of new charges on people who drive cars.

Rookie move by a veteran politician.

OB Rag Staff Report

When the Rag began our 2026 San Diego City Council election coverage, we promised to “scrutinize the candidates in the June primary: who they are, what they’ve done, what they say, and most importantly, where their money comes from.”

Our first post reviewed Campaign Disclosure Reports (Series 400) for three District 2 candidates and listed their top contributors. This post focuses on three candidates in the District 8 primary.

Intro by Rag Staff:

In a speech to House Republicans earlier this month, January, Donald Trump cast the coming midterm elections in existential terms, declaring Democrats would impeach him if they won a majority in Congress. He then supposedly joked about canceling the midterms, but muttered he’d be accused of being a dictator if he did.

But as Patrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez report in a sweeping and important piece in the January 12th issue of the Washington Post they assure us that “Trump can’t cancel elections and he lacks the authority to carry out some of his most far-reaching plans because local and state officials oversee elections, rather than the federal government.”

That’s a relief, isn’t it?

But they hammer away: “Trump has already ignored those constraints and signaled he will continue to do so, which means courts will probably have to determine what rules are in place for the midterm elections.” With the way courts operate, that’s downright scary.

To make their case, the reporters checked out documents and interviewed more than three dozen election officials and experts over the past year “at how Trump and the administration are trying to reshape how the midterm elections will be conducted.” Check the following out, it’s extremely important that we citizens grok what they’re doing — but remember these reporters work for Jeff Bezos, a Trump billionaire supporter who owns the Post, so they’ve also minced their words (which means things are even worse).

Here are the key methods:

Pushing states to redraw House districts

What has Trump done? Trump pressed GOP leaders in several states to take the unusual step of redrawing their congressional maps for partisan gain in the middle of the decade. Ordinarily, states draw new maps once every 10 years, after the census is completed.
Where is it happening? Republicans made nine districts more favorable for themselves across Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina and Texas and are considering redrawing districts in Florida.

What does this mean? If successful, Republicans could gain enough seats to protect their thin House majority, even if Democrats have a good year and pick up other seats. Republicans lead the chamber 218-213, and a handful of races could determine control after 2026.

By Kate Callen

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria’s 2026 “State of the City” address began hitting turbulence on January 14, the day before he delivered it.

His long-time ally Voice of San Diego (VOSD) shocked the city that morning with a takedown of the mayor’s leadership. Will Huntsberry’s “Disappointment Follows Gloria Into Sixth Year” described an executive in free fall with few achievements and fewer friends.

Later that day, word filtered out that the City Council would hold a special meeting at 1:00 p.m., two hours before Gloria’s speech, to allow public comment on a talk that hadn’t yet been given.

The hastily arranged meeting was sparsely attended. Most speakers railed against Immigration and Customs Enforcement abuses, entirely off topic, but Council President Joe La Cava allowed it.

The few speakers who stayed on topic echoed themes in the VOSD article: The mayor has lost the people’s trust. He has squandered money on expensive hires. He prefers cutting ribbons to carrying out tough decisions.

When Gloria stepped to the podium, he was under intense pressure to give a pivotal speech. Would he squarely face the challenges that plague his city? Or would he spin his record, carp about obstacles, and weave a rosy picture of the future?

Editordude: The following is a ground-breaking sweeping review and analysis of Todd Gloria’s tenure as mayor by one of his long-time allies and supporters, the Voice of San Diego. It really is a remarkable piece by Will Huntsberry — and it touches on just about every scandal and misstep by Gloria — so it’s clearly welcomed by those longtime critics of Gloria — like the Rag.

What it doesn’t do, however, is delve into the corruption angle of Gloria’s administration, such as awarding the contract for the redevelopment of the Midway Sports Arena area — a huge, gigantic project — to his top campaign contributor, the manager of Midway Rising. Nor does it examine how a Gloria-backed PAC exercised voter suppression efforts against a fellow Democrat running for City Council. It’s a rather long piece, so sit back and relax — no, no, sit back and get pissed off. 

by Will Huntsberry / Voice of San Diego / January 14, 2026

In early 2020, the future was bright for Todd Gloria. Gloria hadn’t been elected yet, but his campaign was cooking and it seemed he held all the cards to become San Diego’s next mayor.

He convened a kitchen cabinet — an unofficial group of advisers — at a political consultant’s office downtown. Gloria sat at the head of the table and the group had heady discussions about his future.

At the time, he was San Diego’s shining son. Affable, polished and able to work a room like few other politicians. Child of a gardener and a hotel maid. First-generation college graduate. And soon he would be the first openly queer, non-White person elected mayor. Gloria had an amazing story to tell – and the assembled team was there to decide how to tell it.

SD Community Coalition Bulletin:

City Council To Hold Special Meeting Just Before Mayor’s State-Of-City Speech

In an interesting development, the San Diego City Council has posted notice that it will hold a special meeting about the Mayor’s 2026 “State of the City” address on Thursday, January 15, at 1:00 p.m. in the Council Committee Room. The Mayor’s address is scheduled for 3:00 p.m. Thursday in the Council Chambers.

This link contains instructions for submitting a written comment before the meeting. The Council will begin the meeting by taking public comment in person and virtually.

This is a developing story, so please circle back for updates later this morning.

In Minneapolis and other cities where federal agents have led immigration crackdowns, residents have formed loose networks to track and protest them.

By Julie Bosman / New York Times / Jan. 14, 2026

It began in Los Angeles, in Signal chats and strategy sessions on Zoom. Last year, as immigration raids proliferated throughout the city, Latino activists and neighbors began organizing a response, monitoring for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents along sidewalks and in Home Depot parking lots and texting their networks when they spotted an arrest underway.

By late summer, activists in Chicago were trained and ready. Before the Trump administration had announced a crackdown called Operation Midway Blitz, immigrant rights organizations had handed out orange whistles for volunteers to use as a public warning system, formed “rapid-response” groups and advised people to report sightings of ICE agents and memorize their own legal rights. Chicagoans, even many without formal ties to protest groups, showed defiance against ICE with “Hands Off Chicago” signs adorned with the city’s beloved starred-and-striped flag, placed prominently in windows of restaurants and bungalows.

And in recent weeks in Minneapolis, the latest focus for a Trump administration surge of immigration enforcement, a loose but growing network of neighborhood volunteers has shown up near reported arrests, yelling at agents and recording them on iPhone cameras. Some gathered near hotels where agents were believed to be staying, pounding drums and making noise.

By Harry Litman / The New Republic / January 13, 2026

The stunning resignations on Monday of four senior career officials from the Criminal Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division confirm that DOJ has gone profoundly off the rails in its handling of what increasingly appears to be one of the gravest federal excessive-force cases in decades.

The resignations reportedly had multiple causes, but the central one was the sidelining of the Criminal Section from the investigation of the January 7 fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross.

In any normal, professionally run Department of Justice—Democratic or Republican—a shooting that looks this serious on its face would trigger a searching civil rights investigation by the Criminal Section, the Department’s long-standing unit for prosecuting unlawful uses of force. That has been true whether the assailant was a state officer, as in the Rodney King case, or—more rarely—a federal one, as at Ruby Ridge. (I served in the department during both and worked on the King case.)

ICE has steadfastly maintained that the shooting was justified because Ross reasonably believed that Good was attempting to run him over. But multiple bystander videos and visual analyses have seriously undermined that self-serving account. I put the point in that lawyerly, hedged way because, for present purposes, it is more than enough to establish beyond any cavil that this case demands the most thorough investigation the federal government can muster.

That is the very opposite of what happened here.