Category: Election

Summary – Pt. Loma Democratic Club Meeting

The meeting was called to order by President Susan Peinado with a full agenda awaiting the audience. Rather than go into much detail, the following is a brief synopsis of the meeting itself:

1. There was a petition to abolish the death penalty discussed by the originators of the petition. This is very similar to the one presented a few years back, but there are some changes that will make it more palatable this year, or so the originators think.

2. Lawrence Zynda made a brief presentation as to why he is thinking of running for mayor.

3. The campaign manager for Lori Saldana made a presentation as to her running for mayor as an Independent this year against the current mayor. It should be noted that she has always been a Democrat, but the party treated her poorly during the Filner fiasco, and although her beliefs are primarily those of the party, she will run as an Independent.

By Frank Thomas / San Diego Free Press

I admire Bernie’s outspoken, honest portrayal of the breakdown of our egalitarian democracy – “a government of, for and by the people” – by a corrupt, immoral plutocratic political-economic ESTABLISHMENT threatening the very existence of our democracy.

I was appalled by David Brooks’ disingenuous critique of Bernie’s call for a ‘political revolution’- systemic reform for a systemically broken, money corrupted governance. Brooks beguilingly discredits Bernie’s bold ideas in the recent article, Livin’ Bernie Sanders’s Danish Dream.

America Was Great at One Time?

by Ernie McCray

Making America great again
sure sounds like something worth doing.
But the word “again,”
implies that America must have been
great somewhere along the line –
and when I run the feasibility of that
through my long-active mind,
having not been deaf or blind
in my time,
a couple of questions come to mind,
on the fly.
Like:
“When was the country ever great?”
And “Where in the hell was I?”
Really.
Oh, there is greatness all over the place
in the USA.
Great things: art, music, science, who’s going to argue with that?
Great human beings: who can beat Lincoln, Cesar, Fannie Lou and folks like that?
Great opportunities: in this country you can reach for the moon and places like that.
But, just speaking for me,
I have had to sit at the back of the bus,
…

The OB Rag ran a survey of our readers over their choice of major candidates for San Diego mayor, and Lori Saldana bested Kevin Faulconer 3 to 1,

In our online poll which ran for about a week, 51% of respondents chose Saldana and 17% chose Faulconer.

This is no huge surprise as OB Rag readers have more of a liberal bent than a cross-section of San Diegans. But it does show that Saldana definitely has a base among liberals, progressives and independents in this town.

By Jim Miller

Whatever happens in today’s Iowa caucuses, one thing is abundantly clear—when confronted with a credible challenge from the left in the form of the Bernie Sanders, the response of much of the leadership of the Democratic Party and their allies in the corporate media has been to defend the status quo with great zeal even if it meant borrowing tropes from the right.

Whether it was red-baiting from Thomas Freidman or condescension mixed with an appeal to “realism” from Paul Krugman, the drumbeat was loud and consistent: Sanders’ agenda, with it’s direct ties to the legacies of Martin Luther King Jr. and FDR was simply an unrealistic option in the neoliberal era.

For a week, the OB Rag ran a poll on the presidential preferences of our readers. The poll was a wide-open horse race that had all the major candidates of both major parties running against each other, and included most of the top-tiered GOP candidates (however, it did not include and we now think it should have included Jeb Bush).

Overall, Bernie Sanders came out way ahead – with nearly 51% of the total vote. Near each other, Hillary Clinton had 17.5% and Trump had 16.7% following Sanders way down the sheet.

Marco Rubio had 3.3%, Ted Cruz had 1.7%, Chris Christie had .8%. Another 3.3% wanted another GOP candidate (Bush?).

There is finally some good news for San Diego’s left-of-center voters.

A known local politician with definite name recognition, former Democrat and Assemblywoman Lori Saldana has announced her intention to run for mayor of San Diego. Saldana will run as an independent, having resigned from the Democratic Party about 2 years ago.

Now, finally, San Diego voters who don’t usually vote Republican – which is a majority of the city electorate – have a choice other than Kevin Faulconer and a handful of unknowns.

Saldana said she is running to give San Diegans a voice and to represent those who feel disenfranchised by the electoral process.

By Jim Miller

As I noted in my New Year’s column, many in California’s labor and progressive circles had high hopes for ballot measures extending Proposition 30’s taxes on the rich to fully fund education and for raising the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour.

But it did not take long for Governor Jerry Brown to rain on his presumed allies’ parade.

By John Lawrence

The Republican political arena has become the theater of the absurd largely thanks to the emergence of Donald Trump as the new standard bearer of the Republican Party.

He has stood all the rules on their heads and made a mockery out of political correctness. Somehow this has breathed fresh air into the stodgy world of Republican memes and mantras.

For example, let’s take the birther controversy which the Donald was a big part of a few years ago when he and others made an attempt to prove that President Obama was not a “natural born citizen” as required by the Constitution in order to be President. In fact, as Trump and others maintained, Obama was born in Kenya. Turns out not to be true.

Here is the Green Activist calendar for January 2016 – taken from the monthly OB Green Center Calendar:

In Ocean Beach

January 21 Thursday OB Historical Society: “OB’s History of Volunteerism”
at the P.L. United Methodist Church, 1984 Sunset Cliffs Blvd.

Join us Jan. 21 as Claudia Jack presents “OB’s History of VOLUNTEERISM”. The many organizations and volunteers are what has helped make OB special… from it’s parade, beach clean-ups, planning board, Friends of the Library, and many more.!

via UFT

By Jim Miller

It’s a new year and a big one for politics. Here is my pragmatic political wish list for 2016:

1) That Donald Trump actually wins the Republican Presidential nomination and brings the entire Republican Party down when the sizable majority of Americans who hate his ideas vote out the party up and down the ticket.

2) That Bernie Sanders wins some primaries and continues to unsettle the Democratic Party and build momentum for a continuing progressive movement in our politics, win or lose.

3) That the lack of a mayor’s race will finally convince San Diego progressives …

By Jim Miller

As I wrote back in mid-October, Project Censored recently released their list of the most underreported stories of 2015. The number one story on their list features the news that 2016 will be the year when half of the world’s wealth will be controlled by the top 1%. More specifically, they document how:

According to the Oxfam report, the proportion of global wealth owned by the 1 percent has increased from 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014 and is projected to reach 50 percent in 2016.

In October 2014, a prior Oxfam report, “Even It Up: Time to End Extreme Poverty,” revealed that the number of billionaires worldwide had more than doubled since the 2009 financial crisis, showing that, although those at the top have recovered quickly, the vast majority of the world’s population are far from reaping the benefits of any recent economic recovery.

Even more staggering, the world’s richest eighty-five people now hold the same amount of wealth as half the world’s poorest population. “Failure to tackle inequality will leave hundreds of millions trapped in poverty unnecessarily,” the report’s authors warned.