Category: Media

by Frank Gormlie

The next day in Iran is very critical. The country is at the breaking point. This morning in his prayer-speech, the chief cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, came out swinging at the opposition movement that has been in the streets for the last week in support of their reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

by Frank Gormlie

The wonderful and warm community of Ocean Beach thrives on, even while it harbors scars of tagging, and while its business folk plan for the annual festival, the residents go about their days and lives with a harmony uncommon in this day and age of high-tech, high-rise and low markets.

The contentedness – yea, even bliss – of the seaside village’s people, can be traced to …

TEHRAN, Iran – Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi issued a direct challenge Wednesday to the country’s supreme leader and cleric-led system, calling for a mass rally to protest disputed election results and violence against his followers.

A crackdown on dissent continued, with more arrests of opposition figures reported, and the country’s most powerful military force _ the Revolutionary Guard _ saying that Iranian Web sites and bloggers must remove any materials that “create tension” or face legal action

In the early Seventies, the battle for the future of Ocean Beach grew very intense, as the different warring sides squared off around the original OB Precise Plan – the urban design for the community sponsored by the elite and powerful. The OB Community Planning Group published an 8-page leaflet that was so effective, that it convinced the community to join and support the organization.

As you probably know, this blog is named after the original OB People’s Rag, an underground or alternative community newspaper that flourished in Ocean Beach during the first half of the Seventies.

See the evolution of the newspaper’s covers, as they reflected what was going on in OB at the time and what was on the minds of its all-volunteer citizen journalist staff.

Editor: We just heard that 94-year-old Pete Seeger has just passed away. When Pete hit 90, we shared the following review of his project by Richard Flacks, a retired UC Santa Barbara professor who has long written about US culture.

BY Dick Flacks

[When] Pete Seeger turned 90 on May 3, 2009, it provided the occasion for a huge Madison Square Garden celebratory concert, featuring a wide array of popular musicians singing his songs and honoring his influence. In the years prior to this event, Pete has gotten more mainstream attention than he’d received in the previous 70 years of performing. Springsteen’s recorded several CD’s called ‘The Seeger Sessions’ and simultaneously went on an international tour featuring material drawn from Seeger’s folksong repertory. There was a documentary film bio, released on public tv and theatrically, called Pete Seeger :The power of song. There’s an ongoing campaign to get him nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

by Sebastian Ruiz / SDNews.com / June 10, 2009

City Council voted on June 9 to term out the current Mission Bay Park Committee by July 1 and replace the board with members that have expertise in city finance and management. It is unclear who the new members will be – and if any of the current board members will return to their seats.

by Michael Steinberg

Where is San Diego’s ‘Secret Room’? The room, that is, where the National Security Agency (NSA) secretly intercepts all our internet activities and analyzes them in “real time” for purposes the federal government refuses to reveal.

The existence of such a room in a San Diego telecommunications company was revealed years ago …

Here are a number of photos from OB’s past … (okay, I threw one current sunset by Jim Grant in there).

Check out the second one – it shows then Police Chief Ray Hoobler personally accosting young people on Long Branch Avenue in 1968. Check out his uniform. Thank you Steve Rowell.

by Michael Moore

General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled. …

It is with sad irony that the company which invented “planned obsolescence” — has now made itself obsolete.

by Mary E Mann

Last, it was spinach. A few people across the country got very sick, and a baby died – the only thing they all had in common was the consumption of spinach. Suddenly, grocery stores were bereft of spinach, and newscasters with serious faces warned of a spinach-sickness crisis. A small national panic ensued.

Today, it’s swine.

by Frank Gormlie

LATEST UPDATE: 6:00 pm: All protesters remaining in the Clerk’s Office agreed to leave the building without being arrested.

UPDATE: At 5:15 pm, police are negotiating with “dozens” still remaining inside the Clerk’s Office. The County Building was closed at 5pm.

2:30 PM: I just came from the County of San Diego’s Clerk’s Office where a sit-in is going on in protest of the Supreme Court upholding Prop 8 – …