Category: Politics

On the morning of April 24, an Occupy San Diego activist was sentenced to an overly harsh 90 days in jail and stiff probation conditions that have nothing to do with his protests. And in doing so, the judge took it upon himself to throw down the gauntlet at the feet of the Occupy Wall Street movement in San Diego.

The activism of Andrew Fisher – nicknamed “Fish” – arrested and convicted of violating California Penal Code section 148 (a)(1) – obstruction of a peace officer, was not appreciated by Judge Richard Whitney, a San Diego County Superior Court judge.

(Sorry, you cannot RSVP off this image.)

By Frank Rich / The New Yorker / April 22, 2012

If you want to appreciate what Barack Obama is up against in 2012, forget about the front man who is his nominal opponent and look instead at the Republican billionaires buying the ammunition for the battles ahead. A representative example is Harold Simmons, an 80-year-old Texan who dumped some $15 million into the campaign before primary season had ended. Reminiscing about 2008, when he bankrolled an ad blitz to tar the Democrats with the former radical Bill Ayers, Simmons told The Wall Street Journal, “If we had run more ads, we could have killed Obama.”

It is not a mistake he intends to make a second time. The $15 million Simmons had spent by late February dwarfs the $2.8 million he allotted to the Ayers takedown and the $3 million he contributed to the Swift Boat Veterans demolition of John Kerry four years before that. Imagine the cash that will flow now that the GOP sideshows are over and the president is firmly in Simmons’s crosshairs.

By Andy Cohen and Annie Lane

Longtime Congressman and current candidate for Mayor of San Diego Bob Filner discusses mayoral race in an exclusive in depth interview.

On Friday mayoral candidate Bob Filner sat down with the OB Rag to discuss a wide range of topics, including sharing details on a pension plan that he has been promoting that as of yet has not been formally presented for examination.

The plan is an alternative to Prop B, the pension alternative plan developed and promoted by fellow mayoral candidate and current city councilman Carl DeMaio, outgoing mayor Jerry Sanders, and city councilman Kevin Faulconer. The “Comprehensive Pension Reform” plan that has been aggressively promoted by DeMaio calls for all new city employees to receive retirement benefits in the form of 401(k) style plans instead of a defined pension benefit package as is currently the norm.

OWS’ ‘Spring Awakening’ in Central Park Will Kick Off a Season of Activism, Attract New Faces

By Simran Sachdev /AlterNet / April 11, 2012

This Saturday’s family-friendly event will draw some new individuals into the movement while also energizing existing Occupiers and facilitating cross-organizational cooperation.

The Spring Awakening 2012, a day of rejuvenation, celebration, and intense movement-building, will take place this Saturday, April 14, in Central Park. For Occupy supporters who may have been disheartened by any struggles over the winter, this event will help propel Occupy Wall Street forward over the next six months. It is designed to welcome new people into the life of activism and strengthen existing ties of those already embedded in the movement.

California could be third State in nation to adopt such a resolution

By Public Citizen / East Co. Magazine / Originally published on March 25, 2012

California is well in stride to be the third state to call for a constitutional amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, which allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in an attempt to influence elections. The California Assembly passed a resolution – by a 48-22 vote – calling for an amendment, sending the measure to the California Senate.

The Ocean Beach – Point Loma area has lost a strong gay rights advocate and Democratic Party activist as Charles McKain passed away on Saturday, March 17th.

He and his partner of 36 years, Robert McWilliams, had a grand house up the hill from Sunset Cliffs in southern OB (some might call it Point Loma). They both were long-time activists in the local Point Loma Democratic Party club and used to have meetings all the time in their hill-side abode. Charles and Robert were legally married in 2008.

I met them both when I ran for City Council waaaay back in 1987 (I garnered about 10%). They were stalwarts then of the liberal wing of the Peninsula and had opened their house up for Club meetings. I recall sitting in their livingroom explaining why I was a “small-d-democrat”. I have no idea if they voted for me then, but the two of them remained active for decades after.

Here is the article from San Diego Democrats for Equality:

These days, the recently re-christened UT San Diego seems to be a fan of San Diego city councilman and mayoral candidate Carl Demaio. Pension-hating missives such as this, this, and this suggest the paper’s editors, at least, sympathize with DeMaio’s emphasis on public-employee retirement plans as an apocalyptic scourge facing San Diegans.

It’s not hard to imagine UT San Diego issuing a DeMaio endorsement in the months ahead, particularly if the mayor’s race comes down to DeMaio versus Bob Filner.

But a sea change underlies UT San Diego’s apparent affection for DeMaio. When the two first met in 2005, when UT San Diego was still The San Diego Union-Tribune, the newspaper’s reaction could be characterized as somewhere between skeptical and “pffft.”

This is the sixth and final day in which “Doonesbury creator” Gary Trudeau satirizes Texas’ state mandated health care requirements for women seeking an abortion. Trudeau depicts a woman in the first trimester of an unwanted pregnancy as she undergoes a state mandated transvaginal sonogram, listens to her physician provide a state mandated detailed description of her possibly 2 ½ inch fetus, and then waits another state mandated 24 hours before having the abortion.

Are these really the same people who are frothing at the mouth about “big government mandated Obamacare?” My shit detector just hit “10.”

In an interview earlier this week with the Washington Post Trudeau explains the impetus for this week’s strips:

“For some reason, the GOP has chosen 2012 to re-litigate reproductive freedom, an issue that was resolved decades ago. Why Santorum, Limbaugh et al. thought this would be a good time to declare war on half the electorate, I cannot say. But to ignore it would have been comedy malpractice.”

Here’s todays Doonesbury cartoon No. 5 for Friday, March 16th.

Jeff Light, editor of the revamped San Diego U-T, the guy who made the decision to black-out this week’s Doonsbury cartoons because artist Gary Trudeau is drawing about women’s reproductive rights, came on the OB Rag the other day and left a lengthy comment as to why he made the decision.

While we really appreciate Jeff coming onto our site – something his predecessors would never have done and which is a sign of the drastic difference he has made on the newspaper – we believe his reasoning falls flat. Here’s his comment from Wednesday in full:

You know, sometimes people with strong feelings get worked up and do things that they probably realize, deep down, are out of bounds. … So, Rush Limbaugh calls some poor woman a slut, …. To me this is all the same sort of thing.
I didn’t kill those strips for any partisan reason. I run Doonesbury every day. …

A funny thing happened on the way to figuring how to get President Obama not to sign HR 347. Yesterday late afternoon, I was on an urgent national conference call to discuss how to stop the bill. HR 347 is a bill that was passed with lightening speed with almost no opposition just recently by the Senate and House.

During the call, we were told that the bill is on President Obama’s desk and that he had until March 12th to sign it or veto it. This national phone connect was a “call to action” against the bill.

By Michael McAuliff / Huggington Post / March 8, 2012

WASHINGTON — A pair of lawmakers on Thursday offered a bill that would repeal laws that allow the indefinite detention of Americans and others by the military without trial.

The power of military authorities to arrest and jail people …