Category: Politics

Here is the replacement process to select whomever will fill Kevin Faulconer’s District 2 seat on the City Council:

From Chet Barfield / Office of Interim Mayor Todd Gloria

1. A 30-day clock starts on the day Kevin is sworn in as Mayor, which we think will be around March 3. The county Registrar of Voters has 28 days (from Feb. 11) to count the ballots and certify the results. Because the election wasn’t that close, it could take less than 28 days. Upon receiving registrar certification, the Clerk will ask the Council President to docket acceptance of those findings at the next possible meeting.

2. Council approves the election results and Kevin is sworn in as Mayor. This begins a 14-day application period (calendar days) for candidates wanting to fill the interim D2 vacancy. They must reside in the old District Two – as the boundaries existed before being redrawn last year – because that’s the pool from which Kevin was elected.

By Jim Miller

Nobody thought this was going to be easy.

Back in July, at the height of the Filner debacle, I predicted a dire outcome, noting that “in a recall or special election in an off year, the electorate is guaranteed to be more conservative and definitely not favorable” for a progressive replacing Bob Filner because, “Faulconer would have a huge fundraising advantage garnering support from all the usual suspects downtown and benefit from an energized base geared up to hand it to the liberals, unions, minorities, and other foul ‘special interest groups’ that they’ll blame for bringing us the evil that was Bob Filner. With the Democrats dispirited, humiliated and divided, it might not even be much of a fight.”

As it turned out, David Alvarez stepped up and offered progressives hope, and the labor movement surprised everyone by actually being able to raise more money than the Faulconer forces. Sadly, on Tuesday, many of us were crying in our beer instead.

By Jim Miller

San Diego is on the national stage again.

As the final week of the dead heat mayoral showdown unfolded, Politico reported on “the battle for San Diego,” the Sacramento Bee’s Dan Walters pondered whether the race would be a harbinger of things to come in California politics, and the New York Times covered “a battle of ideology in a city unaccustomed to that sort of election,” astutely noting, as I did here at the San Diego Free Press during the primary, that this contest is “a test of whether yet another big-city Democrat can be elected by riding a wave of populism, much as Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York did last fall.”

And that test is happening because last November David Alvarez defied the pundits and political insiders and beat the prohibitive favorite, Nathan Fletcher, in the race to face Kevin Faulconer in the run-off to be San Diego’s next mayor. This was a seminal moment for San Diego—perhaps the biggest political upset in the history of the city.

Some local OBceans have decided to organized a bike ride through Ocean Beach to get the vote out for mayoral candidate David Alvarez.

Date: Saturday Feb.8th

Starting Point: Robb Field Park, Ocean Beach
– specific location is the first parking lot to the right when entering via car.

Time: 12pm – 2pm ride.

Ride will begin soon after 12pm.

After ride gathering with music and beer

Everyone is welcome, family friendly. This is in support of David Alvarez’s bid for mayor with specific focus on GETTING OUT THE VOTE IN OCEAN BEACH! All are encouraged to vote regardless of choice or party preference.

By Lori Saldaña / San Diego Free Press

The current debate swirling within- and now outside– the San Diego Chapter of the Sierra Club reflects in large part a debate over the concept that “form follows function.”

In a nutshell: The San Diego Chapter’s Executive Committee, elected by local Sierra Club members, has struggled for 4 years to manage and grow a Chapter without adequate conservation and volunteer development staff. The national board and their employees in San Francisco have refused to listen to the local leader’s reasonable concerns to hire employees to support the Club’s core mission: to “Enjoy, Explore and Protect” the natural environment.

By Jay Powell / San Diego Free Press

The latest news coming out of the national Sierra Club office- at a time when there are major climate change initiatives underway and the City is about to elect a new Mayor- is just not funny. San Diego and Imperial County members are receiving letters from the chairman of the national Sierra Club, David Scott, informing them that they are considering a formal suspension of the Chapter Executive Committee due to “internal conflicts and divisions.”

In an update report, UT San Diego environmental reporter Deborah Sullivan Brennan outlines some of the recent history of changes …

By Marjorie Cohn / Common Dreams

Edward Snowden, who worked for the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed a secret order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), that requires Verizon to produce on an “ongoing daily basis … all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

The government has admitted it collects metadata for all of our telephone communications, but says the data collected does not include the content of the calls.

By Norma Damashek / NumbersRunner

Act I: the State of the City Address

San Diegans are about to witness a full-dress reenactment of our town’s annual civic ritual known as the State of the City Address. Article XV of the City Charter lays it out: On or before the 15th day of January of each year, the Mayor shall communicate by message to the City Council a statement of the conditions and affairs of the City, and make recommendations on such matters as he or she may deem expedient and proper.

You can catch a live performance at 6pm this Wednesday, January 15th at downtown’s historic Balboa Theatre. Alternatively, you can kick back in the comfort of your own living room and watch it on City-TV.

By Dawson Barrett / Portside

In recognition of the anniversary of the death of Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain, a host of retrospectives will recognize both the raw potency of Cobain’s songwriting and the tragedy of his heroin use and suicide. They will hide that Nirvana was a band of rebels.

This April marks twenty years since the death of Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain, one of the most iconic cultural figures of the late 20th century. In recognition of that anniversary, a host of retrospectives will recognize both the raw potency of Cobain’s songwriting and the tragedy of his heroin use and suicide. Echoing the tired, sexist tropes of “John and Yoko” and “Sid and Nancy,” many will also associate Cobain’s downfall with his wife, Courtney Love. These tabloid narratives will overshadow Nirvana’s political and cultural significance. They will hide that Nirvana was a band of rebels.

40 Years Ago OB Rag Cover Had First Ocean Beach “Munopoly” Board

On New Year’s Eve, we gathered at a good friend’s house and played the latest OB board game, “Ocean Beach-opoly” an OB version of the famed grandparent of all board games.

We had fun – I was fortunate to own the Gilmore Family store – not even noticing our late it had become. (I was one of the winners, by the way – sorry Doug.)

Later, I realized, hey, the OB Rag once ran a cover graphic way back in the Seventies with the first actual “OB Monopoly game board”. Nearly exactly 40 years ago, our version was on display.

By Jim Miller

…the emergence of the local plutocracy’s strategy of rule by ballot initiative is a genuine threat to our local democracy

Last year, I rang out the New Year with a list of the best in San Diego culturally and politically in 2012. This year begs for a grimmer assessment. Better yet, politically, 2013 deserves to be tossed from the house with the caveat that it not let the door hit it in the ass on the way out.

It would be tempting to do a bottom ten list as there are so many deserving candidates in all quarters, but let me just reiterate what I wrote last summer, that much of what we saw transpiring in our fair city brought to mind Mark Twain’s pithy assessment of “the damned human race”:

I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the lower animals (so-called), and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that the theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

“Take to the Hills” by the Freewayblogger (AKA Patrick Randall)

Take to the Hills: Clothing the Sierra Madres is a new e-book by the Freewayblogger. He tells an inspiring story about the thinking that took him from grading papers at SDSU to driving hundreds of pounds of donated clothes into the Sierra Madres mountains.

Some may know the Freewayblogger (AKA Patrick Randall) from the thousands of signs he has posted on the freeways of California and elsewhere. The first one I remember was visible coming into OB from the I-8. An upside down American flag with ‘RIP 1776-2001’ very shortly after the Supreme Court decision in the Bush/Gore election. But before Bush and he death of American democracy the Freewayblogger was doing something else.