Category: San Diego

The Reader broke a story today about a scandal that involves the firing of a whistle-blower by Mayor Jerry Sanders’ office because the whistle-blower was cooperating with a law enforcement investigation into the business dealings of a friend of Sanders’ with the City of San Diego.

The whistle-blower, deputy director of the City’s Economic Development Division, Scott Kessler, was fired in the Fall of 2008. He has since filed an unlawful termination suit against the City and he and his lawyer are currently involved in settlement negotiations with City lawyers.

This is great. Scott Kessler is a very good friend of mine,

NEW UPDATE:
1200 Demonstrate at Governor’s San Diego Office

By Hoa Quach / SDNN

A daylong effort against budget cuts led by student organizers throughout the San Diego region concluded with about 1,200 protesters gathering outside Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s San Diego office late Thursday afternoon.

UPDATE:
Californians Protest Education Cut-backs – UC Davis students try to block highway

Trying to keep on top of the March 4 Day of Action? Here are a few resources that you’ll definitely find useful.

Student Sources

* UC Regent Live(blog) will have a team of writers covering national events throughout the day.
* The blog Occupy CA has been breaking stories about radical protest actions all year.
* This site will of course be passing on everything we get.
* Our national March 4 map includes links and contact information for many local actions.
(SEE INSIDE FOR LINKS AND MORE …)

March 4th Actions Begun in California Have Spread Across Nation

Rally and march in San Diego today at 3pm precedes teachers’ march to Sacramento

With our state government paralyzed and public services as fundamental as education and roads cash-starved and crumbling, it’s easy to forget that California is still the world’s 8th-largest economy. We have riches — and they can be directed toward our common good.

The once-great state of California is self-destructing through irresponsible tax policies stretching back 32 years to Proposition 13, which made it so hard to raise taxes — requiring a two-thirds vote of the Legislature — that the state can’t generate the revenue for its basic needs.

Number 9 – OB’s missing fire pit has been “found.”

Actually, the City knew all along where it was. It was destroyed when all of OB’s fire pits were moved to safer ground behind the berm late last year. OB had nine fire pits at the end of the summer and now we’re down to only eight.

So, according to Park and Recreation Department Director Stacey LoMedico, OB will not receive another one. We’ve got all we’re gonna get. And we may lose them as well.

I went down to check out this whole Tea Party extravaganza today. This is my take on it, or at least a list of random thoughts I had and a list of things I saw today…

I headed down a bit late, probably should’ve been out by 10:15 instead of 10:40. Oh well. Street parking was scarce, but there were some terrific displays of capitalism, namely empty Ace parking lots charging $10 to get in. I parked a mile or so away and walked first along the bay side of Harbor drive, about 10 minutes after the 11 a.m. rally was scheduled to begin. I don’t know how many the teabaggers were claiming would attend or how many they’re going to claim did, but by my estimate they got maybe 250 – I heard some other estimates in the low 300s, which are entirely feasible too, as a few more people trickled in until noon or so.

Between cloud bursts, sixty San Diego progressives sang songs during the counter rally to the Tea Party gathering today near the Star of India.

Activists with the OB Rag and other local groups had tried to mobilize one hundred progressives to stand witness to the rally of Tea Party factions. But Mother Nature decided to drench the county and undoubtedly many stayed away due to the rain. Still, many stubborn people showed up today between 10:30 and noon just west of the County Administration building to show opposition.

Meanwhile, approximately 320 Tea partiers gathered across Harbor Drive.

Editor: Check this out. The Coffee Party movement has begun – an answer to the Tea Party movement. One of our bloggers last week in his post called for a “coffee grounds” movement. Well, his call has been answered. It is official, San Diego will have its own Coffee Party and it will form from these pages. Sign up here.

By Dan Zak /Washington Post / February 26, 2010

Furious at the tempest over the Tea Party — the scattershot citizen uprising against big government and wild spending — Annabel Park did what any American does when she feels her voice has been drowned out: She squeezed her anger into a Facebook status update.

by Earl Ofari Hutchinson/ Huffington Post / February 23, 2010

University of California, San Diego chancellor Marye Anne Fox, the president of Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, UCSD student leaders, and a bevy of civil rights leaders, and black and minority California lawmakers leaped over each other to lambaste the now infamous Compton Cookout at UCSD as racially insulting, insensitive, and demeaning. On February 24, days after the furor broke, UCSD officials held a campus racial sensitivity teach-in to quell racial tensions on the campus.

The Compton cookout, of course, was the boneheaded stunt by a handful of white and non-white students at an off campus to mock, poke fun at, and revel in what’s presumed to be the sway and swagger of ghetto life. There’s a problem, actually, two problems with this.

SAN DIEGO — Student protesters have taken over the offices of University of California San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox as a third racially charged episode has brought a new wave of outrage.

Students are protesting atop desks and countertops throughout Fox’s suite, except for her own sanctum. They are chanting, “Real pain, real change.” Some are playing drums.

Fox has twice addressed students today, once outside the library where a noose was found last night and once in a eucalyptus grove outside her office. Students remain upset with the pace of the administration’s response to their demand for action over ongoing racial strife.

“You can’t imagine how pained we are, we are heartsick,” Vice Chancellor Penny Rue told the students on a bullhorn.New Update: UCSD campus police and president of the regents have reported that the woman student said she had two accomplices.

Some professors have called off their classes for the day and have called for a strike and “disruptive demonstrations” at the campus in protest of the now three racial incidents.

Campus police at the University of California San Diego are questioning a student who admitted she hung a noose on the seventh floor of the university library Thursday night.

This Saturday, February 27th, a group of local Tea Party groups are sponsoring a rally downtown along San Diego Harbor. And San Diego progressives will be there to stand witness to this rally of tea baggers.

Nearly one hundred San Diego progressives have committed to being present at this non-violent counter-demonstration. The counter protest – really more of a show of strength than an actual protest or counter-demonstration – has been organized solely via emails and word of mouth.

This blog website the OB RAG, in conjunction with a number of other San Diego progressive and peace groups have put out the call for the counter effort; we went to cyberspace for the medium of our message. And just over a week’s time, San Diego progressives have stepped up to be witnesses to our local movement of reaction.

This year, the city of San Diego was obliged to trim 3.8 million dollars from the library budget. 3.8 million dollars. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly 760,000 used books off of Amazon. That’s one library, right there.

The Ocean Beach library seemed particularly vulnerable to these cuts, given its proximity to the larger but less centrally located Point Loma Library. Throughout the past few years of budget cuts and closing scares, the Ocean Beach community has spoken quite loudly and clearly against the closing of the small Ocean Beach branch on the corner of Santa Monica and Sunset Cliffs.

On Saturday, February 27, a number of our fellow citizens will take publicly funded roads to a public park to participate in a Tea Party rally at which our publicly funded police force will maintain law and order if necessary. Once our fellow citizens arrive, they will rail against the unfair redistribution of wealth and the size of government.
Hypocrisy In Action

Of course it is that very redistribution of wealth which provides them with those roads, that park, those police. And it is that very redistribution of wealth that provides their “entitlements” of Medicare, Veteran Benefits, and Social Security; that provides their children with public education, parks and recreation centers and libraries. The Tea Party comes with an enormous side of hypocrisy.

It is statistically probable that 95% of those in attendance received a tax cut under the Obama administration.