OB Rag

by Lucas O’Connor / Issa Exposed / August 29, 2011

Questions have been swirling for months about Darrell Issa’s purchase of the office building at 2067 West Vista Way. In addition to previous questions about the property, it appears that one of the principals who negotiated the deal also made his only federal political contribution ever to Issa’s campaign.

The number of San Diegans using food stamps to help supplement their income has increased by 89 percent since January 2009, according to the County’s Health and Human Services Agency.

For several years the number of people using food stamps, also known as the CalFresh program, in San Diego, in comparison to other cities across the country was extremely low. In January 2009 San Diego’s food stamp program had 122,878 recipients. In July 2011, there were 232,255 food stamp recipients in San Diego almost double the number in less than two years.

For most of last week, the OB Rag ran our latest San Diego mayoral election poll, and Bob Filner won it easily hands down. He garnered 46.7% of the vote which included 169 respondents.

“None of the above” was also a choice, and it came in second with 17.2%.

Among the Republicans running, Carl DeMaio topped the field with a meager 13.6%, followed by Nathan Fletcher with a single-digit of 8.3%, and then Bonnie Dumanis bringing up the rear with 7.1%. Combined, the GOP candidates won 29% of the vote.

See this blast from the past! Originally published Aug. 29, 2011. A decade ago and redistricting was the thing.

Well, it’s now official. The neighborhood of Ocean Beach will remain in District 2. This is significant, as it means that OB will remain in a district with other beach neighborhoods that have similar interests and needs.

Some of the country’s best-known multi­national corporations closely guard a number they don’t want anyone to know: the breakdown between their jobs here and abroad.

So secretive are these companies that they hand the figure over to government statisticians on the condition that officials will release only an aggregate number. The latest data show that multinationals cut 2.9 million jobs in the United States and added 2.4 million overseas between 2000 and 2009.

Vista rally time has been corrected! See inside.

RNs to sponsor soup kitchens, food pantries, speak outs on the need for jobs, healthcare, education, housing – and outline the RN plan on how to pay for it.

Local actions planned for San Diego include a freeway overpass flash mob and soup line.

From Maine to California, nurses, joined by others fed up with the ongoing economic crisis, will call on Congress members in their local district offices Sept. 1 to support a tax on Wall Street financial speculation, a revenue source fast becoming an international norm, to pay for healing the nation.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / August 28, 2011

Friday, August 26, was Women’s Equality Day. Sadly, it’s a bit of a misnomer. Besides, how many people actually know what it is that the day celebrates? It surely is not equality. Women don’t have equality. Even I don’t have equality, and I am no pantywaist — but the same rights, responsibilities and opportunities as men? Oh my goodness, no. Women, as a class, have not yet achieved any of that.

Information Overload and the “Post Idea Age”

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, “The Elusive Big Idea,” Neal Gabler makes the case that we are living in a “post-idea” age where mundane observations have taken the place of big ideas. We have left behind the Einsteins for entrepreneurs. As he puts it:

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

It’s that time of year again, time to honor a San Diego community tradition going to back to the age of grunge, bungy jumping and line-dancing: it’s time for the annual Paddle for Clean Water at the Ocean Beach Pier, celebrating its 20th anniversary on Sunday, September 18th from 9:00 am to 12 noon!

Since I try not to drive at night and since I am on a very “fixed income”, I like to try new restaurants – at least new to me – that are relatively close to my home in Ocean Beach and not terribly expensive. Last week I read an article in the newspaper that is thrown in my driveway on Thursdays, re: a restaurant in Old Town called “BERGIE’S”. It sounded interesting, and since I don’t always have the time to stand in line AND eat at Hodad’s, a friend and I decided to try it out.

Over three hundred community and labor activists met yesterday, Saturday, August 27th, for an all-day economic summit and began the process of building a movement to change San Diego.

Under the title of “A Better San Diego”, yesterday’s event at Horace Mann Middle School was the culmination of months of meetings and discussions initiated by San Diego’s Labor Council. Back in the late Spring the Labor Council, headed up by Lorena Gonzalez, had called for allies from the community to join with them to build a community-labor coalition.

By time the Summit rolled around yesterday, you could see the hard work achieved by these activists. The diversity of the crowd rivaled any political grouping of San Diegans in recent history.

The County of San Diego has just released a video to warn all of us of the “Eight Signs of Terrorism”, in preparation for the tenth anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks, as part of their “See something, say something” campaign. We would like to add to this watch our additional Eight Signs of Republican Extremism.

To report suspicious activity, email the OB Rag at obragblog@gmail.com.

People who do the following might be plotting Republican extremist acts:

* Under the guise and rhetoric of “small government”, order all welfare and other poor people who receive public assistance to submit to monthly drug tests, as clearly the poor use illegal drugs much more than the rest of us….