OB Rag

By Amanda Marcotte /AlterNet /May 25, 2011

Glib comments about rape by anti-choice Republican lawmakers reveal that the anti-choice movement is deeply rooted in antagonism to women’s rights.

No big surprise that it was in Kansas, which has struggled with the most serious anti-choice terrorism in the country in the 21^st century, where a GOP state legislator named Pete DeGraaf compared being forcibly impregnated by a rapist to getting a flat tire. DeGraaf was responding to a pro-choice Republican legislator who raised the question of women being unable to afford to terminate pregnancies caused by rape, and DeGraaf responded by suggesting women should have prepared ahead of time for rape by saying, “We do need to plan ahead, don’t we, in life?”, adding, “I have a spare tire on my car.”

Tom Gawronski is very worried about the future of Ocean Beach. As the Planning Board representative for District 1, he’s especially worried about that section of West Pt Loma Boulevard that curves around down at the beach, west of Abbott Street. Gawronski sees the row of single-story duplexes along that stretch of boulevard as the front lines of the City of San Diego’s efforts to allow the gentrification of Ocean Beach. As a retired molecular biologist, Tom is not easily shaken. But he’s agitated now.

Mayor Sanders’ new budget avoids cuts to rec centers in OB, elsewhere

The Ocean Beach Recreation Center — like similar centers across San Diego — had been targeted for cuts to its operating hours in Mayor Jerry Sanders’ initial budget proposal for the city’s next fiscal year.

Under an updated proposal Sanders released last week, however, the city’s rec centers would maintain their current 40-hours-a-week schedule. Sanders originally had slashed rec centers hours by half, but his new plan reflects the better-than-expected performance of the local economy in recent months.

Supreme Court Calls BS on California’s 3 Decades of “Law and Order”

by Robert Cruickshank / Calitics / May 23, 2011

I suppose someone should write about [Monday’]s 5-4 US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata, where the court ruled that California must release 33,000 prisoners to relieve overcrowding in state prisons. So I’ll take a shot at it.

Washington, DC — A Coalition of advocacy groups and patients filed suit in the DC Circuit Court [May 23, 2011] to compel the Obama administration to answer a 9-year-old petition to reclassify medical marijuana.

By Ed Bruske aka The Slow Cook / La Vida Locavore

An Associated Press report last week on the controversy surrounding flavored milk in schools was widely reprinted in media outlets across the country, from the Washington Post to Huffington Post to Yahoo! In it, the AP declared that a number of professional and medical groups–including the American Heart Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics–had issued a “joint statement” in favor of flavored milk, arguing that “the nutritional value of flavored low-fat or skim milk outweighs the harm of added sugar.”

Dear OB Convert:

Confused OBcian

Dear Confused: We in OB have had a lot of discussion about the homeless

Back in 1942 the narrator of Jim Thompson’s seminal noir account of San Diego, Now and On Earth observed that:

San Diego, prior to the establishment of the aircraft factories, was not inappropriately dubbed the “City of the Living Dead.” There were no industries, there was no construction; the town’s one asset was its climate. If you were young and wanted excitement and had a living to make, why, the town wouldn’t want you and you wouldn’t want it. If you were old and had a small income or pension, you couldn’t have found a more attractive place to live (or die) in.

How many reasons do you need, to understand why you have to buy a T-shirt from the OB Rag? Well, here are ten reasons:

1. T-shirt sales are one of the chief ways we pay for maintaining our website (the other big one is ad sales).

2. We do have expenses – such as server upgrades and fees, gas, postage, post office box, subscriptions, access to the internet, business cards and other printing costs, office rent (very small), camera, recorder, …

Last September, FX premiered a show about two private eyes called Terriers. The show had a sunny setting in Ocean Beach, an eclectic township of San Diego. It had two dynamic leads in the perpetually underrated Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James, who played the Cajun-accented bad guy in the first season of True Blood. Terriers was exceptionally well-written and engaging, and the more episodes you watched, the more hooked you became. It also had an absolute masterpiece of an opening credit sequence.

The Chicano Legacy 40 Años mural, which covered the east wall of Peterson Hall on the campus of the University of California, San Diego for two years, has been installed as a permanent mosaic. The 17-by-54 feet mural, made up of thousands of pieces of colored glass, will be unveiled at noon, May 25, in a free event open to the campus and San Diego community.

This is the second in a series, and here’s Part 1.

The Wilson Era Begins With Police Reform

A few years later, during the early seventies, a new “centrist” Republican mayor – Pete Wilson, still wearing the mantle of an advocate for “controlled growth” -, made efforts to reform the police department. But he was up against old Chief Ray Hoobler, a veteran of the old school of hard knocks – literally. Hoobler, while not media or PR savvy, was notorious for using his brown-suits to clamp down on minorities, gays, Navy sailors, young people in general, and the growing population of hippies.

In 1975, Chief Hoobler was forced to retire because he was caught lying to the City Council. This worked for Pete Wilson as it then allowed him to appoint a community-policing “reformer” as chief – Bill Kolender.