OB Rag

By Will Power / East County Magazine / May 16, 2011

Citing budget concerns , the State of California (and the U.S. federal government) are studying plans to turn over California’s most precious beaches, lakes, and forests to private entrepreneurs who will rent California’s own land back to its citizens for a profit.

Seventy California state parks are slated for permanent closure, including Palomar Mountain State Park and San Pasqual Battlefield State Historic Park in San Diego County.

by Lucas O’Connor / Two Cathedrals / May 16-17, 2011

The importance of preserving history is rooted in the conversations that we’re able to have as a result: who we are, where we came from, how it helps point us into the future. It’s an extremely difficult balance, and usually the forces of indifferent change-for-profit are much better equipped, leaving defenders of our shared history little choice but to throw themselves fully into every check in the process.

Carlos Santana was given the Beacon of Change award before the Atlanta Braves’ fifth annual Civil Rights Game on Sunday [May 15, 2011] against the Philadelphia Phillies and he used the opportunity to criticize Arizona and Georgia for their new immigration laws.

Saying he represented immigrants, the Grammy winner said at Turner field, “The people of Arizona, and the people of Atlanta, Georgia, you should be ashamed of yourselves.”

Join progressives at Congresswoman Susan Davis’ Town Hall Meeting – this Wednesday, May 18th. It’s at the Normal Heights Community Center, located at 4649 Hawley Blvd. The Town Hall meet is from 5 to 7 pm.

Here is the agenda for the OB Planning Board Project Review Committee of Wednesday, May 18, 2011. The Committee meets at the OB Rec Center – 4726 Santa Monica Avenue, begins at 6:30 pm, and is chaired by Vice-Chair Landry Watson.

The Mesa College Theatre Company, working with the San Diego Black Ensemble and Vagabond Theatre Project, is producing a series of staged readings, “Pioneers and the Journey: A Festival of African American Plays” to explore the African American Experience – an experience in and of itself based on my experiences within the experience, experiencely speaking if there is such a term (big smile)

Tomorrow morning I will be attending a webinar. Well, my brain will be attending, the rest of me will be where it always is in the morning, right here in my desk chair. The webinar has to do with “Search Engine Optimization” or SEO. Wikipedia says SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

The webinar, or site clinic as they are calling it, will be hosted by some respected web ninjas. Among them is Chris Pearson, the founder of DIYThemes.com and the geek responsible for the Thesis Theme, the basis for the overall look of the OB Rag.

The times are a – changin’. They certainly are. NASSCO – with 60% of its workcrew Latino, and located in Barrio Logan, a Mexican-American neighborhood of San Diego – is about to christen its latest Navy cargo ship after Cesar Chavez. The dedication ceremony will occur on Tuesday, May 17th, at NASSCO. The Chavez family will be flying into San Diego for it.

Late last week, the San Diego U-T published an article by reporter John Wilkins describing a “new” book out that he called “the answer” to the question why wasn’t there a noir book about San Diego. The book, “San Diego Noir”, (Akashic Books) edited by bookstore owner Maryelizabeth Hart, purports to describe San Diego’s underbelly – “a place of sometimes shocking crime and corruption.” As part of a “literary genre known as noir – that dark terrain of desire and desperation, of passion and paranoia ….” the anthology has a number of articles by both well-known and unknown writers.

Protesters, many from San Diego City College, interrupted an education funding discussion hosted by state assemblyman Nathan Fletcher outside his Miramar office on May 13.

Fletcher, a Republican, started the event by saying he hoped for “a calm conversation” about education and the budget plan presented a day earlier by GOP leaders in Sacramento.

Within 10 minutes, however, about 30 protesters began a competing conversation on a sidewalk adjacent to the meeting area.

Our nation has devolved into a new and nasty civil war, with moneyed elites now charging into legislatures and courts to establish themselves as a de facto plutocracy.

By Jim Hightower / Originally published May 12, 2011

You’re not likely to have known Robert Clark, Ruth West, Chet Newall, Webb Kamp, or Darrell Odom, but I wouldn’t be who I am without them. And you might have a similar honor roll of those who spurred, inspired, lured, intrigued, goaded, and otherwise motivated you to do more than you might otherwise have done — a list of your special public school teachers. The junior-high, senior-high, and college teachers on my list largely sparked my lifelong interests in language, history, politics, and how (and for whom) government really works.

In my last column, I ruefully noted that the thought of any revenue increase is verboten in Republican circles, but the same could be said for many Democrats driven by fear of being assailed as a “tax and spend” liberal. Indeed as recent polling suggests, a majority of Californians think the state budget has gotten bigger when, in fact, the general fund spending has shrunk by over $20 billion as taxes on the rich and corporations have gone down. Why the inaccurate public perception? In the final part of “Indy by the Sea” I ask the question:

Where do people get the idea that they are overtaxed in a country where people pay fewer taxes than citizens of most other industrialized countries and have a much smaller “welfare state”?