OB Rag

by Reverend Billy Talen / AlterNet / May 10, 2011

In April we experienced 600 tornadoes in the US. Last year the count for April was 110. The six fold increase is an astounding climate change. But how did 600 twisters happen? And why? In our public reports such basic questions are strangely restricted. No connection is made

By Esther Rubio-Sheffrey / NUG Magazine / May 10, 2011

San Diego’s medicinal marijuana community is in the beginning stages of a potentially long and expensive legal battle against city hall. At stake: safe access to medicinal marijuana approved by California voters in 1996.

Getting a ticket for running a red-light equipped with camera can be a costly mistake, with fines that can run hundreds of dollars in some areas. Here compiled a list of locations for all red-light cameras in San Diego County–including East County, North County, and other communities in our region.

Check out our handy guide to red-light camera locations below, then pass this link along to other drivers.

The class action suit against McMillin properties proceeds this Friday, May 13th, 2011, before Judge Richard A. Strauss. Judge Strauss will determine whether McMillin had a duty to disclose the potential relocation of the Rock Church, a “mega church,” to purchasers in the Point Loma residential community of Liberty Station.

Michael Franti of Spearhead is hands-down, bar-none my favorite musician alive, today or ever. Lately his music has been popping up on the radio, on TV in video game and Corona beer ads, and elsewhere in the public sphere, so you’re probably familiar with Franti and his band Spearhead’s reggae-funk-ska-hip-hop-world beat fusion, whether or not you know it. But were you aware of how deep his tracks really go?

See inside for the video.

Competing plans by new “Gang of Four” and by Faulconer suggest not if, but how it will be done

By Craig Gustafson / San Diego U-T / May 10, 2011

Remember those devastating cuts to city parks and libraries proposed last month by San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders? Not going to happen.

A swift public outcry has led to dueling proposals from City Council members to restore the mayor’s suggested reductions in operating hours at branch libraries and recreation centers.

MISSION BAY — San Diego resident and San Diego Coastkeeper outreach coordinator Dylan Edwards grew up sailing and wakeboarding in Mission Bay, in a time when many people saw the aquatic park as little more than a contaminated saltwater lagoon.

“I remember people saying, ‘Eww, you wakeboard there?’” Edwards recalled. “I think it has that reputation because of the chronic sewage spills that happened in the 1990s and early 2000s.”

If there’s no NFL season, we won’t get to watch the bolts play football on Sunday.

Well, every Wednesday night – you can hear thunder at Winston’s in Ocean Beach. That’s Topic Thunder, a new comedic, interactive talk show

By Matt Corrales

In the current edition of another community publication, a column ran attacking the LGBT Redistricting Task Force as a “mostly all white so-called LGBT Redistricting Committee … working on a new 3rd District that would be about 70 percent all white and would kick out our first gay person of color elected to the city council”.

This analysis of the Task Force and the proposed District 3 map it produced is plain wrong in a number of ways.

Close to five hundred people gathered Sunday, May 7 in Tijuana’s Zona Rio to call on President Felipe Calderon to end Mexico’s “failed” war on drugs. Converging beneath the city’s Monument to Two Cultures, which honors U.S. and Mexican society with two scissor shaped columns, protestors divided into two distinct groups.

It’s tension time for the students, parents, and faculty at High Tech High, Point Loma’s well-known charter high school, as they await word whether President Obama will give their graduation speech this Spring.

Editor: This is Part 2 of Jim Miller’s examination of San Diego as the “Wisconsin of the West”.

While the web of right wing, corporate-funded think tanks are clearly feeling their oats in the Scott Walker era, their rise was a long time in the making. They were, importantly, the intellectual replacements for unreliable “liberal” universities where the state-funded intellectuals could not be counted on to carry the water for the corporate class.