OB Rag

by Emily Alpert / Voice of San Diego

Most sitting school board members talk up how the school district has improved on their watch. Not John de Beck. As he campaigns for another four years on the board, de Beck sounds more like an upstart, complaining that San Diego Unified hasn’t tackled its biggest problems.

San Diego County Registrar of Voters Deborah Seiler has sent out a letter to potential San Diego County voters that actually could discourage some people from voting. This is the same Deborah Seiler who used to work for Diebold – the corporation that made faulty voting machines. (Diebold has since changed its name to Premier – presumably to get away from all the adverse PR.)

Sessions Public is a nice place to take your honey

By Jenny Montgomery / San Diego CityBeat

I’m wary of restaurants that spend too much time on just-so décor. Perfect design and attention to the hippest of trends often means food is an after-thought. H

by Robert Reich

It’s a perfect storm. And I’m not talking about the impending dangers facing Democrats. I’m talking about the dangers facing our democracy.

First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.

The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.

Who are these people?

Local Ocean Beach business to host skateboarding event to raise funds for school

The Ocean Beach Surf and Skate shop is holding a skateboard jam this Saturday, October 23, to raise funds for cash-strapped Ocean Beach Elementary School. The Jam, to be held at the Robb Field Skate Park from 1pm to 5pm, will also include famous skateboarders, a kids’ BBQ, vendors, autograph signing, and a raffle to raise the funds.

When the OB Rag website first started publishing three years ago, the massive October 2007 fire was raging across San Diego County. Our blog/ website was hatched in the midst of fire, born under fire, so to speak. The fire and the responses to it raised all kinds of issues that we began addressing.

Here are a few of the posts that we wrote and published about the fires – and a few other issues – during that period:

COME INSIDE FOR HEADLINES AND LINKS …

Apparently, all over Ocean Beach, intersection ramps are being replaced to meet ADA standards. Trouble, is the ramps that are being replaced are fairly brand new!

The same thing has been occurring in Pacific Beach. Last week, the San Diego Reader ran a short piece by Paul Severt on this very issue:

[The City has a] current project of replacing the handicapped sidewalk curbs with ones that include plastic yellow rectangles with raised domes. ….

This 60 Minutes video from CBSnews.com was sent to us by a reader.

Stand Down 2010

In the middle of July this last summer, 947 homeless vets walked in to a three day event sponsored by Veterans Village of San Diego.

A safe place, for three days…. 879 of them walked back out and 68, picked by lottery, won a bed in the Veterans Village Treatment Center. It’s wonderful, and sad.

Last Sunday I decided to go see a play downtown. I didn’t want to pay the price for parking, so decided I would take the 35 bus to the trolley station and then take the Blue Line from there. I got all ready to go, allowing myself plenty of time to get there, and went to the bus stop on Sunset Cliffs and Pt. Loma Ave.

Guess what? On Sunday there is no 35 bus on Sunset Cliffs and Pt. Loma Ave.

At age 33, I’m a relative newcomer to reading poetry. In high school, the standard stuff they foisted on us — Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Keats, Byron, Shelley, and so on — struck me as dull, dated, and often incomprehensible. In fact, like so much of the literature I remember reading in English classes, many of the poems we were assigned felt like they were written solely to make teenagers hate reading.

No discrimination is reasonable but there, to me, is nothing more screwed up than the discrimination inherent in our “Don’t ask, don’t tell” world.

Now, thanks to old Jim Crow back in the 40’s and 50’s and 60’s, I’ve faced more than my share of discrimination but I overcame all that, beginning in my childhood …

Paul Connett, author of the newly released book The Case Against Fluoride, will be speaking in San Diego from Oct. 14 – 16. Connett will provide new, compelling science-based arguments against community water fluoridation. Following are the times and locations of his public presentations.