OB Rag

By Center for Policy Initiatives

Study shows 229,000 households in the red, including many with full-time jobs

Almost a third of working-age households in San Diego County have incomes below what they need to meet basic living expenses. Half of those struggling households include someone with a full-time job.

The attorney for Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks leaker, says he doesn’t have any information indicating that Manning leaked tens of thousands of pages of documents on the Afghanistan war to the WikiLeaks website.

“I have not talked to my client about that. I have not seen anything, nor have I heard anything that would definitively tie him to that,” said attorney David Coombs in an exclusive interview with CNN.

Manning has not been charged with leaking those Afghanistan field reports, but U.S. military officials have told CNN that he is the prime suspect in that leak.

Greenpeace claims to have shut down offshore drilling by a British oil company at a controversial site in the Arctic after four climbers began an occupation of the rig just after dawn.

The environment campaigners said the four protesters evaded a small flotilla of armed Danish navy and police boats which have been guarding the rigs in Baffin Bay off Greenland since the Greenpeace protest ship Esperanza arrived last week.

Psst! Hey Ocean Beach. Quick – check this out! I just found Frank Gormlie’s papers that he tried to burn recently, and they’re entitled: “Secret Plans To Take Over the OB Town Council.” It looks like he tried to burn them in the fireplace. But I rescued enough of the documents to put together where it was all headed. And it’s not pretty.

My name is George, and I’m Frank’s brother, but we’re estranged, and he doesn’t know I got the ADMIN password for the blog, and he doesn’t know that I’m doing this, or that I even found some of the burnt documents!

I’ve managed to decipher the substance of the plans, and I outline them here:

by Molly MacGuire
The peace movement of this past decade was George Bush’s tea parties.

Amidst the gnashing of teeth and stomping of feet by peace movement types – people like me – expressing our frustrations, distrust and exasperation over this whole change in Iraq, there is something that has to be brought up. Whether it’s just the appearance of the end of US combat after the 7 year war, or there has been a significant shift in American military power, there is something that I think has been overlooked.

Candidate Barack Obama pledged to end the war in Iraq. More than any other Presidential candidate during that long, long campaign – Obama was the most poised to declare himself as the anti-war candidate. And he did. And the peace movement and the left in general ate it up – for good reason.

The peace movement had been in the streets protesting the Iraq invasion, war and occupation by Bush for 6 long years, since the Fall of 2002. Every year – in March – on the invasion’s anniversary, the peace movement would take to the streets. We welcomed a candidate of Barack’s stature joining our side. And we joined him as well, shooting his popularity up, beyond Edwards, Kucinich, Clinton, … and ultimately beyond John McCain.

About the Downtown San Diego Registry Week

The Downtown Partnership’s Board of Directors and its Social Issues Committee have teamed up with the nationally renowned organization Common Ground and its 100,000 Homes Campaign to administer a survey and create a by-name registry of everyone experiencing homelessness on the streets downtown. Local partners in this effort include the United Way, the San Diego Housing Commission, the Centre City Development Corporation and several other organizations. The registry data is analyzed and broken down into sub-populations (veterans, medically fragile, seniors, youth) and then prioritized, matching those in the greatest need to housing.

Editor: The local San Diego government watch-dog web site, the Voice of San Diego, has caught TV station KUSI working the spin machine in favor of opponents of Prop D, the sales tax increase.
How Political Spin Became Fact on KUSI

by Keegan Kyle/Voice of San Diego/ August 31, 2010

Here’s a lesson from the budding campaign over Proposition D that shows how quickly political spin can become accepted fact. ….

This is a letter sent to the Ocean Beach Town Council today, August 30th, requesting that they release their Bylaws and election procedures. I’m asking that the Council send a copy to some of the other community organizations, such as the Mainstreet Association, the Planning Board, or the Historical Society.

If you’ve spent any length of time in an urban community in the U.S., I’m sure you’ve seen the ads on public transportation or heard the television commercials from schools where you can train to be a medical assistant or a computer technician. But before you or someone you know signs up for a “promising career” at one of those for-profit colleges, take heed!

For-profit colleges have been around for years. The University of Phoenix, …

By Ray McGovern

President Barack Obama’s aides say his speech this evening marking the end of “combat operations” in Iraq will avoid the vainglorious aspects of President George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech in 2003. We’ll see.

On the chance Obama might be open to pivoting away from the reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq and addressing honestly the worsening quagmire in Afghanistan. I have offered him the following text:

My Fellow Americans,

Come meet the OB Town Council of yesteryear … of 1972. OB community activists were engaged in a stand-off with the then president Bob Miller. Here is a portion of the front page of the original OB Rag in March 1972.