OB Rag

The day started off with a surprise. Callers at the Department of Education reported that students at Mission Bay High School had walked out of classes and marched off campus. A few hours later the students were found, when they arrived, marching and chanting, for a scheduled teach-in at City College.

Walkouts, rallies and teach-ins happened at City, Grossmont, Mesa, State, and UCSD in the mornings. Students from all those schools convened for a regional rally at the Centro Cultural in Balboa Park.

250 Yards of OB Pier Damaged – Will Be Closed Another Week and Half

61st Annual OB Kite Festival – March 6th

OB Planning Board Election March 9th At Rec Center

The Reader broke a story today about a scandal that involves the firing of a whistle-blower by Mayor Jerry Sanders’ office because the whistle-blower was cooperating with a law enforcement investigation into the business dealings of a friend of Sanders’ with the City of San Diego.

The whistle-blower, deputy director of the City’s Economic Development Division, Scott Kessler, was fired in the Fall of 2008. He has since filed an unlawful termination suit against the City and he and his lawyer are currently involved in settlement negotiations with City lawyers.

This is great. Scott Kessler is a very good friend of mine,

NEW UPDATE:
1200 Demonstrate at Governor’s San Diego Office

By Hoa Quach / SDNN

A daylong effort against budget cuts led by student organizers throughout the San Diego region concluded with about 1,200 protesters gathering outside Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s San Diego office late Thursday afternoon.

UPDATE:
Californians Protest Education Cut-backs – UC Davis students try to block highway

Trying to keep on top of the March 4 Day of Action? Here are a few resources that you’ll definitely find useful.

Student Sources

* UC Regent Live(blog) will have a team of writers covering national events throughout the day.
* The blog Occupy CA has been breaking stories about radical protest actions all year.
* This site will of course be passing on everything we get.
* Our national March 4 map includes links and contact information for many local actions.
(SEE INSIDE FOR LINKS AND MORE …)

March 4th Actions Begun in California Have Spread Across Nation

Rally and march in San Diego today at 3pm precedes teachers’ march to Sacramento

With our state government paralyzed and public services as fundamental as education and roads cash-starved and crumbling, it’s easy to forget that California is still the world’s 8th-largest economy. We have riches — and they can be directed toward our common good.

The once-great state of California is self-destructing through irresponsible tax policies stretching back 32 years to Proposition 13, which made it so hard to raise taxes — requiring a two-thirds vote of the Legislature — that the state can’t generate the revenue for its basic needs.

Number 9 – OB’s missing fire pit has been “found.”

Actually, the City knew all along where it was. It was destroyed when all of OB’s fire pits were moved to safer ground behind the berm late last year. OB had nine fire pits at the end of the summer and now we’re down to only eight.

So, according to Park and Recreation Department Director Stacey LoMedico, OB will not receive another one. We’ve got all we’re gonna get. And we may lose them as well.

Local OB historian Pat James took these shots of the old Plunge or OB’s first salt water pool on February 28th.

Turns out Mother Nature wanted to re-establish the old pool herself. So, here ya go, all you OB history buffs – the salt water pool re-birth.

Originally posted March 3, 2010 – reposted by popular demand

Carlos Dominguez and Antonio Santillano came to Ocean Beach Tuesday morning to replace a damaged fence. The fence, which surrounds the now-defunct saltwater pool, was knocked down last month during a day of large waves and high tides. Carlos and Antonio work for South Bay Fence of Chula Vista, the company in charge of the project.

The saltwater pool is also known as ‘the Sandbox’ (because it’s currently filled with sand) or ‘the Plunge’ (as it was originally dubbed in 1917). What remains of this once-glamorous attraction appears to have been hit by a bomb. Concrete rubble coexists with splintered wood and public supervision is sparse at best: it’s the kind of place you might witness a fistfight or step on a shard of glass. But I love the pool, despite the fact that the fences are washed-out regularly. The Plunge is a treasure, a relic of bygone era when Ocean Beach yearned to become a ritzy waterfront wonderland.

by John Williams

I’m now nearing three months in Saudi Arabia. Much of what I’ve already said remains unchanged.

However, I have learned that the characteristic black outer garment the women here wear is called an abaya, not a burka. I’ve also learned that is only worn when a woman wishes to go out in public. It isn’t worn around the house. Further, it is rather like your mom saying, “Don’t forget your jacket!” Except, of course, in this case the women are not told by their mothers, “Don’t forget your abaya!”, but by their culture.

Additionally, I’ve also learned that how much face a woman shows in public is decided by her husband. Some are allowed to (or is it directed to, I don’t know), show their entire face, quite nun like; others show just the eyes; and others show nothing of their faces at all, black from head to toe.

I’ve also learned that thobes, the characteristic attire for men, can be purchased in subtle pinstripes as well as in solid colors.

No one has confirmed that Black shock-comedian was behind the racist February Compton Cookout

Student Activism / March 1, 2010

Okay, I guess I have to address this, since it’s coming up more and more often in comments on my coverage of the UC San Diego situation: There is NO evidence that the black shock-comedian “Jiggaboo Jones” was behind last month’s racist “Compton Cookout” at UCSD. None. Zero.

Here’s the deal.

Sometime in early-to-mid-February, the invitation to the Compton Cookout party was posted on Facebook. As word of the party got around, complaints began to mount, and on February 16 the UCSD administration condemned the event.

The Guardian, UCSD’s student newspaper, has printed a statement that it says was written by the student who hung a noose in the campus library last week.

The student — who remains anonymous — claims that last Tuesday, two days before the noose was found, a friend of hers fashioned it from a piece of rope she had found on the ground, “without thinking of any of its connotations or the current racial climate at UCSD.” She herself then carried the noose with her to the library “and ended up hanging it at my desk.” It was, she says, “a mindless act and stupid mistake.” When she left the library hours later, “I simply forgot about it.”

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner.