OB Rag

A breakfast forum last Thursday on the subject of homelessness included Rob Hutsel, executive director of the San Diego River Park Foundation.

Hutsel, who’s headed the nonprofit for eight years, has become an unlikely expert on the people who call the river banks home: The organization’s twice-monthly trash pick-ups and bi-annual “river blitz” clean-ups have somewhat become field studies of the living conditions of river-bank dwellers.

by Frank Gormlie

By 6:00 pm, there was a long line that stretched from the gym’s doors almost all the way to the main road, lining the school’s parking lot as it crept up the small hill. Doug and I were at Rancho Buena Vista High School for Congressman Darrell Issa’s Town Hall meeting on health care. We had driven to southern Vista – a land of new suburbs, condos and malls – from the southern reaches of the county. Everything in sight seemed to have been built in the last ten to twenty years or so.

It had been a long drive from San Diego, and so we had a while to muse about was in store for us … in conservativeland.

SUNSET CLIFFS, CA. Local photog Jim Grant captured this sunset and new addition to “Peace Rock” .

Senior students from Point Loma High School placed their year on top of the rock. Jim spoke to the guys and girls who put it up Sunday night( Aug 30) at high tide.

They hope it stays up until graduation next year !!

They paddled it out on a long board and attached it with long steel spikes.

by Ernie McCray

On July 31st, in an effort to get on with my life after the death of my precious soul mate, I wrote in my journal: “I’m on my way down a long highway, trying to make my way to something faraway called normalcy where I used to live before the tragedy. But I’ll get there. Just you wait and see.”

By E.J. Dionne Jr. / The Washington Post / September 3, 2009

Health-care reform is said to be in trouble partly because of those raucous August town-hall meetings in which Democratic members of Congress were besieged by shouters opposed to change.

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong?

Originally posted August 21, 2009

by Frank Gormlie

No other corner in all of Ocean Beach has had as much attention and been the point of so much contention and conflict within the community as has the corner of Voltaire Street and Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. The northwest corner to be exact.

The Point Loma Actors are at it again, and this time they are bringing the classic French playwright Moliere’s “The Forced Marriage” to Ocean beach on Sep. 5th and 6th!

Local Congressman Darrel Issa appears to be trying to capture the right-wing momentum sputtering here and there at town hall meetings across the nation. He all of a sudden announced that he, too, is holding a health care reform town hall meeting – this one is tonight in Vista.

A line wrapped down the block and around another one in Hillcrest Tuesday morning. If you didn’t know, you would think they were handing out free money not free nectarines and bread.

One after another, young and old collected plastic bags filled with fresh produce — bread, cantalope, nectarines, bananas and potatoes — from volunteers.

by George Mitrovich

At the tribute to Senator Ted Kennedy Friday night at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Mr. Kennedy’s closest friend in the Senate, told a story of how he recently underwent prostate cancer surgery and when he came out of recovery his first phone call was from Mr. Kennedy, who said, “Given the choice between prostate cancer surgery and going to town hall meetings, you made the right choice.”

It is beastly hot in my tiny house eight miles inland from Ocean Beach and I have just spent a number of hours culling through the news online and I am really really grumpy.

I’ve printed out a copy of Robert Reich’s recent posting The Guns of August: How the Republican Right Fired on Health Care …

OCEAN BEACH, CA. This is the OB Rag’s weekly Community Bulletin and Discussion Board. Discuss anything that is bugging you, or exciting you, or of interest. Do it in the comments section. Not only that, if you or your buds are having a meeting or event you would like to inform the rest of us about, do so here.
Come inside for each of these sizzling stories …

* GO INSIDE FOR OPEN THREAD FOR DISCUSSION