OB Rag

Local beach residents want no part of the recent elimination of trash cans by the City of San Diego along walkways and viewpoints at the cliffs and beaches. They are registering their opposition by leaving mounds of rubbish and trash where trash cans once gallantly stood.

Nearly two weeks ago, the City of San Diego announced that it was permanently removing about two dozen trash receptacles from Ocean Beach to La Jolla. The cans removed were at walkways and viewpoints – not the actual beach and parks in between.

Water rationing probably will be imposed in San Diego by July 1, Mayor Jerry Sanders said yesterday. The reduction would vary per household depending on factors including how much water is used for landscaping. Sanders said residential and business customers alike would face “fairly significant penalties” for using too much water in the face of a drought and spring cutbacks expected from the wholesaler that provides water to the city. Sanders didn’t elaborate on what the penalties might be.

Water administrator Alex Ruiz said the rationing plan would try to take into account customers’ past conservation efforts and seek to distinguish between “discretionary” outdoor water uses and indoor uses, such as cooking and cleaning.

Antiwar activists have taken up the cause of an Army deserter who was deported from Canada and is now being held at the brig at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. Two dozen members of Military Families Speak Out and San Diego Veterans for Peace protested Tuesday [Jan. 13,2009] afternoon outside the base in support of Robin Long, a onetime Army private who was sentenced in August to 15 months behind bars and a dishonorable discharge.

The activists support Long’s view that the Iraq war is illegal and say his sentence is particularly cruel because it could prevent him from returning to his sick girlfriend and their 2-year-old son in Canada. Canadian law makes it difficult for convicted felons to enter Canada.

Filipino and American troops will hold exercises for 25 days starting Monday inside a military reservation in Capiz that is being claimed by an indigenous people’s group as part of its ancestral domain. “Balance Piston 09-1” will be held on January 26 to February 20 at the Camp Macario B. Peralta Jr. in Jamindan town, according to a press statement issued on Friday by the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division.

The exercises will involve 141 personnel of the division and 31 US soldiers, mostly trainers, acting division spokesman Captain Renante Besa told the Philippine Daily Inquirer (parent company of INQUIRER.net) in a telephone interview Friday.

A more than $1 billion plan to add 10 gates, and probably a parking structure, at Lindbergh Field is scheduled before the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority in March, but it may cost another $4 billion to build out the airport that would soon be gridlocked. An airport update was presented at a Society for Marketing Professional Services meeting at the DoubleTree Hotel in Mission Valley last Wednesday.

Iraj Ghaemi, the Airport Authority’s director of facilities development, noted that with 227,000 aircraft operations, Lindbergh was the busiest single runway commercial service airport in North America in 2008.

On Wednesday night, when former NSA analyst Russell Tice told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that the Bush administration’s National Security Agency spied on everyone in the United States, specifically targeting journalists, the Countdown host was so flabbergasted that Tice was invited back for a second interview.

On Thursday, he returned to the airwaves with expanded allegations against the NSA, claiming the agency collected Americans’ credit card records, and adding that he believes the massive, warrantless data vacuum to be the remnants of the Total Information Awareness program, shut down by Congress in 2003.

One out of every 150 Americans was there in Washington DC yesterday, January 20, 2009. Nothing before yesterday had ever seen such a press of humanity that demonstrated on Tuesday. So many grand words have been spoken or written about President Barack Obama’s inauguration, that we dare not add anything mediocre. We had risen yesterday in anticipation, and turned on the tube early to watch history and try to be part of it. The crowds were what amazed me. Seeing faces with tears rolling down glad cheeks were what got me the most. Watching so many young Americans happy and excited, seeing so many African-Americans beaming, and viewing the plain diversity of the crowd made us all gasp with pride. The relentless chants of “Obama, Obama!” echoed my shouts into the night air the evening he was elected.

Over 50 people and a gorilla created a carnival atmosphere at a sunset beach party on the last day of Bush’s presidency as they gave Bush the Boot! Inspired by the Baghdad journalist who threw his shoes at Bush as a sign of disrespect, Ground Zero Players constructed a life-size Bush effigy, stood it up on the beach in Ocean Beach, and invited people to hurl away. At the moment the sun disappeared below the horizon, spontaneous cheering, bell-ringing and drumming erupted. A simultaneous shoe hurl was accompanied by singing a few stanzas of Tanks in My Memory from bushisgone’s You Tube video.
Bye Bye Bush! Don’t let the shoes hit you as you slink out of Washington.

A memorial for Donnie Truesdail is being planned here in Ocean Beach for next Thursday, January 22nd. His family and friends hope it will allow all the different people touched by the local musician and music teacher to come together and express their sympathies.

The planning for the memorial, however, is being done in the dark shadow cast by the California Highway Patrol’s conclusion that Donnie’s death was a ‘suicide.’ Their conclusion is based on faulty evidence.

Aside from the beautiful full moon we had last week there was a very low tide over the weekend. I’m sure they’re somehow related but don’t ask me how… Frank and I took a hike on the beach south from the staircase at the foot of Ladera St. We didn’t get far before the batteries in my camera and the backups were dead, but we had a great hike and watched the sunset from the beach before making our way back up. I was happy to get these great photos of the low tide from our good friend Jeff.

Check ’em out, click on the smaller image below to see a larger version. Let us know your favorite!

Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn’t gloating, it’s satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully.

He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago !!!

Editorial writers around the world have been taking their final printed whacks at George W. Bush, accusing the president of tarnishing America’s standing with what many saw as arrogant and incompetent leadership. Some newspaper editorials, for all their criticism, suggested historians might just be kinder later on than those now writing first drafts of history. A success often cited by those seeking a silver lining was the United States’ freedom from further homeland attacks following September 11.

Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, will be sworn in as the 44th U.S. president on Tuesday. “A weak leader, Bush was just overwhelmed in the job,” said Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung under a headline: “The Failure.”