OB Rag

By OB Rag Staffer

Our US employer-based corporate healthcare insurance system is a nightmarish maze of rules and expenses and deadlines. It keeps many patients from receiving the medical care they need. It provides easy access to medical care to those who need it the least, and denies it to those who need it the most.

It provides a lavish, luxurious lifestyle for the corporate executives who reap its financial benefits (and who fight to keep it that way).

by Anna Daniels

“Actress Heather Graham wants women to empower themselves by pole dancing.” I read these words in a filler article in the U-T last Saturday morning (5/31/09). Whatever life lacks in plot, it more than makes up for in irony. Consider the past week’s news.

“LORD KNOWS WHAT WE WOULD GET THEN” The news has delivered up some fascinating responses to President Obama’s proposed appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. …

One in nine Americans are using federal food stamps to help buy groceries as the country’s deep recession forced another 591,000 people onto the federal anti-hunger program at latest count.

The unemployment rate raced to 9.4 percent, the highest since a matching rate in July 1983, from 8.9 percent in April. This reading beat the peak in the jobless rate during the 1973-1975 recession that lasted 16 months.

Some call it the “Tiananmen Square Massacre,” others say the “Tiananmen Square Crackdown,” and in China it is known merely as an “incident,” the “June 4th Incident,” or as the Chinese say, “liù-sì shìjiàn”.

No matter how you refer to the 1989 democracy protests in Beijing and the brutal response by China’s military, on Thursday, June 4th, the world marks the event’s 20th anniversary.

Once upon a time, a citizen-created park existed at the busy corner of Voltaire Street and Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. It had been created and then was maintained by folks from the Ocean Beach Grassroots Organization and supporters.

After the departure of the last business at the location – on property owned by World Oil – the lot had become an eye-sore with weeds and trash strewed about. Without authorization from the City or World Oil, OBGO took it over, uprooting the weeds, dealing with the junk, picking up the old asphalt, and planting flowers, trees and bushes. And watering it.

by Michael Steinberg

Where is San Diego’s ‘Secret Room’? The room, that is, where the National Security Agency (NSA) secretly intercepts all our internet activities and analyzes them in “real time” for purposes the federal government refuses to reveal.

The existence of such a room in a San Diego telecommunications company was revealed years ago …

Here are a number of photos from OB’s past … (okay, I threw one current sunset by Jim Grant in there).

Check out the second one – it shows then Police Chief Ray Hoobler personally accosting young people on Long Branch Avenue in 1968. Check out his uniform. Thank you Steve Rowell.

AHIP (America’s Health Insurance Plans) is having their annual meeting in San Diego this week. Nurses from the California Nurses Association and allies from groups like Physicians for a National Health Program and Progressive Democrats of America will be there to greet them – of course!

Emotions ran high at the monthly meeting of the Sunset Cliffs Natural Park Council last night as dozens of people — a record turnout, regulars said — filled the small meeting room at the Cabrillo Recreation Center, most of them eager to discuss replacing the park’s recently departed benches.

by Craig Gustafson / SignOnSanDiego.com

A federal court has ruled the city of San Diego is prohibited from harassing or dispersing the entrenched seal colony at Children’s Pool beach in La Jolla.

At the northwest end of Ocean Beach sits a sandy respite known as Dog Beach. Nothing more needs to be said. It is a local wonder, an international destination, and a model for all other ‘dog parks’. Everybody who has a dog has been there. In fact, we kind of glorify the place.

San Diego photographer Jen Wilbur agrees.

by Michael Moore

General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled. …

It is with sad irony that the company which invented “planned obsolescence” — has now made itself obsolete.