OB Rag

Washington D.C. is building miles of bike lanes, though fewer people are biking to work.

By Marc Fisher / Washington Post / November 20, 2024

Despite its reputation as a liberal enclave, D.C. is not and will never be Amsterdam, Portland or one of those college towns where the streets teem with more bicycles than cars.

But sometimes, it’s not for a lack of trying.

The following letter to the editor in today’s Los Angeles Times (Nov. 21) caught our attention. The editors put a headline on it of “The reality of single-family blocks” and magnified the letter itself.

Once again, it is being suggested that those who own and live in single-family homes are wealthy and white.

By Kate Callen

You can’t blame Todd Gloria for delaying the painful announcement that Measure E is DOA.

The mayor is having a rough month. He should have been re-elected easily. That didn’t happen. He had an inside track to a White House post. That won’t happen either. It’s understandable that a politician with fresh bruises would put off more skirmishes. But while Gloria takes a breather, the rest of the city is preparing for a fierce budget battle in the not-too-distant future.

Times of San Diego

A racist term for a Native American woman will be removed from nearly three dozen geographic features and place names on California lands, the state Natural Resources Agency announced Friday.

Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022 signed a bill into law that bans use of the word “squaw” in future place names and ordered the agency to rename all places that used the slur, including on streets, bridges, public buildings and cemeteries, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

By Sydney Brammer / The Point PLNU / Nov 20, 2024

Point Loma Nazarene University claims to be a sustainable campus, yet the inaccurate and outdated information found on their website is misleading to the reality of their efforts. The composting program has just begun making its way back since being shut down during COVID-19, according to Gustavo Bernal, assistant director of campus facilities. Staff workers in the university’s food establishments weren’t aware of the composting process and only a select few actually know where food waste ends up.

By David Malcolm / Voice of San Diego / November 20, 2024

Short-term (vacation) rentals (STRs) are an innovation. Since VRBO and Airbnb came on the scene, this is a new sub-sector of the lodging industry, just as Uber and Lyft were a new sub-sector for the transportation industry.

Unintended consequences often accompany innovation, mostly during early adoption. STRs rely on existing homes and apartments. The more there are, the less housing there is for residential. As a result, rental prices can soar, sometimes pushing residents out of an area.

Early Wednesday morning in OB, Nov. 20, a fire broke out in a condominium which displaced four people and caused an estimated $120,000 in damages.

No one was injured by the fire which started around 3 a.m. in the 2000 block of Abbott Street, near Brighton Avenue.

By Co-Pilot

The City’s sea level plan, the final straw,
Mission Beach’s past, with its old law,|
Once limiting who could own a home,
Now diverse, an eclectic zone.

Six thousand strong, a varied crowd,
Students, pros, retired, proud.
But AirBnB came, took control,
Rentals surged, displaced lives, a toll.

On Tuesday, November 19, at the San Diego Union-Tribune, these were the first lines of the main article:

President-elect Donald Trump confirmed Monday that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military in some form to assist in his plans for mass deportations of immigrants who do not have legal residency status.

Donald Trump’s popular vote total has fallen below 50 percent, and his margin over Kamala Harris has narrowed considerably as all the votes are counted.

John Nichols / The Nation / November 20, 2024

Unfortunately, for the president-elect, the United States takes time to count 155 million votes—give or take a million—and the actual result will rob Trump of his bragging points.

Over the weekend, as California, Oregon, Washington, and other Western states moved closer to completing their counts, Trump’s percentage of the popular vote fell below 50 percent. And his margin of victory looks to be much smaller than initially anticipated.

by Ernie McCray

As I surveyed a picture
taken at
my sister-in-law, Becky’s, 80th birthday party,
I couldn’t help but notice
how joyful she looked
all dressed in pink
and I began to think
that the way to survive the mess
our country is in
is by simply
enjoying to the fullest
the joyful moments we find ourselves in,
no matter how fleeting they might be
because these little breaks
will certainly be short-lived
in our reality
as a country,