OB Rag

Society of Professional Journalists, San Diego / October 28, 2026

Kelly Davis was an award-winning investigative journalist whose work exposed injustice, challenged powerful institutions and gave voice to people too often overlooked.

After Kelly passed away July 1 after a years-long cancer battle, the San Diego Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and others who love her partnered with the Rancho Santa Fe Foundation to create the Kelly Davis Prize for Courage and Compassion in Journalism to fuel important work like hers. The goal is to recognize outstanding journalism that advances public understanding of social justice issues and to foster future reporting projects that reflect Kelly’s values and reporting legacy.

From Save Our Heritage Organisation

In June of this year, we first alerted you to this issue and asked for your help. SDG&E has released new information about its proposed Golden Pacific Powerlink transmission project, including three alternative routes, and has announced a series of community open houses. This is an important opportunity to learn more, ask questions, and make your concerns known.

The Golden Pacific Powerlink is a proposed 150-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission corridor. extending from the Imperial Valley to Orange County. With an estimated cost of $1.62 billion, it would be SDG&E’s largest capital project and the longest 500-kilovolt transmission line in its service territory.

It is important to understand that these lines would simply transmit SDG&E’s power to Orange County and the Los Angeles area. They would provide no electricity to anywhere in San Diego County, yet SDG&E customers would shoulder part of the financial burden.

By Kate Callen

The strangest 2026 City Council race is taking place in San Diego’s most underserved district, and it is scrambling political alliances in portentous ways.

Nothing about the District 4 face-off between incumbent Henry Foster III and challenger Martha Abraham could have been predicted. Before 2024, Foster was chief of staff to then-D4 Councilmember Monica Montgomery Steppe, and Abraham was a full-time neonatal nurse. Neither had ever run for elected office.

On March 5, 2024, Foster won a special election to replace his boss after she became a county supervisor. One year later, the Council repealed the infamous Footnote 7 that targeted two D4 communities for overdensity. Abraham, a community activist who helped draw attention to Footnote 7, was preparing to oppose Foster in the D4 primary.

At that point in election cycles, the incumbent would build a campaign war chest and call in favors from powerbrokers. The challenger would pound the pavements with stalwart volunteers and raise modest money. The outcome would be pre-ordained.

That has not happened in District 4. Abraham now has clear momentum and appears to be ahead of Foster. Why has the race become such an outlier?

How Insults, Lawsuits, and Attack Ads Seduce Some Voters

By Bill Eddy / Bill Eddy’s Substack / October 22, 2026

This column builds on my prior column, Right Brain Politics.

What a week!

Yesterday, President Trump spent two hours at a rally in Michigan repeatedly insulting the Democratic Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed. Trump gleefully used his middle name, saying “I call him Mohamed because that is his name—his middle name.” He also calls him a “jihadist” with no basis except that he is trying to tie these words to the fact that he is Muslim. Former President Barack Hussein Obama also spoke in Michigan, pointing out that the same approach (calling him by his middle name) failed to defeat him in two elections.

Neighbors for a Better San Diego (NFABSD) continues its leadership of community empowerment with this “Update on 2026 State Legislation.”

The California Legislature introduces thousands of bills every year, and 2026 was no exception.

Working with a statewide coalition of policy analysts, NFABSD tracked more than 100 bills relating to land use and housing development, which were boiled down to the ones that we predict will have the greatest impact on the lives of Californians.

Click here to review the list of bills and see how your state legislators voted.

OB Staff Report

With a week to go before the November 3 elections, the Rag is taking one last look at how much money candidates have raised in the Council District 2, 4, 6, and 8 races. The data are taken from Follow the Money.org (FTM), a self-described “coalition of non-partisan organizations working together to create transparency for campaign contributions and expenditures with local San Diego candidates.”

To help the public fully understand campaign finance, FTM, where one of the key groups is the League of Women Voters, reports what has been spent in support of a candidate (“why you should vote for X”) and what has been spent in opposition to the candidate (“why you should not vote for X”).

Money spent in support is generally considered “campaign contributions” that are given directly to the candidate or party. They are subject to contribution limits, and they must be publicly disclosed.

Money spent in opposition typically comes through “independent expenditures” by outside groups or individuals for public communications (ads or mailers) for or against a candidate. There are no spending limits, but funders must file disclosure reports and identify themselves in the materials, almost always in small print.

Here are the races:

by Ernie McCray

Chicago.

A wonderful city, in my view,

as far as towns go.

My earliest recollection

of visiting the windy city

is one of me, as a little lad,

in the 40’s,

back when racism

was ever so systemic.

By Ben Christopher / CalMatters / October 26, 2026

For nearly a decade, California’s Yes In My Backyard activists and other pro-development advocates have wanted to overhaul California’s signature environmental law to clear the way for more housing construction.

Now Proposition 45 is on the ballot. Supporters say it would, among other things, overhaul that law, known as the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, to clear the way for—you guessed it—more housing construction.

So why are YIMBYs divided?

By Rag Staff

The San Diego Community Coalition publishes this email bulletin to keep our members and the general San Diego public informed about important Council hearings and other city public meetings.

Monday, October 26: City Council, Closed Session, 10:00 a.m.

CS-2: Victoria Hayes, et al. v. City of San Diego

Why it matters: The horrific December 23, 2023 accident resulting from a high-speed police chase that killed two young brothers was a major factor in the creation of a police oversight board. It’s hard to imagine why the boys’ mother is still waiting for a resolution of her civil suit.

Monday, October 26: City Council, 2:00 p.m.

Agenda

Item S400: FY2026 Year-End Financial Performance Report

Why it matters a lot: This is a bleak picture. The Independent Budget Analyst (IBA) notes that:

Trump is cozying up to the Russian leader. What does this mean for the world?

By Bill Eddy / Bill Eddy’s Substack / October 22, 2026

Last week President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff spoke with the Russian President and praised him as a “humanitarian” because of releasing a 74-year-old American prisoner who may have been arrested for the purpose of being a bargaining chip. Trump also waived sanctions on the sale of Russian oil, which will produce a windfall for Putin to use in promoting his brutal 4-year war on Ukraine. Trump’s fondness for Putin has led him to withdraw most U. S. support for Ukraine, telling reporters this week in the Oval Office, according to PBS News: “We want Zelenskyy to make a deal. We’ve given a lot to Ukraine. We’ve gotten absolutely nothing back except grief, death, tremendous monetary loss.”

In reality, Ukraine has been the bulwark—the defensive wall—for democracy in Europe against Putin’s war of choice to expand its territory, just as Britain and the United States were the bulwark for democracy against Hitler’s war of expansion across Europe. But this week Trump became open to the idea of a summit of Trump, Putin, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to resolve the war in Ukraine. This would involve getting Ukraine to concede land to Russia that was taken by force.

To understand the danger of this shift, let’s look at Putin’s personality since this is a column on why personality matters in politics. Specifically, does Putin fit the dynamics of “malignant narcissism,” as many dictators do (including Trump?) and what this means for our future.

County Supes Approved Major Use Permit in September

By Jacob Aere / kpbs / October 22, 2026

San Diego County and developers of a solar and battery storage project in East County are facing a lawsuit alleging the project’s environmental review was insufficient.

The suit was filed in San Diego Superior Court last week. It focuses on the Starlight Solar project near the town of Boulevard. The county Board of Supervisors approved a major use permit for the development for last month.

The 588-acre project, which includes a solar farm and a 868 megawatt-hour battery energy storage system, has faced community pushback.

The suit, filed Oct. 15 by a group calling itself the Back Country Community Alliance for Responsible Development, was brought under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

By Thom Hartmann / The Hartmann Report / Oct. 21, 2026

Trump is empowering Putin, abandoning Ukraine, and preparing to bargain with dictators over the future of the world. The Republicans who could stop him are doing nothing…
What the hell is going on in the Republican Party?

See original for all the links

Trump gutted his own Russia sanctions law, cut a diesel deal with Putin, and is now talking about carving up the world with Putin and Xi. Congress has the power to stop him right now: why are Thune and Johnson still on vacation?

Yesterday Donald Trump told reporters he’s ready to sit down with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in Shenzhen next month — apparently, a modern-day Yalta conference to carve up the world — and that Ukraine’s president may not be invited to the meeting that will decide Ukraine’s fate.

That came just three days after he spit on the grave of Lindsey Graham by signing an executive order waiving every operative section of the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act that both houses of Congress had passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis.

Gone are the 500 percent tariffs on Russian goods, the secondary sanctions on Putin’s oil customers, and the requirement that the sanctions stay in place until Russia made peace on terms Ukraine accepted. All destroyed on a Friday night while Congress was out of town. And now he’s publicly, shamelessly defending it and essentially daring Republicans in Congress to do anything about it.