OB Rag

Atkins to Run for Governor

Scores of classes canceled at San Diego State University and Cal State San Marcos as faculty strike

City Council Race to Replace Montgomery-Steppe Will Tip the “Balance” of Power

Residents, staff members at San Diego Safe Sleeping site hit with abdominal illness

Report on roads one more chapter in San Diego City Hall’s history of incompetence

San Diego has a plan to woo back scooter companies: Roll back the rules

It’s way too wet at OB Rag headquarters for us to post anything at this time. We’re under a severe flood and drip watch — Never seen such rain in years — I’ve never seen our front porch under water before.

By Geoff Page

I did not watch Todd Gloria’s State of the City speech. I heard afterward that Gloria announced he had signed some kind of “executive order.” I had no idea the mayor had the power to issue executive orders. I decided to check this out.

After 20 years of working on complex construction claims and lawsuits, the most important thing I learned was the paramount importance of substantiation, good substantiation, specific substantiation. The first thing to look at was the mayor’s order. Here is what the order said:

By Peter Bohmer / January 18, 2024

I mourn the deaths of 26,000 people murdered in southern Israel and Gaza over the last three weeks (as of January 17, 2024), over 24,000 Palestinians in Gaza and 360 Palestinians in the West Bank by the Israeli military and settlers, and 1200 in Israel, mainly by Hamas. Israel has killed over 10,000 Palestinian children. More than 20 Palestinians have been killed for every Israeli.

I am anti-Zionist which is fundamentally different from being ani-Jewish.

By David Garrick / Pt Loma – OB Monthly / Jan.17, 2024

A comprehensive new survey indicates the quality of San Diego’s streets has dropped sharply since a similar survey in 2016, with the City Council district that includes Point Loma and Ocean Beach recording the region’s lowest rating.

The new survey drops the overall pavement rating for San Diego’s streets from a score of 71, which placed them near the bottom of the “satisfactory” category, to the middle of the “fair” category with a score of 63. They now rank well below streets in comparable cities such as San Francisco, San Jose and Phoenix.

By Derek Falconer / OpEd – San Diego Union-Tribune / Jan. 18, 2024

[Please go to  original for any links.]

When proponents of a proposal spend more time criticizing the motives of its detractors than defending the merits of the proposal itself, it often indicates the idea itself is a bad one. This is the case with the city’s proposed Barracks H homeless encampment. The proposed site will house up to 1,000 homeless and at-risk individuals right at the doorstep of San Diego International Airport and Harbor Island, near Liberty Station, and within a 20-minute walk of nine schools.

While the need to address the homeless crisis is undeniable, we must critically assess whether this waterfront location is the right choice for an unprecedentedly large encampment.

There will probably come a time in the city of San Diego’s future (if it survives 2024 and sea-level rise) when historians, architects and residents of good-will will try to understand what happened to the city’s soul.

They’ll ponder why the city destroyed its historic buildings and neighborhoods and will look at this moment, in the middle of the century’s second decade, as a game-changer, for it will be known that in the name of “reforms” the city government decided to gut historic protection rules so developers could have even a wider landscape and latitude from which to make their obscene profits.

Here’s David Garrick at the U-T in the latest:

Join CODEPINK SD and San Diego Veterans every Saturday at 12:00 pm on the plaza corner of Sunset Cliffs Blvd. and W. Point Loma Blvd., entry to Ocean Beach, San Diego for a Peace Vigil for Palestine.

And join them this Saturday, January 20, 2024 from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM.

It’s at the entrance to Ocean Beach, at the intersection of Sunset Cliffs Blvd and W Point Loma Blvd in OB.

Its new owner, Sinclair executive chairman David D. Smith, has pushed local TV news hard to the right. Will he do the same with newspapers — a medium he’s called “so left wing as to be meaningless dribble…so devoid of reality and serving no real purpose”?

By Joshua Benton / NiemanLab / Jan. 16, 2024

It’s a question only the bravest have dared contemplate: Is there something worse for a newspaper than being owned by Alden Global Capital?

The vulturous hedge fund has, after all, been traditionally seen as an end-stage owner. In the old days, newspaper owners existed in an ersatz great chain of being. Family-owned papers worried about being bought by McClatchy;

by Debbie L. Sklar / Times of San Diego / Jan. 17, 2024

Infection preventative measures, including high ventilation standards and universal masking, prevented many SARS-CoV-2 transmissions during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a UC San Diego-led study published Tuesday revealed.

What the data revealed, the authors at UCSD School of Medicine wrote, was that amongst patients who tested positive for the virus, the use of personal protective equipment shielded and virtually eliminated health care associated transmission.

By George Mullen and Bill Walton / Times of San Diego / January 10, 2024

San Diego is currently living a homeless humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions. The time is now to consider deploying what we call the Sunbreak Ranch Emergency Parachute.

The tragic numbers are staggering. According to our own local government’s Regional Task Force On Homelessness, in the San Diego region there were over 4,751 new unsheltered homeless people in 2023.