OB Rag

By Marjorie Cohn / TruthOut / April 5, 2022

Donald Trump and his lawyer, former Chapman law school dean John Eastman, launched “a coup in search of a legal theory,” U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter recently wrote in his stunning 44-page opinion. Carter found it “more likely than not” that Trump committed two federal crimes to further his and Eastman’s “campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history.”

Carter’s opinion provides a road map for Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice to bring criminal charges against Trump.

The San Diego Union Tribune Editorial Board sent a 10-question survey to the five viable six candidates in the San Diego City Council District 2 race.

Q: How satisfied are you with the progress the city has made on its Climate Action Plan and how will you ensure its legally binding goals are met? Specifically, what would you do to reduce carbon emissions?

Lori Saldaña

Moderately satisfied. Outreach, planning, and promotion has been extensive. It remains to be seen if sufficient budget allocations will pay for execution. Every city department needs to educate and encourage employees to think in terms of meeting Climate Action Plan goals.

A brand new city staff report just released prioritizes the five bids for the Sports Arena-Midway redevelopment and recommends the promotion of one of them to center stage, keeping two other bidders in the wings, and throwing out the other two.

The report, released Tuesday, April 12, demonstrates how Mayor Gloria, in picking his priorities, appears to be favoring a new arena over affordable housing as the key element of the redevelopment.

City staff – who of course report to Gloria and follow his directives – have declared they believe

by Camille von Kaenel / inewsource / April 13, 2022

Sempra Energy, the parent company of San Diego Gas & Electric, is paying out its highest profits ever to its investors this month.

The upcoming payout to investors on Friday comes on the heels of a massive spike in bills for many SDG&E customers, who already shoulder the highest per-unit electric prices in the country. SDG&E executives blamed inf

The San Diego Union Tribune Editorial Board sent a 10-question survey to the five viable candidates in the San Diego City Council District 2 race. OB Rag staff rearranged their responses on an issue by issue basis.

Q: What are the root causes of crime in San Diego and how do you plan to address the recent spikes in crime across the city?

Joel Day:

The cornerstone of a safe city is a stable city. The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed stable, predictable foundations of public life, eroding trust in all institutions. The pandemic has shaken the stability of housing, health care, psychological services, and most importantly, access to jobs and education.

The world can change for the better by little innovations that start somewhere and then grow. One way to respond to something bad that is rampant in society is by overpowering it with good.

As an example: Graffiti––a destructive pastime for youth wanting to express anger or frustrated artistic talents, or to mark their territory for drug-related commerce. It’s a world-wide problem. Some consider it an art. I think it is an anti-art. But suppose those who do graffiti had another option. Suppose they had a way to express themselves artistically by making something beautiful that would result in pleasure and admiration in the viewer instead of anger. Could they be motivated to beautify the world instead of destroying it?

By Thomas Ultican / Tultican / April 9, 2022

In 2014, the first Network for Public Education (NPE) Conference was held at Austin, Texas. My first conference was the following year in Chicago. That was the year after the late Karen Lewis and the Chicago teachers union decided enough is enough and stood strong against a host of privatizers and education profiteers.

Their powerful teachers’ union victory sent ripples of hope to educators across America. That year, Diane Ravitch, Anthony Cody, Mercedes Schneider, Peter Greene, Jennifer Berkshire, Jose Vilson, Jan Resseger, Steven Singer and many other pro-public education activists started dominating social media.

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson / OpEd News / April 10, 2022

Not a moment has passed since President Biden took office that somebody, somewhere is making a political doomsday prediction that Biden will fail. There are endless stories about how he and the Democrats are in trouble and will lose big in the November 2022 primaries. Biden’s plunged approval ratings are endlessly cited as proof of his and Democrats’ supposed pending political Armageddon.

This is the same sorry template that the GOP and conservative media used during virtually every moment of the Obama presidency. That was to create a strawman argument that Obama’s policies were a failure, that he could get few if any political initiatives through, and those he did get through such as the Affordable Care Act were bad.

The San Diego Union Tribune Editorial Board sent a 10-question survey to the five viable candidates in the San Diego City Council District 2 race. Here, staff of the OB Rag have separated out their responses based on the subject matter or issue, and placed the responses side by side.

Q: How will you combat the high cost of housing in San Diego? What will you do to boost housing affordability and construction?

Linda Lukas:

San Diego is a great place to live. It’s beautiful, and it has a very favorable climate,

Mica Kramer is one of the only women operating a Computer Numerical Control or CNC machine in the building of surfboards. Women in the surfboard industry are growing and Mica is a pioneer. Follow her as she builds, paints and surfs her way to a new tomorrow. A film by Charles Landon and Tom Zizzi.

The San Diego City Council continued yesterday, Monday, April 11, to adjust its rules for accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and made it easier, supposedly, for developers and homeowners to build more of them for low-income residents.

Already the loosest rules in the state, San Diego’s ADU building process just got looser.

And developers play loose with the rules, as Paul Krueger demonstrated in today’s Rag.

By David Ost / Common Dreams / April 2, 2022

It is tough for leftists to be on the same side as the mainstream.

We can easily feel at those times that we’re missing something, that we’re letting down the struggle, that by ganging up even on an admittedly bad actor we’re helping strengthen the nemesis at home, allowing it to appear as the good guy.

Ever since 1917, that has been the case with regards to the western Left and Russia. Before 1917, the Left saw the tsarist autocracy as the pinnacle of authoritarian reaction, an attitude that eased the path for the socialist parties of Russia’s enemies to embrace World War I. But ever since the Russian Revolution, the Left has been wary of joining with any western bourgeois condemnations of the country,