Will the Marshmallow Ban Hold?
Will Homeless Advocates Be Arrested?
By Frank Gormlie / OB Rag
Your online, local website is looking for a few good observers who have cameras for July 4th. That’s right, the OB Rag wants to sign up a handful of volunteers who will assist us in monitoring what happens in Ocean Beach on Friday, July 4th.
There’s a bunch of stuff to observe – and we’re not talking about the surf or the fireworks. [Read more…]
At the 11th Hour, Coastal Commission Makes 43 Recommended Changes to OB Plan
The San Diego City Council Hearing on the OB Community Plan scheduled for Monday, June 30th, will be postponed to as yet an unknown date.
Councilman Ed Harris’ office was notified by the Mayor’s Office late on Friday afternoon that due to a brand new, 11th hour submission of 43 recommended “modifications” to the Plan by the staff of the California Coastal Commission, the Mayor will be seeking a continuance – or postponement – of the hearing slated for 2pm. It needs to be postponed in order to allow City staff sufficient time to evaluate the recommendations and make a response. …
COME INSIDE FOR THE MEMO …
[Read more…]
By Frank Gormlie
Coming on the heels of the electoral defeat of the community plan for Barrio Logan in the June 3rd Primary, there’s now yet another community whose plan in trouble, and this time it’s Ocean Beach.
After a 12 year process of updating its community plan, Ocean Beach finally had a Draft Update that was supported and endorsed by every community group in the village. The OB Town Council was on board as were the merchants’ association. Plus other groups as well, like the Friends of the OB Library.
But on its way for the anticipated final approval by the City Council, the OB Community Plan ran into a roadblock: the San Diego Planning Commission.
At their May 29th hearing on the Plan, the Planning Commission – having listened to City staff endorse it, and after nearly every Commissioner praised OB’s “unique character”, turned around and recommended gutting the very tool the community and its Planning Board have used for nearly 4 decades to create that “unique character” by its limits on bulky over-development. The design tool, the FAR, limits how many square feet a developer can construct on a lot.
[Read more…]
Some of OB Rag Email Contacts Stolen – As He Calls for His Former Contacts to Email Him
By Frank Gormlie / OB Rag
Yes, it is true, and at first, I sort of laughed it off, as I went ahead and changed my password to the email account that was hacked on Thursday, June 19.
But then I realized all 2300 of my email contacts were gone ! – stolen by the hacker. Hundreds of those were my OB Rag email accounts. (It was my personal yahoo email account that was hacked – not the OB Rag gmail account.)
This is a real blow – as it’s through emails that I contact OBceans, planning and town council leaders, other activists, other journalists. And now I have none. I have no way of contacting the hundreds of people on my “OB Alert” list for example. [Read more…]
By Frank Gormlie / OB Rag
Councilman Ed Harris’ office abruptly cancelled a meeting that had been scheduled with OB planners to discuss the OB Community Plan. The meeting had been set for Thursday, June 19th.
While the Plan goes before the full City Council on June 30th, OB planners had expected to be able to have a sit-down with the Councilman of OB before the hearing in order to explain in detail why the Community Plan is a good deal.
Harris had earlier met with the leader of the opposition to the Plan, property investor and owner, David Stebbins.
The two members of the committee responsible for the Plan Update and who have been working with City staff and who were expecting to meet with Harris, Gioivanni Ingolia and Peter Ruscitti, both were notified by Harris’ staff on Tuesday, June 17 about the cancellation. Ingolia is the Co-chair of the Update Committee and Ruscitti is the current Chair of the Planning Board.
The reason for the cancellation? It’s unclear. [Read more…]
By Frank Gormlie
The first thing I asked DA candidate Bob Brewer when I met him yesterday was if he could do “something about the traffic?” as it was bumper to bumper at 2:30 in the afternoon on I-5 as I drove to the interview – (okay it was a Friday – but really?) . We both chuckled and grimaced and he responded, “yeah, I’ll build another freeway” knowing full well that wasn’t the answer.
We sat down in an empty conference room on the 3rd floor of one of those new fancy buildings in the Carmel Valley area. He’s “of counsel” for the firm Jones Day where he’s been for the last 6 years.
Bob handed me some campaign literature just before beginning, and asked me if I wanted some coffee. When I said yes, he whisked away and brought it back. He didn’t hit some button and ask a secretary or clerk to get it.
I told him I wanted to get to know the “real Bob Brewer” and for the next hour plus I peppered him with questions and he responded in kind. First we explored his personal history.
Brewer had been a prosecutor up in Los Angeles. He did that for 2 and a half years. Then he was hired on as an Assistant US Attorney for the LA office and dealt with federal courts – he did that for four and a half years. [Read more…]
UCSD Students to Honor George Winne’s Self-Immolation and Protests 44 Years Ago
By Frank Gormlie / OB Rag
Forty-four years ago exactly, college and university campuses across America exploded in violent and non-violent protests against President Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam war. It was May 1970.
Over the course of the month, the nation would witness more than 450 university, college and high school campuses being shut down by student strikes that involved more than 4 million students. It was the largest American student protest before and since.
During protests, National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 in Kent, Ohio, and Jackson city police and Mississippi state troopers killed one student at Jackson State College and a high schooler passerby, in Jackson, Mississippi on May 15. [Read more…]
By Frank Gormlie / OB Rag
The tour I now present around Mission Bay is a great one and it is a ride that has been honed by me and a few riding friends over the last three decades – since the early Eighties.
It is a ride along a route that has a minimum of traffic and street exposure, and it is a route that is practically 13 miles round trip from the Ocean Beach Skateboard Park in Robb Field. [Read more…]
By Frank Gormlie
Sarah Boot and I grabbed a table outside at Nati’s in OB the other day for our interview – but as the sun was playing hide and seek, we later had to move inside. Sun or no sun, Sarah is running for the District 2 City Council seat in the Primary which is coming up on June 3rd. The mail ballots go out in May.
Before we sat down outside, we met in the foyer of the iconic family cafe on Bacon Street. We shook hands, then while leading her into one of the dining rooms, I informed Sarah that Nati’s was the oldest Mexican restaurant in the Peninsula. I pointed to the oil painting hanging prominently on one of walls of Louisa – the famous server who worked at Nati’s for over 50 years – and who I met when I was a teenager when my family came during the Sixties.
Once outside, we ordered some lunch – Sarah’s a partial vegetarian – she does eat fish and cheese – and we settled in for a back-and-forth discussion over the next hour or so. And it was a discussion, for she’s good at listening and I had a whole mental cabinet full of OB and Peninsula history and issues to share with her. I also threw her questions, and I’ve integrated her responses into my story. [Read more…]
By Frank Gormlie/OB Rag
New food truck regulations just passed by the City will prohibit them near the beach in Ocean Beach. In fact, the new law will not allow any food truck – unless on private property – from operating within 2 to 3 blocks of the beach. This will certainly bring smiles to restaurant owners in OB, but it is also bringing frowns to the mobile meal managers.
However, the new restrictions will not apply near the coastal communities until the California Coastal Commission weighs in and grants its approval
Yes, the City of San Diego finally took action to provide guidelines and new rules for the exploding gourmet food truck industry, on Monday, March 3rd, when the City Council approved an ordinance restricting their hours of operations, location prohibitions and permit requirements. [Read more…]
By Frank Gormlie / OB Rag
Hundreds of Point Loma High School students honored the director of the controversial film “Blackfish” – the expose on SeaWorld’s treatment of their Orcas – on Monday, Feb. 3rd.
Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite came to the campus after some film students had produced their own film criticizing SeaWorld and addressed an assembled group of them. She told them she wanted her documentary about the water-park’s captive killer whales to persuade SeaWorld to discontinue “using animals as entertainment.” Cowperthwaite also told the students that they need to form their own opinions on the issue.
Her film began, she said, as a research project on the death in 2010 of Orca trainer Dawn Brancheau and Tilikum, the killer whale. [Read more…]
Here’s Part 1.
By Frank Gormlie
It’s finally here, Friday, November 22nd – exactly 50 years after President Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.
Of course you’ve noticed it – you can’t help but … as everywhere you go there are signs that everybody in the media is commemorating the half century mark of the end of the Kennedy Era – an era that was terminated with bullets.
It’s been 50 years since the end of Camelot and we are told it was the end of the “idealism of the Sixties”.
Well, it has been fifty years, and it’s been fifty years of the Big Lie – the Big Lie that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, and that Kennedy’s killer was then killed himself – which wraps it all up rather nicely, – case closed. The Big Lie is the Warren Commission Report – and all its apologists and defenders.
The Big Lie includes the failure of government to adequately and fairly investigate the execution of America’s chief executive, it includes the dismissal, omission, suppression and misrepresentation of evidence, it includes the manipulation, dismissal and intimidation of witnesses – and ultimately elimination of witnesses.
The Big Lie represents the plot necessarily carried out by a conspiracy to eliminate JFK and then to cover it up; the Big Lie is the half century of a carefully calculated deception laid on the American people, a deception that allowed governmental policies involving getting the US out of Vietnam, restricting the war industry, ending nuclear brinkmanship with the Soviet Union, and reproachment with Cuba to be reversed. The Big Lie is treason incarnate.
But the Big Lie is also very personal, as many Americans of my generation – the Sixties Generation – were all individually deeply affected by Kennedy’s murder and the subsequent shenanigans involving Jack Ruby killing Oswald on live TV. And we were all affected as a generation, as a class of humans by what happened in Dallas. [Read more…]
