Originally Posted at OB Rag
The owner of the U-T San Diego, Papa Doug Manchester, unveiled his plans to “transform” Mission Valley recently, and at the top of his list of development for the San Diego River area is a 22-story containing 200 residences. [Read more…]
Setting up an offshore corporation is not difficult, nor is it expensive.
For $650. you can set up an offshore corporation in Belize or the Seychelles Islands or the Cayman Islands, among many other places. And, for a slight additional charge, it can be linked to a bank account in a jurisdiction which is absolutely tax free and completely confidential — in other words, a tax haven. Furthermore, the shell company can be in one offshore jurisdiction and the bank account in another making any transactions even more difficult to track. These corporations and bank accounts are guaranteed absolute confidentiality. No one can obtain any information about them including the US government. It’s even against the law to inquire about these shell corporations in the Cayman Islands. You could get jail time!
For this reason, offshore companies and bank accounts are proliferating. As is well known, Mitt Romney and Bain Capital have partaken of these completely legal schemes to hide money and have it grow tax free. They’ve set up hundreds of these corporations and bank accounts. At $650. a pop, they are ridiculously cheap for the average multimillionaire. All you have to do is google “offshore company registration” and you will come up with thousands of companies who can assist you in this process. Setting up the offshore corporation can be done in 24 hours, and the only documentation required is a scanned notarized passport and a utility bill — all sent by email. [Read more…]
Echoes for DeMaio*….It was a tough night for City Councilman Carl DeMaio. After weeks of outreach and publicity about reaching out for the Latino vote in San Diego’s Mayoral contest, his expedition into Barrio Logan last night was a bust. Despite DeMaio’s web site’s boast that “The Latino Community is uniting behind Carl DeMaio’s vision for jobs and quality schools!” the ‘Latinos for DeMaio’ event had exactly three voters show up. There were, however, six people who did appear on site to protest his appearance. *(h/t to John Lamb for coining the term ‘Echos for DeMaio’)
The event was catered for fifty. (Crackers, chips and salsa) Candidate DeMaio muttered a few words about his campaign for ‘reform’ winning one voter at a time and left. The protesters moved in and helped themselves to the candidate’s ‘spread’. This venture into the world of voters south of Interstate 8 comes on the heels of much ballyhooed moves by the DeMaio campaign to appeal to voters in San Diego’s less white-bread neighborhoods.
The City Councilman’s campaign kicked off the month with the announcement that former ‘Democratic’ chair Art Castañares had signed on with the campaign as a consultant. Castañares was quoted as saying “I look forward to helping Carl deliver that message to communities throughout San Diego who may not have heard his message before.” Although the local mainstream media jumped on the news of a former Democrat joining a GOP campaign, word soon leaked out that his association with local dem party efforts had ended more than a decade earlier.
This move the was followed a few days later by the announcement that ‘Latino advocate’ K.B. Forbes had signed on as Communications Director for the DeMaio campaign. The press release announcing his arrival quoted candidate DeMaio saying: “Besides his work in public policy, K.B. has been a leading consumer advocate helping Latinos fight fraud and abuse. I am pleased to have a seasoned communications strategist and accomplished Latino activist on our team.” Forbes made the news earlier this week for having a meltdown in front of the media during which he accused opponent Bob Filner of being a “bold (sic) faced liar”.
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Returning from my much-ballyhooed drive out to El Centro on Tuesday – August 14th – I saw a wild fire that concerned me, but what I found out about it the next day disturbed me even more.
Driving out of downtown El Centro and hitting the freeway, I saw what looked like a tan plume of dust near Ocotillo – the tiny town on the edge of the desert. Oh, great, I thought, I might have to drive through a desert dust storm.
But as my rental car hurtled west on the Kumeyaay Highway with the a.c. nearly at full-blast, I could see that the dust storm was really smoke coming out of an area south of I-8 up in the mountains – not that near Ocotillo at all.
As I approached the mountains and began the climb up the steep incline, it was obvious that the brown-gray-white smoke was a wild fire up in the very rugged mountains, the eastern side of the terrain – south of the freeway – .
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A showdown is developing in London at the embassy of Equador, which this morning granted asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The British government has told Ecuador that its orders to extradite Assange to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning in a sexual assualt case, would override any asylum order. Police gathered outside the embassy in London last night, and there was rampant speculation that they were preparing to enter the building and seize him. A videographer live streaming the event was hit with a sudden Denial of Service (DDoS) attack over the internet, shutting down coverage and fueling the rumors.
WikiLeaks supporters point out that Assange has not been charged with any offense and Sweden has a bilateral agreement with the United States which would allow it to surrender Julian Assange without going through the traditional tests and standards of regular, lengthy ’extradition’ procedures. Emails hacked from the Stratfor security firm reveal that a sealed indictment against the WikiLeaks founder was issued by a secret grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia last year. [Read more…]
Ramona Videographer Thinks As Himself As a Watchdog – Police Think Otherwise But They Issue Press Passes
By Brandon Lowrey / North County Times / August 14, 2012
A Connecticut-based news agency is suing San Diego city and county officials in federal court, claiming that press credentials issued by the San Diego Police Department violate the First Amendment. [Read more…]
The Republican budget hero provides a clear context and contrast to a race where there previously was little.
So it’s now official: Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has a running mate. Last weekend Team Mittens announced the selection of Wisconsin Congressman and House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan as Romney’s #2. You could almost hear the champagne corks popping in Chicago.
The selection of Ryan, the principal author of the official Republican budget proposal, entitled “The Path to Prosperity,” changes this presidential election in a very substantial way; it defines it in a way that it had not been defined before. Romney wanted to make this election exclusively about President Barack Obama’s handling of the national economy, a dubious tack to begin with for a number of reasons that need not be spelled out here other than to say that deliberate and systematic Republican obstructionism has played a starring role in the slow pace of economic recovery. [Read more…]
Here’s an example of too much government... San Diego’s ACLU chapter is challenging an Escondido ordinance that requires citizens to give the City two months advance notice in order to receive a permit for a special event. The group became aware of problems with the North County city’s permitting policies when they applied for a permit to hold voter registration and get-out-the-vote event at the Grape Day Park on September 25, 2012, to coincide with National Voter Registration Day. A city staff member told the San Diego ACLU that the event would require at least 60 days advance notice, and declined to accept the application.
A press release issued by the ACLU asserts that “Escondido’s ordinance represents an illegal prior restraint, pitting the public’s right to protected expression against the government’s power to approve or disapprove an application. On a number of fronts, the city’s current ordinance violates First Amendment protections…” The group is currently negotiating with the Escondido city attorney’s office, but indicates that litigation remains an option if necessary. [Read more…]
Virtually all the news media in America’s Finest City have been breathlessly reporting on the vandals that trashed the lily pond in front of the Botanical Building on Saturday night. And, at least from what I saw on twitter yesterday, lots of people were very angry about the damage done to the park. Here’s a 39 second video of the chaos that ensued.
What started as a public late night water pistol showdown at the big fountain in Balboa Park got out of hand as a crowd, variously estimated at between 1500 to 2000 people arrived at midnight for the social media driven event. Although some organizers claimed that they originally expected about 100 people, over 6000 invites were sent out via a Facebook event page (since deleted), with over 1000 people RSVPing for the occasion.
The primary organizer for the “2nd Annual Water Gun Fight in Balboa Park” was Ken St. Pierre, until recently Sales Director for San Diego Gay and Lesbian news and San Diego Pix, owned by Jonathan Hale (partner of Carl DeMaio). A recent press release from Hale media indicated that Pierre is leaving that organization to accept a similar position with ultra-luxe Riviera Magazine. The event was promoted in SDGLN last Thursday [Read more…]
“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.” – Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was out of her Vulcan mind.
This is a simple fact that can be verified by anyone with even minimal Google skills. She was the Albert Schweitzer of Selfishness and the Mother Theresa of Greed all rolled into one. This, naturally, makes her a hero to the Right and qualifies her for sainthood. Too bad she was an Atheist.
Her philosophy, so she said, was one of pure reason, unstained by taudry emotion. But as sane people know, one of the quirks of being a human is serving the heart as well as the mind. Ayn Rand believed you should only serve yourself. In her world, everyone was free to agree with her version of individual freedom and all others were worthy of contempt and scorn. She considered altruism immoral and selfishness a virtue.
Ayn Rand called her philosophy “Objectivism”. For the layman, “Objectivism” is Latin for “I don’t give a shit about anyone but myself.” It’s self-absorption with a bow on top. She makes the Kardashians look like Anna Karenina.
“The best aspect of Christmas, is that Christmas has been commercialized.” – Ayn Rand
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By Daily Kos / Daily Kos Member
Paul Ryan was probably one of the worst picks for conservatives. Strangely enough, it’s because Ryan is a true conservative and now makes the ticket a truly conservative ticket.
Most conservatives, and people across the country, had their doubts about how conservative Romney really is. If you look at his health care law in Mass., some of the other laws he passed, and his past statements, he certainly comes across more as an opportunist rather than a conservative.
This past week, conservatives everywhere were putting pressure on Romney to pick not only a conservative VP, but specifically, Paul Ryan. Now the conservatives have exactly what they asked for. [Read more…]
The Atlantic / By Nancy Cook and Rebecca Kaplan
In the weeks before Rep. Paul Ryan released his latest budget blueprint this year, he urged all of the presidential candidates to follow his fiscal lead. He critiqued GOP front-runner Mitt Romney’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference as “pretty good,” but cautioned that all of the candidates needed to take bold policy stances. “We need to have an election with a mandate, so we can fix these problems,” he said at a breakfast with reporters in mid-February.
He was equally noncommittal about his allegiances weeks later, when he praised both Romney and Rick Santorum for broaching the topic of entitlements on the campaign trail. “Their specifics have jived perfectly well with what we’ve been saying,” he told National Journal. “We’re all saying the same thing, and that’s very good in my opinion.” [Read more…]
