Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Close to Home — What it’s like on the street where you live
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Amid a slumping recruiting class, San Diego's police department faces gender discrimination lawsuit
Cassander, You, I and JW seem to be on the same page. You said what I think in a most concise and eloquent way.— May 7, 2017 8:39 a.m.
Amid a slumping recruiting class, San Diego's police department faces gender discrimination lawsuit
We actually subscribe to the shrunken rag, so I had the paper here. The U-T editorial page is full of surprises now; even two years ago it would not have been critical of anything Kev was doing. But let me raise a point of caution. These "national searches" often fail to do the job. We've had them here in No County to fill school superintendent slots, and on more than one occasion got a real loser or fraud out of an expensive search firm. Those search agencies are good at finding carpet baggers who will roll into town, serve the three years of a contract, and then leave again without doing any of the things that needed to be done. Worse yet is when the carpet baggers manage to stay on for more years while furbishing their reputations, and then take off to greener pastures. As I said, getting the sort of chief the city needs would be hard to find and harder to recruit, and that's what the city needs to do. But if there's no real attempt made to get a competent chief, why spend the money on a national search that isn't going to get anyone worth having? This is shaping up to be another hand-off such as happened with the sheriff, and is underway with the DA.— May 6, 2017 11:42 a.m.
A wider road from Bonsall to I-15
Agreed. The Pala Band will pay for "some" of it. Will Pauma also pony up some coin? How about the others that also add traffic on 76? Whatever gets done there is too little, too late.— May 6, 2017 9:17 a.m.
Amid a slumping recruiting class, San Diego's police department faces gender discrimination lawsuit
JW, it doesn't seem that you and I disagree at all. You mention some things I"d heard before, and had forgotten. And you fleshed out my reasons for thinking that a change is really, really needed. That even her overdue retirement will likely not make any changes is mildly terrifying. The overall situation in the city of SD just continues to deteriorate, just like its streets. I'm still waiting for Faulconer to take some of the action he's promised, during two election campaigns, to go to work on that infrastructure maintenance backlog (which is in the $ billions.) At best we've seen some token efforts in that direction.— May 6, 2017 9:13 a.m.
Amid a slumping recruiting class, San Diego's police department faces gender discrimination lawsuit
If Zimmerman really wants to solve this recruitment crisis, the first thing she could do is resign. That would allow the city, actually Kev-boy the "strong" mayor, to find someone who really knows how to run a PD. Someone like that would be hard to find, and harder to bring on board, and would NOT come from the SDPD ranks. (We've seen enough of that sort of progression to know that it doesn't work.) The woman is an idiot; her daily pronouncements are an embarrassment to her and to the PD and to the city. About all we ever hear is that the SDPD doesn't pay enough to get the people it needs. Nowadays police forces pay very generously, and can have their pick of motivated young people. But why would a local candidate for a police career pick the SDPD, when he or she can apply to about two dozen other forces? The word does get out, and the best candidates apply to work in such forces as Carlsbad, La Mesa, CHP, and even for the Sheriff. No, it isn't a matter of money and benefits, it's a matter of leadership, something that has been lacking in the SDPD for too many years. It's all sad because there are good cops, some really good cops, in that department. But in the ranks, there are some really bad ones, and nobody seems able to root them out. (My best example would be Arrevalos.) And then there are the incompetent investigations. Time for a change at the top, a real change, and a new direction for the force.— May 5, 2017 9:20 p.m.
Swimming in Copley cash
At their current rate of disbursing funds, they will never exhaust the trust. And with the gains of the past few years, the day the trust goes out of existence gets even farther remote. The only way that stash is ever exhausted is if return on investments goes to zero. That is most unlikely.— May 5, 2017 7:30 p.m.
A wider road from Bonsall to I-15
Good to hear that it is complete. Sad that it should have been in place twenty years ago. So, now it's time to go across I-15 and upgrade Highway 76 to the east. That area is loaded with casino traffic, and the highway still has 1920's era curves in it. Again, it should have been upgraded before the casinos were built, and the best way to accomplish that would have been to require the casinos, such as Pala, to finance the highway upgrade east from I-15. What am I thinking? Such developments never have to pay for the roads and highways needed. That always comes afterwards, and the taxpayers pay.— May 4, 2017 4:19 p.m.
Incumbency will favor Summer Stephan over Adam Gordon to succeed Dumanis as D.A.
It's bigger than her. For some reason the supervisors want to control the succession in that elective office. I'd say they wanted to do that with the sheriff, and managed to pull it off the same way. But it is more than the county supervisors; other politicians are fearful of what would happen if just "anybody" ran for DA and won. That's the reason for the fix.— May 3, 2017 8:04 p.m.
Incumbency will favor Summer Stephan over Adam Gordon to succeed Dumanis as D.A.
Ron Roberts should be ashamed of himself after most of the meetings he attends. He can come up with some sort of "man bites dog" justification for almost anything he favors, and usually nobody on the board opposes him. But many local pols are very afraid to vote against him. Yes, if this deal goes down as now being plotted, it will work to give Stephan a big boost. If the voters were paying any attention, the endorsement by Bahnee and appointment by the board of supervisors would be a detriment. But too many county voters are of the knee-jerk sort, favoring incumbents without having any real notion of the performance while in office. This need not be so. I'm old enough to remember back to 1964 when one of California's US senate seats was coming open. The incumbent was very ill and was not going to run again. A guy named Pierre Salinger, whose accomplishment had been as press secretary to JFK, claimed to be a California native, but he hadn't lived or worked in the state for twenty years or more. But with the seat coming open, he resigned his post and headed here, establishing residency just prior to the deadline. He then filed for the seat as a Dem, and got the nomination. That summer the incumbent Clair Engle died, and the then-Gov, Pat Brown was empowered to appoint a replacement. (For those too young to remember, that Brown was the father of our current recycled governor, Jerry Brown.) Brown decided to appoint Salinger to complete the term. His reasoning went that "everyone" knew that Salinger was going to be elected in the general election, and that he'd have more seniority than if he only took office in due course. Somehow it didn't work that way, and George Murphy, the Republican nominee, won the seat, bucking the LBJ landslide. Not only did Salinger not get the advantage of incumbency, the high-handed work by Brown put him at a disadvantage. Ol' Pat had gone politically tone deaf, and being the arrogant jerk he was, undid what he wanted to accomplish. But he didn't learn much from the experience, or from the mishandling of the Watts riot the following year. The political neophyte, Ronald Reagan, thwarted Brown's hope for a third term, beating him in a landslide. So, if a strong opponent for Stephan comes along, many of us will support him/her, hope to see an end to the Bahnee dynasty, and get an un-corrupted new DA.— May 3, 2017 4:22 p.m.
San Diego city attorney weighs in on limiting public comment at council meetings
I'm going to register a mild dissent here, not about limiting the comments, but why he wants to do it. A few visits to a local governing body revealed that there were a handful of those who would comment every month. They didn't want to comment on matters on the agenda, no, they each had a hobby horse thing they brought up at every meeting. Nothing new ever came from those comments, just the same old stuff, usually with no backup evidence or arguments. The members of that body just tuned it out, and sometimes would talk among themselves while "usual" comment makers spouted off. If someone else spoke they would at least listen. Knowing that you'll be seeing and hearing those same speakers at the start of every meeting would start to wear. Heck, it wore on me after just a few meetings. And so, it might be tempting to try to limit it. BUT, that's not the way we do things in a democratic world. There is a right in the First Amendment to meet and to petition those in control. If some vexatious or boring speaker keeps raising the same things time after time, that's a price we pay for being able to be heard when we want to speak out. Making an attempt to impose those limits is a step onto a slippery slope. Today the time permitted and the small number of speakers who can actually talk is sharply limited. Going farther is not the way to deal with his dislikes.— May 3, 2017 3:58 p.m.