To local Democrats, the numbers don’t add up.
San Diego County is home to more registered Democrats than Republicans, but all five of the county supervisors are GOPers, and they’ve all been in their seats since before some high-school students were born.
It looked like things might get interesting in this year’s election in the district where they had the best chance of picking up a seat. But now, San Diego Councilwoman Donna Frye has quit her to-run-or-not-to-run indecisiveness. She’s finally declared she won’t run against Supervisor Ron Roberts. (CityBeat had the scoop.)
That means no leading challengers are in the race, and the filing deadline is looming, raising the prospect that Roberts will win by default.
In other news:
- About 200 families from Burma have arrived in San Diego since 2006. We examine the severe challenges facing these refugees, some of whom had been living in Thailand or Malaysia for decades before coming here. “Some of them tell me, if there was not an ocean between the United States and Thailand, they would walk back on foot,” one says.
- Here’s a tidbit sure to be a conversation starter: according to the mayor, “the city’s top 400 pensioners — or 5 percent of those drawing a city pension — took home $38.3 million in 2009, or more than the city’s library budget.”
That’s an average of $95,750 each, by the way. Nice non-work if you can get it.
Also at City Hall, we’ve got details on the eternally stalled effort to outsource some city jobs.
- Report cards evaluating San Diego schools are late again “but the school district argues that it can’t put the reports together unless California starts providing the information it needs to create them sooner.”
- The San Diego school district’s top financial guru has been taking questions — a whole lot of them — on our site. Among other things, he explains how the district can be unsure it will have any employee layoffs even though it knows positions will be cut.
- This is a first: the Fact Check blog is fact checking a reference to a Fact Check verdict. Got that?
It all has to do with our finding last week that a claim regarding local union membership is “barely true.” Let us repeat that one more time for those who aren’t paying close attention: “Barely true.” Not “correct” or “true.”
There are other possible verdicts in the land of Fact Check. The least desirable is “Huckster Propaganda,” reserved for statements that aren’t just untrue but made by someone who should know better and in an attempt to gain an advantage. Guess what: we just handed out one of these verdicts. Read about it here.
- Our editorial cartoonist tackles school budgeting woes.
- The Photo of the Day is spark-er-rific.
- Yesterday, I included a link to a Google Maps image of downtown’s YWCA building, which had shown up in an earlier Photo of the Day.
The link sent people to maps of a variety of places, including the United States and the Gulf of Mexico east of Tampico. On my computer, the link sometimes takes me to where it’s supposed to go: 1012 C Street. And other times it goes to a map of Poway. (“Sure, Randy,” e-mailed a skeptical reader after I tried to explain this.)
So what does the building look like? Well, it’s got windows and a door or two. Moving on …
Elsewhere:
- Gawker looks at “America’s Goofiest College Race War” — the one at UCSD — and wonders, “Are college kids in San Diego particularly racist, or just, perhaps, particularly dumb?” (Um, is there a third option?)
The post also points out that this intriguing sentence appeared in a student’s apology for leaving a noose in a campus library: “I innocently marveled at his ability to tie a noose.”
- Finally: In yesterday’s Morning Report, I asked readers whether La Jolla should be called a town. And boy, did they respond.
It’s a community since it has a Community Plan, says one reader. Naw, it’s a town because it’s not as dense as the urban parts of the city, says another. And Glenn Daly recalls that, “When I bartended there a long time ago, I always thought it was more of a ‘pretension.’”
Back in 2007, our own Kelly Bennett collected media references to La Jolla after the big Mt. Soledad landslide. The community was described as “hilly, affluent,” “posh,” “ritzy,” “scenic” and “pricey.”
As for pronunciation, Bob Broms says that “back in the day, when the town definitely had a sense of humor,” a community party was promoted as providing “Jolla-fication,” a pun on the word — yes, it is a word — jollification. (La Jolla poking fun at itself? Yup. But that was back in 1924, before that kind of thing was banned in the CC&Rs.)
And a reader says there’s yet another way to mispronounce La Jolla if you’re not from here: La JOE-yah.
OK. You say “La JOE-yah,” I say “La HOY-yay.” Let’s call the whole thing … University City North.