It hasn’t been a good summer for San Diego’s mayor, and not just because of the sexual harassment scandal. Bob Filner is facing fire on a variety of fronts, and he hasn’t helped himself by failing to tell the complete truth.
“We’ve looked into seven recent assertions made by the mayor or his allies and found some creative spin, significant gaps in logic and even an outright falsehood or two,” VOSD reporter Liam Dillon reports. You can read his summary here.
In Search of … Filner Country
Where’s Filner Country? Not here. But maybe to the east in Imperial County. His congressional district stretched out to the sparely populated region, which is best known for farmland and water politics. They liked Filner out there, and some may still appreciate his work for them despite the ongoing scandal.
So it’s no surprise that Filner’s lawyer wanted to move his pending sexual harassment to Imperial County. But, as U-T columnist Logan Jenkins notes, there’s a deeper message about the so-far-unsuccessful bid for a change of venue: “What does it say about Filner’s ability to lead the city when his own lawyers concede that no local jury can be found that is not prejudiced against him?”
The Rest of the Weekend in Filner
• The U-T reports on what it’s hearing about various investigations into the mayor.
• The L.A. Times’ Sandy Banks examined a question that’s on plenty of minds: Why didn’t most of these women speak up?
• John Lee Evans, head of the San Diego school board, is calling on Filner to resign, the U-T reports. But board member Richard Barrera is not. He’s head of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, which is taking heat for refusing to abandon Filner.
Second Opinion: Life and Death Under Obamacare
Sally Johnson, a British immigrant who lives in Mira Mesa, seems to be more comfortable with death than many of us. Part of it has to do with her upbringing across the pond. There’s also the matter of her personal experience as a longtime caregiver for a close friend.
She offers a question for our Second Opinion series about the Affordable Care Act: How does the new law handle “end-of-life situations and expensive chronic illnesses like dialysis and heart transplants for people over 50”? Click here to find the answer.
When Coronado (!) Gave Birth to Drug Smuggling Galore
Prim, proper and well-manicured: Coronado sometimes sounds like a La Jolla matron. But the tidy little town on the peninsula gave birth to a $100 million marijuana-smuggling operation in the 1970s. Joshuah Bearman, the journalist who wrote the magazine story that became the Oscar-winning film “Argo,” is out with a true-life tale about how the high-flying “Coronado Company” ruled the waves and West Coast weed.
Bearman explores the story behind the story in a new VOSD Q-and-A.
Filner-All-the-Time? Not Quite
Some readers, viewers and listeners have complained about the endless Filner coverage in the media over the past month. (Yes, it’s only been about a month since this all began. Seems like a decade, doesn’t it?) What about all the other stories?
There is other news, and we’ve tried to remember that with new stories that aren’t directly connected to the mayoral mess. A couple of those articles — about a suspicious local non-profit and the state of our rather tepid transit system — made our Top 10 list of the week’s most popular VOSD stories.
Quick News Hits
• KPBS has been following the sad plight of hundreds of deportees from the U.S. who’ve been living in a concrete drainage channel on the Mexican side of the border in Tijuana. Last Monday, the station reports, “a team of federal, state and municipal officers swarmed the canal, arrested 90 people, evicted hundreds more, destroyed their lean-tos and filled in their holes.”
But many quickly returned.
• CityFest, the annual Hillcrest street festival, featured a potential mayoral hopeful in a dunk tank for charity.
• Last Friday, the sunset lined up perfectly with the Scripps Pier in La Jolla. A local photographer captured the moment in a stunning shot that you can see here. I can feel the salt in my nose and the sand in my shoes.
Wait a minute. I’m wearing shoes on the beach in this little reverie? Jeepers. I must think I’m Richard Nixon.
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