Oakland Focus News | Oakland News Online Blog

  More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! Like other supporters, I received this email letter from U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, but this one was pointed right at one of my favorite subjects: "Who should be Justice David Souter's replacement on the Supreme Court?" After not much stewing on the matter, I would guess, Senator Boxer wants it officially known: President Obama's choice must be a woman and she's taking to the Internets to make it known. I still favor Kathleen Sullivan for the job so no harm there; this is what Senator Boxer wrote: Dear Zenophon, Women make up 51% of our nation's population. Yet only 17% of the seats in Congress are held by women. Only 3% of corporate CEOs are women. And just one out of nine Supreme Court justices is a woman. President Obama can change that. Send an email to the White House now — and urge President Obama to nominate a woman to the U.S. Supreme Court! Since Sandra Day O'Connor's retirem...

Ok. A lot of people have been writing that they don't want to see surface parking at the lot next to the Fox Theater in the Uptown District. The tower Forest City Development was to build is going to be stalled in this economy for a good, long time. So we have a lot. Yuck. But the reason we have that, and not an alternative plan beyond it, and a lot of "stuff" from staff is that we don't have an overall development plan and regulations specifically for the entire Uptown Area; regulations that could govern signage, sidewalk design, and transportation. We've allowed the area to just sort of grow with piecemeal development projects as opposed to a full, overall plan. Don't blame me folks; I pushed for one long ago, but lost that battle too. What to do about the lot? Well, we could have a party on it! Seriously. Why not have a good, old fashioned Saturday public potluck right out there on that land, just to show that people will actually walk to s...

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed can kiss the Oakland A's goodbye! Mayor Reed opened up and let fly the one sentence Lew Wolff and Major League Baseball don't want to hear: "Make us millions" or words to that effect, and "pay for your own stadium" or words to that effect. I don't know what the guy was smoking but look, I want some. What the heck, they'll probably legalize it anyway! The bottom line truth is in this recession the A's want someone to pay for the stadium now, and they will kick in money when the economy gets better. That "someone" is the government, because the Athletics sure don't have the money to do it and have lost over $24 million on the effort to date. After all that, they can't be hungry to build a privately financed stadium at all, regardless of their statements now or next week beyond this post. The Oakland A's are counting on a city to get stimulus money, but they'll have to stand in line behin...

Greetings from Georgia, where I'm visiting my Mom. (Humid here.) I ran across a cool website called Beer By BART and it has some rather interesting listings but what's more curious is what was left out of the website. But first, what is it? It's a simple site that you can use to find where to go to get beer near a BART Station. In Oakland's Rockridge District, for example, the site lists just two places: Ben and Nick's and Barclay's and that's it. In reality, there's The Hut just across from Ben and Nick's and closer to BART than Barclay's, as well as Zachary's Pizza which is on the way to Ben and Nick's. So why those two made the cut's a wonder to me. Berkeley BART? Same problem. List just Jupiter and Triple Rock, forgetting "Downtown" which is on the way. What is this, the anti-yuppie beer site? Well, visit the site and give Steve Shapiro & Gail Ann Williams your views. Regardless of the omits, it'...

  More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! Last weekend's installment of "The Blog Report with Zennie62" features the 16th District Delegate Election that was held in Alameda in January. The show segment, which is shown here, covers the election process and why its important to the political future of the Democratic Party in the Bay Area. But the real stars of the show are Oakland's young political activists who are bringing a new energy to the scene here. East Bay Young Democrats President Frieda Edgette, union leader Dan Rush, and Peralta Community College Trustee Abel Guillen are just some of the faces interviewed in the second Episode of "The Blog Report." Personally, I think Frieda Edgette's the one to watch. The leader of the East Bay Young Dems and " MixitUp East Bay " has a unique combination of energy, intelligence, empathy and direction to rise to the level of congressional representative or senator, and I'm not...

I'm getting a bunch of emails on the happenings in the Oakland Mayor's Office just days after my decision to expell the bad food that was in me: dealing with Oakland's mess of a sports politics situation, of which the Oakland Athletics - not Mayor Dellums - have created. The latest news is David K. Chai, Dellums Chief of Staff is on his way out and possibly but at this point not certain that Dellums' executive assistant Marisol Lopez would take the top spot. One email described the situation like this: his (Dellums') choices for COS (chief of staff) (wonderful at first with Dan Boggan, then unproductive with David Chai, and now completely disorienting with Marisol Lopez his most likely choice) are distancing him from even his own, most loyal supporters. The emails have also allowed me to see why our current Sports and Entertainment Task Force was being undermined by Dellums' dealings to create a new baseball task force: no consistent mayor's staff conta...

  More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! YouTube , Yahoo , Metacafe , DailyMotion , Blip.tv , StupidVideos , Sclipo and Viddler Today, I saw Star Trek with my longtime friends Bill Boyd and Lars Frykman at matinee showing at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, thus following through on a plan we formed almost a month ago and I wrote about a few days ago. It was a cool reunion as I'd not seen Lars for just over 30 years and Bill and I get together for lunch maybe twice a year. Regardless of how little you see of each other, there's something about the friends you had when you were a teenager, especially when they last as long as ours has. Star Trek was always a rallying point for us, so today's meetup was a perfect way for the originators of the Bret Harte Star Trek Club to reconnect. We're all fans of the original series, and consider ourselves experts on it. What we liked about J.J. Abrams version was the attention to detail in referencing certain...