Oakland Focus News | Oakland News Online Blog

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! On YouTube.com As of July 26th, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin will resign her post as Alaska's governor. I deliberately used the term "governor" twice, because even though I disagree with her politics, I always respected her as a governor of a state in America. Moreover, I root for women in politics, period. But I always believed Governor Palin - as I will continue to call her, much as some still refer to California Attorney General Jerry Brown as "Governor Brown" even though he's not been that since the 80s - had too thin a skin to deal with the new level of stardom she achieved after her time running to be vice president of the United States. A lot of this has to do with the life she crafted for herself in Alaska, which totally drove her and the GOP nuts when the media started asking her about her past. Indeed, with the spotlight on Palin came a set of issues so great in number, I...

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! On YouTube.com I'm starting to get the impression that BART's workers are out of touch with the common person in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to BARTLabor.com the average union worker makes about $115,000 a year . By contrast, BART riders have an average income of just over $55,000. That means the striking union workers are doing well, and the average BART rider's just getting by in the expensive Bay Area. But with that, BART union workers want a 3 percent raise? Yikes! So let's say they strike after July 9th. That means the person who needs to use BART to get to that job interview in Concord from Oakland can't make the interview without paying money they can't afford for a cab to a place of employment that may not hire them. That's terrible. Why in Heaven's name would BART's workers who want to walk out if they don't get what they want even try to con...

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! YouTube , MySpace , Metacafe , Blip.tv , Sclipo and Viddler I had the pleasure of hanging out with two of my favorite "vloggers" Irina Slutsky and Tracy Swedlow, of Geek Entertainment Television and Interactive TV Today . The idea was really just to meet at a cool cafe called "Mission Pie" on 25th and Mission in San Francisco and share ideas as friends - we all know each other already; this wasn't our first time talking but it was my first time getting together with both of them at once. We talked about events, vloggers, t-shrts, boobs, and the Karate Kid. I've long admired what both Irina and Tracy have done. I met Irina in 2006 at an event in San Francisco she helped produce called " Vloggercon " which was my first introduction to the community of video-bloggers. But what is "video-blogging"? Video blogging is the act and art of talking into a camcor...

For the first time in 17 years, though it seems like yesterday to me, The State of California will have to issue I.O.Us to those owned money. I have a friend who's disability check comes in part from California and that portion has shrank from $225 per month to $162 per month over just the last three months and he's depressed. Governor California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has called a fiscal emergency forcing the legislature to work overtime in closing the $26 billion deficit the state's facing. Will they - the Gov and the Democrats come up with something they can agree on? Well, Gov. Schwarzenegger's got to stop trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor with service cuts and higher sales taxes, then blaming the Democrats. What he needs to do is stop spending on this war on the people of color in the inner city. More soon.

The budget passed by the Oakland City Council last night in a 7-1 vote contains $83 million in cuts, but it doesn't mean the city's out of the woods just yet with respect to its $100 million projected deficit. If employees don't take the 10 percent pay cut that's part of the plan in the case of the police department , layoffs will take place. Moreover, the proposed 10 percent ticket surcharge on Coliseum event tickets is being challenged by the County of Alameda, which threatened a lawsuit. Someone in the City of Oakland should have called the Coliseum Authority before installing that plan. The lawsuit threats a reflection of lack of communication. More soon.

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! On Monday, June 29th the City of El Cerrito approved the Rialto Cinema Theater chain's proposal to own and operate The Cerrito Theater, which was the creation of Catherine and Kyle Fisher, the owners of the now-closed Parkway Theater and the executives behind " Downey Street Productions ." According to El Cerrito Redevelopment Agency records , Downey Street Productions failed to pay timely rent after doing so for the first 12 months of operation of The Cerrito Theater.   The Cerrito Theater (A personal side note: it's very painful to see Catherine and Kyle Fisher's business problems presented this way in public, but that is one downside of working with a redevelopment agency: the public gets to see the information, both good and bad. But a detailed read of the letters explains that they, working as Downey Street Productions , got into a debt problem after theater construction costs. In a le...