Googol

I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal the other day where an analyst was dogging Google for taking its stand against censorship in China and refusing to filter web content. He said that it could cost them about 50 points (roughly 10%) and that shareholders weren't going to like it.

I applaud Google for its stand. The shareholders be damned. They have made enough off their stock already. The company that said don't be evil is finally backing up its words. Hooray Sergey Brin.

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Speaking of Google, the new fast Chrome Browser is anything but. I have been using it for about two months and it goes into a pesky resolve mode at one stage. Slowest browser I have ever used. Maybe there is some advantage I haven't discovered yet...

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That sick bitch Ann Coulter is in full snip because of the decision of the Canadian University to ban her hate filled bile. I could easily fill the screen with her vile offal but will spare the both of us. If you are not an anglo saxon christian, she apparently has little use for you.

A friend and associate was by this morning castigating universities for not being fair and giving equal time to the Coulters and Tancredos of the world. He says that they let the Angela Davis's of the world speak. I would say that Davis was primarily against the power structure, while Coulter has made clear her antipathy to muslims, jews, gays, mexicans, canadians, etc. . It clearly moves into hate speech. I am not sure if she means what she says or is merely a flamethrower, I tend to think the latter, maybe she possesses an obscene need to be noticed and to trigger revulsion.  Making fun of people's ethnicity, sexual persuasion and religion seems like a strictly conservative past time. I must say, the racist and anti gay slurs really don't bother my republican friends too much.


So bravo to our northern neighbors.

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I cautioned many times last year that the tea bag party was going to turn out to be a tiger that devoured the conservative cause. The broken windows, white powder filled envelopes, faxed nooses and death threats all show the wacky chickens coming home to roost. The anger of the lunatic right is coalescing and the storm will forever damage by proximity any sane republicans that may be still standing.

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The Senate Republicans are starting to play the old stop your unemployment benefits check game again. Cause we all know that if you are not working right now, you are neither graced by god's eternal love, nor are you really looking very hard, content to just suck off the system. So get lost, losers!

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The pope might want to borrow Ari Fleischer from Tiger for a little damage control over that Wisconsin molester snafu. David Frum gets his schmeckel rapped for speaking a little too honestly. Syracuse gets whacked by Butler. Hugo Chavez locks up his chief television critic, Guillermo Zuloaga. Eric Cantor thinks that the dems are overreacting to a little harmless gunplay.

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Bravo to the County Supervsors for rejecting the Merriam Mountain subdivision. You can't bring 2600 more houses in when we are already out of water. The notion of supporting building merely because it will provide jobs is shortsighted. We need to think about long term sustainability.

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The sapphic sith queen, Bonnie Dumanis, has lost her second straight marijuana conviction, today to a unanimous jury. Stupidity is said to be the repeating of an action, again and again, in the hopes of obtaining a different result. Wise up, D.A.

D.A. Doldrums

What is it about San Diego County and District Attorneys? It seems like it has been so long since we have had a normal one. Witness Bonnie Dumanis, who has declared war not just on medical marijuana patients, but apparently the County Judiciary and the Public Defender's Office as well.

Now the D.A. is trying to get respected Superior Court Judge Harry Elias to recuse himself from a case, saying that he has made '"highly critical and accusatory statements" about the Prosecutor's office. The judge has been a little bit miffed lately about the D.A.'s office illegal conduct in not sharing evidence with the defense, in one case not turning over exculpatory fingerprint evidence. In another case, they failed to share evidence of a bloody knife that could have helped the defense. The judge apparently chastised them for encouraging witnesses to give false testimony.  The prosecutor says that they don't need to "go back in history, or cite other cases in other contexts," preferring not to answer for their malfeasance.

This is on the heels of a contretemps with Judge John Einhorn, another popular jurist who was boycotted by Dumanis office in the last several months for reasons that were never publicly divulged. Her office had a peremptory blanket challenge against the justice. Einhorn is widely respected and was voted Judge of the Year but has sat idly by of late in a crowded docket because he wouldn't step in line with our District Attorney.

Judge Elias is a former prosecutor who is somehow being characterized by the D.A. as being hostile to the prosecution side. The D.A. is being accused of trying to bully the bench. Elias cautioned in a hearing yesterday that the Prosecutor's office's reputation is not good among either judicial officers or the defense bar.

Now the California Supreme Court has dismissed the charges against the five defendants in the pension case, another cause celebre for Dumanis in 2005. Another costly prosecution case goes down the drain. She has repeatedly refused to charge policemen in officer shootings like Officer Frank White.

Dumanis has reportedly increased the budget for her office by over 65%, hiring five public affairs officers to her predecessor's two and even installing an office historian. On our dime. She outspends the Defender's office by 47%. She built a snazzy gym at the Hall of Justice. The office deflects criticism regarding her largesse by claiming that the improvements were funded with forfeitures. A good reason for them to want to continue the war on pot. So she can decorate.

The one thing she has not done is to try cases like her predecessor, who implemented rigorous performance standards and had a much more productive tenure.  Makes you long for the days of Paul Pfingst. Bonnie Dumanis has been an unmitigated disaster. The citizens of San Diego County need to send her packing.

San Diego's Finest.

San Diego police pull medical marijuana patient Paul Cody out of his wheelchair and into the squad car.

San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis has been getting a lot of negative publicity lately. Liberals and lesbians were upset when she failed to upbraid the deputy who forced himself into a gay couple's home during the Francine Busby fundraiser and manhandled one of the residents. The Sheriff's Association is p.o.'d because she failed to charge the woman.


There have been a string of very iffy officer involved shootings during her tenure, not surprisingly, none of the law enforcement officers were ever charged with any malfeasance. 


The D.A.'s office has been under fire for their  recent very publicized raids against medical marijuana patients and their care providers. The fellow in the video is a wheelchair bound practicing buddhist. Now I didn't title the video and I am not sure that it rises to the level of brutality.  But I wonder if the cops knew the nature of his malady before they yanked him out of the wheelchair.  If you had a spinal injury, it could be very damaging to get treated like that.


The District Attorney just can't deal with the fact that Proposition 215 has been the law in California for the last 13 years, can't shake her opposition to the evil weed, can't accept the will of the people.


After a flood of negative commentary, she has even shut her Facebook page off to comments.


This week she may have made a calculated move to repair her image.  In football mad San Diego, she may have found her constituency, Charger fans. She has decided not to bring charges against linebacker Shawn Merriman.  The guy who has had his share of trouble and allegedly abused his girlfriend, one Tila Tequila.  Now I don't know what really happened between them, all I know is that Daddy told me never to date a girl named after a cocktail, and I have tried to live my life like that.


Football fans probably have more juice than a bunch of sick potheads. Very smart.


Yesterday, D.A. spokesman Paul Levikow was asked in what way law enforcement had tried to educate dispensaries as to what would constitute proper compliance with the law and his smarmy reaction was telling. 


"I don't think that (law enforcement) sat down and said "This is how you sell dope." "I don't think that conversation was had." 


Levikow's reaction is at least honest and more indicative of the true attitude of the DA's office than the prevaricating, mealy mouth Dumanis.  They hate marijuana, have fought it for years and aren't about to let the people of California, the action of the rest of the county governments in California, or anyone else for that matter stand in their way. (even if you are in a wheelchair.)


The DA is trying to do damage control on the political front.  They are on a new media blitz talking about supposed rampant crime and lawlessness around dispensaries.  I have visited 5 or 6 in the county and saw none of that.  Well groomed, innocuous establishments, with no loitering.  Much less attendant hassles than your average local liquor store.  But they are trying to ratchet up their case by exploiting the fears of seeing dark men in trench coats selling weed to the children down at the elementary school.


I thought Mike Aguirre was the worst District Attorney San Diego County ever had.  Dumanis is determined to give him a run for his money.

Marijuana Chronicles

Donna Lambert




"Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could."
William F. Buckley, Jr.

San Diego seems to be the site of Custer's last stand for the individuals in county government who object to the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Even though the law, Proposition 215, which legalized medical marijuana was passed way back in 1996. Even though the federal government says that it will respect the law passed by a majority of California voters.

The San Diego County District Attorney, Bonnie Dumanis and her underlings like DDA Walters, are doing everything thing they can to obstruct the law and put up any available roadblock they can to thwart its rational implementation. They lost at the SCOTUS but want to keep fighting until the last pain sufferer is left unstanding.

Two unfortunate souls, are caught in their devious web, Donna Lambert and Eugene Davidovich. Lambert goes to trial this afternoon. They both sold marijuana, in legal accordance with the state law, to undercover operatives, who had duly issued medical cards and were feigning illness. The San Diego County DA is in the process of ruining these poor people's lives as collateral damage in their never ending war on pot. They are trying to not allow the submission of any medical defense presentation in court. Both of the aforementioned are medical marijuana patients, Eugene a decorated veteran.

The DA seems to be using the argument that any sales of grass for money are illegal even though Proposition 215 clearly states that legitimate costs for production and distribution can be recouped by collectives and cooperatives. Chris Conrad, an expert who helped draft Proposition 215, has testified that the initiative was followed properly in the defendant's actions in the San Diego cases going to trial. And never mind that every other county in California seems to be having no problem with following the intent and will of the statute.

So they are settling on a piddly subjective matter of minor bookkeeping to keep their draconian drug war alive. I guess it all comes down to what "reasonable" means in the statute. But Dumanis is surely taking the most prohibitive view possible, in my view quite unnecessarily.
Now, as a person who has a medical prescription and has been helped by it through several cancer bouts and heart surgery, I have to ask myself, how the pain suffering little old lady is supposed to procure the drug if not for dispensaries? Who doesn't have access to an illegal source. An elderly person, like a family member of mine with severe M.S. and is paraplegic and can't grow her own? They seem to have little regards for such people. Or would they prefer that drugs get sold by cartels to keep the criminal machine working and their own jobs buzzing along?

I pray that the judge sees their obfuscation and bullying for what it is and spanks the DA. Dumanis is just another lousy politician playing with people's lives. The will of the people is clear. Do our public servants choose to uphold the law only when it suits their own purposes? They need to get on board and create a format for the dispensaries to function legally and responsibly and not answer "that's their problem" like one of the DA's did several months ago when queried how their narrow and deluded take on the law would square with reality. The people have spoken. Is anyone listening?


First postscript: I have been thinking about how unfair the Davidovich and Lambert cases really are. These poor people are in the process of being criminalized when they were only following the guidelines and statutes of a thirteen year old law that had been accepted on its face by every other county in the state. These two victims of an overzealous DA are facing felony jail time after doing everything in a way that they believed to the best of their ability, was dictated by Proposition 215. It's wrong that they are now sacrificial lambs, after being ensnared in this deluded drug war.

Second Postscript: Today, 9/10/09, a day after the county and DEA went on another dispensary raid, Bonnie Dumanis had the audacity to say that she wasn't anti medical marijuana and that people should just grow it. Interesting.  Like everyone is capable or has the land to grow pot, or no fear of having it stolen.  Like people trust the county not to come swooping down in their helicopters during the next purge.  My mother in law in the wheelchair can't grow it - you want to start your own garden, Bonnie, and provide for the folks with M.S.?


You have managed to ensnare so many good people already Ms. D.A., because you disagree with the state law that explicitly states that reasonable costs can be recouped.  I don't trust you and I don't believe you.