Every day you hear different stories about the fate of Medical Marijuana Dispensaries in LA.:  From the city is banning them outright, to the courts upholding that dispensaries can operate in the absence of guidelines from the city council.  But one thing is for sure.  The dispensaries and access are under heavy attack.

I’ve written about it before, but basically, Trutanich, our new city attorney is on a rampage and has vowed to close them all down.  He seems to have backed off a bit (maybe someone in the city pointed out to him that medical marijuana is NOT against the law and is a smart thing to tax and bring sorely needed revenue to our city…)  Here’s how you can help:

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Sigh.  Maine.  In a scenario all too familiar to those of us in California, gay marriage opponents currently are celebrating their successful drive to prohibit gay marriage via public vote in the Pine Tree State.  For those of you keeping count, that’s the 31st state in our Union to have the issue defeated at the polls.   Meanwhile, one year after the passage of Prop. 8, gay rights proponents will be meeting en masse tonight at the Vermont and Santa Monica Red Line station at 7.  There, Equality Network will host a Death to Discrimination March, led by a New Orleans-style funeral, headed due north to Sunset, then to The Black Cat/Le BarCito in Silver Lake, where a roster of series will rally the troops.  After an appropriate time for mourning and moving through the stages of grief, organizers plan to continue fighting the good fight (i.e., “Don’t mourn.  Organize.”), and hopefully, there will be some talk about education and de-clawing the anti-marriage coalition’s fear tactics.

It’s not over.

A crystal clear case of driver vs biker road rage?  Last year, city prosecutors filed criminal charges against physician Christopher Thompson for deliberately braking hard in front of two cyclists on a narrow stretch of Mandeville Canyon.  After a three-week trial, the jurors came back with convictions in hand: Dr. Thompson was found guilty of, among other charges, assault with a deadly weapon and mayhem.  According to the prosecutors:

… Thompson stopped his car after passing the two cyclists and shouting at them to ride single-file. One cyclist ran face-first into the rear windshield of the doctor’s red Infiniti, breaking his front teeth and nose, and leaving his face scarred. The other was sent hurtling to the sidewalk and suffered a separated shoulder.

Thompson told the response officer that the cyclists flipped him off, so he hit the brakes “to teach them a lesson.”  Thompson’s version is decidedly more benign: he says he pulled over to take a photo of the riders and thought he had left them enough room to get around his car.  Which one sounds more likely?

Two lessons spring to mind.  First, statements you make after an accident can be used for and against you in court, so talk to anyone at your emotionally-charged peril.  And second, don’t effing use your car as a weapon to “teach” someone a lesson.  No apples for you.

Photo courtesy frequent commentator waltarrrrr via the Metblogs Flickr pool.

Well, I guess that happened months ago, perhaps when people started Fairey-ing their Facebook photos. But  I wonder if this  image of a dog with the word “ADOPT,” which I snapped in Marina del Rey, adds to the universal iconography idea that might help Fairey in his lawsuit with the Associated Press.

TMZ, I love you.  I never thought I’d say that.  But that was my reaction after being pointed by the Los Angeles Times Local section online to these photos at TMZ.com purportedly catching First Lady Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger in the act.  No, not an adulterous sex romp, but rather, two cell phone-in-hand chatting sessions while driving, at least one of which reportedly takes place in Los Angeles.  Yeah, it was her husband Arnold who signed  the law that Maria clearly appears to be breaking.

I can’t wait for Maria’s top five excuses:

5.  I was stopped at a red light.
4.  I was stopped in traffic.
3.  The pics are Photoshop phonies.
2.  It wasn’t me, it was Mariel Hemingway (top photo).
1.  It wasn’t me, it was Amy Irving (bottom photo).

This once, I hope a TMZ celebrity story makes front page news and stays there.  Maybe it will save some lives.

It was a year ago tomorrow that I learned his name: John McGraham. A homeless man who was a fixture in the neighborhood radiating out from 3rd Street and Berendo where he could often be found, McGraham, 55, was attacked and murdered there October 9th, 2008, reportedly doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire with a flare.

I biked by there this morning to find the above poster McGraham’s family mounted to the long-empty dentistry office outside of which he had lived and so brutally died.

Such unfathomable violence galvanized the community and after more than three months of intense investigations detectives from LAPD Robbery/Homicide Division arrested 30-year-old Benjamin Matthew Martin in Ranch Mirage, Riverside County on January 22. Though unemployed at the time of his arrest, Martin had reportedly worked as a barber in and around the area where McGraham was killed.

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Mickipedia just spotted this sign somewhere around LA. It says “IT IS A FEDERAL CRIME TO EMPLOY OR PICK-UP DAY LABORERS. PUNISHABLE BY A $5000 FINE”

First off, this is a flat out lie. As we know from LA city legislation not only are day laborers legal but they are being actively protected. Also the lack of citing specifically which federal law is being referenced is a major red flag. My first thought is that this is just a tactic being used to scare people away from hiring them and push them to one of the companies listed on the flyer. There are two companies listed – eMove and Uhaul. I called Uhaul first and the person I spoke with said they have no idea what this is and don’t endorse it at all. The second company emove.com also lists a toll free number which I called and and found a recording directing me to call other numbers depending on what kind of moving help I need. Their website seems just to be a broker for moving help and is registered to a guy named Sam Shoen who lives in Phoenix, AZ. I called several of the numbers and couldn’t get a live person on any of them so I don’t know if they know about this flyer or not.

Either way, regardless of how you feel about day laborers, telling people it’s a federal crime to hire them to try and point business somewhere else is extremely messed up.

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Yesterday I posted about a flight being detained at LAX because of suspicious activity, and later it was announced it was a disturbance with a passenger who wouldn’t listen to flight attendant instructions. Well apparently Cruftbox was on that flight and posted a first hand account of what happened in the comments. He writes:

I was on the plane, in the back row.

The guy really had to go to the bathroom and didn’t listen to the flight attendants telling him to sit down. We were first in line to take off and it forced the plane to leave the runway.

The guy also caused trouble at the gate, so the plane headed back to the gate to take him off. Once they discovered he had been speaking arabic and that it was Yom Kippur the crazy begun.

The plane filled up with LAPD, TSA, and FBI. Paranoia began with the passengers quickly. I met the bomb testing guy. We all had to deplane while they went over the whole plane with dogs and lots of people. We got rescreened and got back on the plane. 4+ hours later, the plane took off.

All because a guy couldn’t wait until after takeoff to pee.

So there you have it.

Yesterday I posted asking for calls to object to Dianne Feinstein’s latest hamfisted, wrongthink “Won’t Somebody think of the CHILDREN” legislation that set manditory 10-year minimum sentences for people making edibles for medical marijuana patients..

Thanks to all of you that called! We were very successful in getting ourselves heard.

Through our calls we were able to get a postponement on the resolution vote. This is a very good sign that it may either be thrown out entirely or rewritten to exclude patients and their providers from legal ramifications resulting from the production or use of medicinal cannabis edibles.

That giant exhale you heard late Friday was not me thanking the sweet Lord that a horrific work week was over – no, that collective breath of hot air was courtesy Chief Bratton and the LAPD who are no longer the overburdened subjects of a federal consent decree.  Eight years ago, hot off various instances couched as “scandals” that turned out to be “standard operating practice and procedure” (think Rodney King and Rampart), the federal government demanded reform and appointed itself referee.  Under its gavel, it has witnessed the LAPD’s renaissance from an undisciplined fleet of ragtag racist officers to orderly, gentile frenemies, or so we are led to believe.  On Friday, the federal court determined that considerable progress had been made (i.e., the LAPD has proven that it does not target minorities (as much as it did 8 years ago)), accepted the joint recommendation of the LAPD and Department of Justice’s attorneys to terminate the decree, and ended federal oversight of the department.   Interestingly, under the transition agreement in place, the federal court reserved jurisdiction to oversee the LAPD’s antigang unit, the sore source of so many controversies, from Rampart to Alex Sanchez.

While I don’t doubt the LAPD’s progress, I also don’t doubt that there’s still much work to be done.  Whether this work may be done – or may be done more effectively – without judicial eye is another question.  Indeed, the ACLU is not terribly happy about the judge’s order; neither is Senator Tom Hayden. But, Eric Garcetti?  As you can see from his tweet, he’s pretty darn excited.   Who wants to garner a guess as to what Walter Moore tweeted from his French lodgings when he heard the news?  Hint: It’s not nearly as exciting as you would hope.