California City To Charge Residents $300 Per 911 Call
Calling 9-1-1 is no longer a right, it’s a privilege for those with the means to afford it. The city of Tracy, California will begin charging people $300 when they call 9-1-1 to report a medical emergency. On the bright side, there is a yearly flat rate option. A CBS affiliate reports:
Tracy residents will now have to pay every time they call 9-1-1 for a medical emergency.
But there are a couple of options. Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year which allows them to call 9-1-1 as many times as necessary.
Residents will soon receive the form in the mail where they’ll be able to make their selection. No date has been set for when the charges will go into effect.
Carly Fiorina’s Bizarre ‘Demon Sheep’ Campaign Ad
Widely considered to be one of the worst American CEOs of all time Carly Fiorina thinks it’s a good idea to bring that business acumen to the U.S. Senate for the good people of California. From CNBC:
A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005.
THE STAT: HP stock lost half its value during Fiorina’s tenure.
Check out this campaign ad about “FCINO: Fiscal Conservative In Name Only” — the weirdness begins at around two and a half minutes into the video:
The Walmart of Weed
Matthai Kuruvila writing for the San Francisco Chronicle:
Call it the Walmart of weed.
In a 15,000-square-foot warehouse just down the road from the Oakland Airport, an entrepreneur is opening a one-stop shop for medicinal marijuana cultivation that’s believed to be the largest in the state.
Don’t know the first thing about growing pot? The folks at iGrow have a doctor on site to get you a cannabis card and sell you all the necessary equipment for indoor, hydroponic cultivation – from pumps, nutrients and tubing to lights and fans.
Don’t know how to set it up? For a fee, on-site technicians will show you how to build it in your home and even maintain it weekly.
“A lot of people don’t know much about growing pot,” said Dhar Mann, 25, the owner, who stood…
California Schools Ban The Dictionary
The Guardian reports that schools in Southern California have removed the dictionary from classrooms because it contains dirty words. No, really. I think this is how civilizations collapse:
Dictionaries have been removed from classrooms…after a parent complained about a child reading the definition for “oral sex.”
Merriam Webster’s 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the “sexually graphic” entry is “just not age appropriate.”
The dictionary’s online definition of the term is “oral stimulation of the genitals”. “It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.
…
Schwarzenegger Asks: Why Not Build Prisons in Mexico?
Kevin Yamamura writes on the Sacramento Bee:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday offered yet another way California can save on incarcerating illegal immigrants: pay to build prisons in Mexico.
Schwarzenegger said in a Sacramento Press Club speech that rather than raise taxes, the state could find money by cutting pension costs, allowing offshore oil drilling and lowering prison expenditures.
His budget calls for an $880 million infusion from the federal government to pay for housing illegal immigrant prisoners who have committed crimes in California. The governor also wants to rely more on private prison companies.
California Supreme Court Upholds Medical Marijuana Laws
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a major victory for medical marijuana proponents with this ruling by California’s Supreme Court:
In a victory for medical marijuana users, the state Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a state law that protects them from arrest if they show police official identification cards. The court also overturned a law that limits how much pot patients can carry and how many plants they can grow.
The court unanimously ruled that the limits – 8 ounces of dried marijuana, six mature plants or 12 immature plants – conflicted with Proposition 215, the 1996 initiative that made California the first state to legalize marijuana for medical use.
Prop. 215 said a patient, with a doctor’s approval, could possess an amount of marijuana that was “reasonably related to the patient’s current medical…
Is California’s Governor Broke Too? IRS Files Lien Against Arnold Schwarzenegger
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on this tale befitting the governor of the IOU state:
As if a projected $20.7 billion state budget deficit wasn’t bad enough, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has another financial headache to deal with: clearing up paperwork related to his 2004 and 2005 federal taxes.
The tangle involves a lien of $79,064 placed on Schwarzenegger’s property by the Internal Revenue Service. The lien was filed in May in Los Angeles County, where the governor and his family live, and surfaced Friday morning on a celebrity Web site, tmz.com.
News of the lien brought a quick defense from Schwarzenegger’s staff, with a morning declaration that the governor had paid all his taxes, followed mid-afternoon by a release that ascribed the glitch to sloppy record-keeping…
