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Companies can fire employees who use marijuana for medical reasons even if California law allows such use because federal law prohibits it, the state’s Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.

“Under California law, an employer may require preemployment drug tests and take illegal drug use into consideration in making employment decisions,” Justice Kathryn Werdegar wrote.

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Doing double fistfuls of (prescribed) Vicodin for your pain, washing it down with vodak, then taking (prescribed) Xanax for your anxiety over your disease, and (prescribed) Prozac for your depression about it, while smoking a couple packs of Marlboros a day is still completely legal, of course.

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Bush, before:

“I believe it is the job of a President to confront problems, not pass them on to future Presidents and future generations.”

Bush, now:

The White House confirmed Wednesday that its new budget next month will not request a full year’s funding for the war in Iraq, leaving the next president and Congress to confront major cost questions soon after taking office in 2009.

Typical.

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Apple claims slightly over 3.7 million iPhones were sold in 2007 – yet AT&T this week revealed it ended the year with “just at or sightly under two million iPhone customers”.

That two million has been boosted somewhat by an estimated 300,000-400,000 sales in Europe, analysts believe.

The discrepancy is that the 3.7 million iPhones Apple says it has sold and the estimated 2.4 million sold by its network partners still leaves 1.3 million of the devices unaccounted for.

That implies that around one in three iPhones are being purchased in order to unlock the device for use on other networks and/or for use with unapproved third party applications.

Judy: Gee Bill, there’s something different about you, and I just can’t put my finger on it. Have you lost weight?
Bill: No.
Judy: You got a new haircut?
Bill: Nope. Try again…
Judy: I give up. What is it, you look so much … younger.
Bill: Here, let me show you…

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If you look at this pattern squarely, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, as often as not, what presidential candidates say to get elected has absolutely no predictive power about what they will actually do as president. If you push the pattern to its outer limits, it suggests that presidential policies often end up contradicting campaign promises. And if you apply this logic to the current presidential campaigns, voters who regard American withdrawal from Iraq as their highest priority should not vote for any of the three leading Democratic candidates — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards — but instead for Republican John McCain.

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As the federal government scurries to prevent the subprime mortgage crisis from sending the economy into a deep recession, many of us are asking why it waited so long to intervene. As it turns out, the government wasn’t exactly sitting on its hands. Instead, for reasons that now appear hopelessly shortsighted, an obscure federal agency torpedoed legislation from a handful of states that would have made institutional investors far charier of buying mortgage loans that were likely to go belly-up. If the legislation had been permitted to go into effect, the crisis we now face would probably look a lot less grim. The right question, then, is not why the feds did so little. It’s why they did so much.

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George W. Bush is famous for his attachment to a painting which he acquired after becoming a “born again Christian.” It’s by W.H.D. Koerner and is entitled “A Charge to Keep.” Bush was so taken by it, that he took the painting’s name for his own official autobiography. And here’s what he says about it:

I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission. When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves.

So in Bush’s view (or perhaps I should say, faith) the key figure, with whom he personally identifies, is a missionary spreading the word of the Methodist Christianity in the American West in the late nineteenth century. <

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Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

A smooth-talking horse thief. How…. appropriate.

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“The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.”
Five Western military leaders.

I read the statement three times trying to figure out the typo. Then it hit me, the West has now out-Orwelled Orwell: The West must nuke other countries in order to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction! In Westernspeak, the West nuking other countries does not qualify as the use of weapons of mass destruction.

The astounding statement comes from a paper prepared for a Nato summit in April by five top military leaders–an American, a German, a Dutchman, a Frenchman, and a Brit. It can be found here: [Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, Nato told, By Ian Traynor, The Guardian, January 22, 2008 ]

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DETROIT (AP) — Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick bristled in the witness chair last year when asked whether he had an affair with a top aide. No, the mayor confidently told jurors, the two were never romantically involved.

But a trove of 14,000 text messages that emerged this week tell a different story: The mayor and his chief of staff carried on a flirty, sometimes sexually explicit dialogue about where to meet and how to conceal their numerous trysts.

Now the mayor’s indiscretion has landed him in a Clinton-style scandal that could cost him his job and his law license and even bring perjury charges.

He should have lied about war and weapons of mass destruction instead.

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A homeowner who can’t sell his house tells the L.A.Times, “Foreclose me. … I’ll live in the house for free for 12 months, and I’ll save my money and I’ll move on.”

Banks and lenders fear this kind of thinking — that walking away from a house could be the smart economic move — appears to be on the rise.  Wachovia, in a conference call yesterday, warned  investors that increasing numbers of homeowners are walking away from their homes by choice: “… people that have otherwise had the capacity to pay, but have basically just decided not to because they feel like they’ve lost equity, value in their properties…”

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A commenter on L.A. Land this morning writes, “I am one of these people.  My condo has dropped in value from $520K in 5/06 when I bought it to $350K now. My ARM payment will probably go up $900 per month in June.

“Despite all this, I would be willing to stay if the bank would refi the loans to a 30 year fixed, but since I’m not a ‘hardship’ case they’d apparently rather foreclose. I guess the only way I could qualify for loan mitigation is to get my boss to fire me, stop making payments, and wreck my credit.  In fact, my bank won’t even talk to me until I miss a couple of payments. 

“I have purchased a cheaper place in a nearby area now, while my credit is good, and will stop making payments on house #1 after house #2 closes. I know the foreclosure will be on my credit for 7 years, but I will have saved a lot of money.

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Yvonne Bray, took her daughters Gemma, 15, and Katie, 13, to New York shortly after Christmas for a shopping trip but was taken into hospital when she fell ill with pneumonia during their visit.

The girls were then told they could not wait at the hospital and as minors would have to be taken into care.

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Social workers took them to a municipal orphanage in downtown Manhattan, where they were separated, strip-searched and questioned before being kept under lock and key for the next 30 hours.

The two sisters were made to shower in front of security staff and told to fill out a two-page form with questions including: “Have you ever been the victim of rape?” and “Do you have homicidal tendencies?”

One question asked “are you in a street gang?” to which Gemma replied: “I’m a member of Appledore library.”

Their clothes, money and belongings were taken and they were issued with regulation white T-shirt and jeans. Katie said: “It was like being in a little cage. I tried to go to sleep, but every time I opened my eyes, someone was looking right at me.”

Eventually Bray discharged herself, and – still dressed in hospital pyjamas – tracked down the girls.

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Since returning home, Bray has received a letter from the US Administration for Children and Families, notifying her that, because the children were admitted to the orphanage, she is now “under investigation.”