Car Booting Violence: The folks over at Universal Guaridan Holdings, Inc. in Newport Beach are smiling today because their Cobra StunLight (pictured) “was successfully used to help disable an armed assailant” recently in downtown Atlanta. They say Jeremiah Day was booting illegally parked cars when a yelling man with a gun threatened to shoot him in the face. People don’t like boots put on their vehicles, I’m guessing. Anyhow, the assailant wouldn’t chill and, well, let’s have Jeremiah tell it: “As soon as I had the chance, I sprayed him in the face with the StunLight’s pepper spray. . . He immediately fell to the ground and dropped the gun.” According to Kevin A. Westcott, president of Universal Guardian Holdings, the weapon uses “a high-intensity LED flashlight, a psychological deterring red laser aiming device, and launches a ballistic stream of pepper spray from safe distances of up to 20.” No mention of cost, but a good product to have at your front door when pushy Halloween teens ring.
Day Five: The Register reports that the Santiago Fire has consumed 22,000 OC acres as of Wednesday night and that officials have contained about 30 percent of the blaze. Dubya arrives in Southern California this morning to bless us with the competence he showered on New Orleans. When he left the White House this morning he said he wants to show us how much he cares about us. I’m getting warm, tingling feelings thinking about this. Meanwhile, excellent news: the FBI has joined the hunt for the turd(s) who started our fire.
Fork Over Your Palm Tree? The fire experience prompted Tom Impelluso of San Diego County to get his letter to the editor published in today’s New York Times:
It was evening of the third day of fires whipped by the infamous Santa Ana winds. It felt like sunset on another planet as I saw a truck drive slowly by with a driver staring up at the palm tree in our front yard. Later, there was a knock on the door. I answered. It was the truck driver. He offered to buy the palm tree in our front yard. There was an eerie silence as I stood there in the orange smoky haze, ashes falling like snow on Mercury, and blinked two or maybe three times. By motivation, this had absolutely nothing to do with the fire — it just seemed like something that would happen in Southern California. As I quietly closed the door, I thought about Joan Didion; she would understand this.
Can The Borg Show Compassion Please? USA Today weighs in on the international fight over Little Saigon’s Tam Tran, a UCLA graduate who testified before Congress against U.S. refugee policies and found herself and family members arrested three days after the appearance. Tran, 24, is in the middle of a ridiculous government created mess. She was born in Germany to Vietnamese refugee parents who’d escaped the Communist terror in Vietnam. The family came to the USA legally 18 years ago while their asylum application was processed. In 2001, asylum was denied and Germany refused to consider her a citizen so she could return there. US agents hinted about wanting to ship the family back to Vietnam. Ironically, Tran had testified before a congressional committee considering the “DREAM Act,” which would give legal status to certain children brought to the USA by illegal immigrant parents. Representative Loretta Sanchez wants federal officials to stop acting like The Borg in Tran's situation.- And Finally, A Note To A Source: Once again, my office email account is broken. Leave the disc in a Santa Ana shop after 9 and I'll have someone get it. Sorry for the inconvenience. (794)
— R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.