After London, police departments around the U.S. are gearing up to face the threat of bombings in their cities.

Across the country, police departments large and small are preparing for a possibility once thought improbable and now feared to be inevitable. On Thursday, the day of four attempted explosions in the London subways, the New York City police began randomly searching bags and backpacks at subway stations and other travel hubs.

It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the UK response to the terrorist acts was in large part a police enforcement reaction. During the months after 9-11, a common refrain used to attack one’s political opponents for being soft was to hint that he or she viewed fight on terror as a law enforcement issue.

A lot of times, that is exactly what it is. Especially when the terror is being conceived and carried out in your backyard.

Eliot Sptizer has tackled his latest case after coming to an agreement with Sony under which the company will put a stop to the use of payola to buy radio air time.

According to Spitzer:

This agreement is a model for breaking the pervasive influence of bribes in the industry. Contrary to listener expectations that songs are selected for airplay based on artistic merit and popularity, air time is often determined by undisclosed payoffs to radio stations and their employees.

I was actually under the impression that radio air time was based on how hot the performer’s midriff looked on MTV.

It turns out that meeting someone via online dating is about to become the equivalent of picking up someone for a first date on horseback. In other words, decidedly old school.

The hip new kids know online dating is over and that it’s now all about mobile dating (at least until the brain chip implants are ready).

Prospective couples are now meeting each other via their cell phones. And best of all, the phone knows where you are in relation to the possible object of your affection.

This certainly adds a new urgency algorithm to the dating game.

You will ultimately be confronted by the following choice.

Either you can approach someone who is a nearly ideal match but is a few miles away or you can have someone who isn’t all that close to being a match but who is only a few feet away when it comes to physical proximaty.

Have a few Red Bulls and Vodka before answering…

I’ve been suggesting that one of the stories within a story that will play out as we dig into the CIA leak scandal is the ongoing, but often silent, rift between the administration and many in the CIA. I also think the positioning of Valerie Plame’s CIA role will be paramount.

Here’s former CIA agent Jim Marcinkowski bringing those two topics together:

What has suffered irreversible damage is the credibility of our case officers when they try to convince an overseas contact that their safety is of primary importance to us. Each time the political machine made up of prime-time patriots and partisan ninnies display their ignorance by deriding Valerie Plame as a mere paper pusher or belittling the varying degrees of cover used to protect our officers or continuing to play partisan politics with our national security, it’s a disservice to this country.

Kaboom.

Let me make this clear. I get tired of the Dems complaining that Rove and Co play too rough. The idea is to outsmart the other side and to do a better job of messaging.

But this is not politics as usual or just another tough political tactic.

This is an administration that attacked the patriotism of those who have fought in wars while leaking the name of a CIA official working keeping WMD out of the country in an effort to pave the way for other potential future victims of partisan attacks to spend a few years in harm’s way.

That’s a big deal.

The other day at a roundtable thrown by SF’s Luncheon Society, I had the chance to ask California Attorney General Bill Lockyer about the insanity of the nation’s medical marijuana debate.

Like many of us, Lockyer has been directly impacted by the debate as two of his relatives have unfortunately suffered from diseases for which medical pot could provide rare moments of relief.

He described the current restrictions on medical marijuana as “silly.”

Of course, it’s really worse than that. The restrictions on the use of medical marijuana are cruel, unusual and wholly ridiculous.

The crazy thing is that I can see talking heads from either side of the aisle making an argument in favor of providing pot to those who suffer from serious diseases. Let’s add a dose of realism to the debate. At least in my neck of the woods, a bedridden and seriously ill patient is probably the only person who can’t easily procure some pot with little or no risk.

I wondered if now isn’t the time that a group of politicos could finally begin to add some common sense to this debate. Lockyer’s take was that, no matter how you position the issue, law enforcement sees pot as a gateway drug and to them it’s no different than coke or heroin.

It’s hard to accept that argument (for me and the Attorney General). After all, when you consider the cocktail of toxic prescription drugs that many of these patients are subjected to, if anything, marijuana is a drug that provides a gateway back towards weaker and less intense drugs.

If we are really worried about weak drugs that can bring out the addictive parts of our personalities, maybe we should focus on Starbucks, not weed. I’ve never seen a major group of people heading towards the outpost of my neighborhood’s local pot connection. But they are lined up out the door at every Starbucks in my city (and they appear every three blocks or so).

There are so many political issues where one has to, for sanity’s sake, sit back, sigh and just accept the nonsense.

There are other times when the stupidity crosses the line. Maybe we should call that gateway stupidity.

A classified memo issued by the State Dept makes it clear that Valerie Plame was a CIA employee who was working on covert operations (or at least that her identity was covert).

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked “(S)” for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

The legal aspect of this is important. But the political angle is the one to watch. As I’ve explained before, the public appetite for this scandal will ultimately come down to one key issue: Will Plame be viewed a desk worker whose outing was bad form (and illegal), but no threat to national security. Or were lives and covert operations put at risk?

If the latter is the general view, keep your hands and feet in because this is going to be a wild ride.