Leno and McClintock together again?

Senate leader Don Perata saw the floor jockey and pronounced that it must be some kind of "joke." Sen. Tom McClintock, one of the conservative warriors of the Legislature, was the spokesman for a bill authored by Assemblyman Mark Leno, a gay San Francisco Democrat and one of the biggest targets of legislative Republican ire. What brought these two men together? Hemp. Leno, along with Assemblyman Chuck Devore, R-Irvine, authored the bill to define industrial hemp as a non-pyschoactive agricultural product. The bill passed off the floor 26-13 and now heads to the Assembly for concurrence before landing on the governor's desk. Leno's office notes that "Industrial hemp has less than 0.3% THC and has no psychoactive effects while marijuana contains 5 to 15% THC." One light moment in the debate came when Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth, a Republican, asked why, if this were an agricultural bill, all the letters his office received were from San Francisco. Sen. Dean Florez, who represents Fresno and other Central Valley farming areas, opposed the bill.