-By Warner Todd Huston One of the things that many Romney supporters are using to explain away their decision to ignore Romney’s many flip flops is Ronald Reagan’s one-time support for abortion and his signing of the Therapeutic Abortion Act as governor of California in 1967. But this comparison is a non sequitur. Reagan’s support of
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Dear Romneyites, Reagan Was NOT an Abortion Supporter!
You may have issues with the current politicians in Washington, but at least, to our knowledge, none of them have ever been charged with murdering a lover 33 years ago. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports that Bridgewater Councilman Gregory Scott Hopkins, a 65-year-old building contractor, has been charged with homicide of a young woman in 1979, thanks to a break-through in DNA evidence linking the legislator to the murder. “Councilman Gregory Scott Hopkins, 65, a building contractor, was charged with homicide because DNA evidence linked him to the slaying of Catherine Janet Walsh, 23, of Monaca, District Attorney Anthony J. Berosh said. Her father found her in her bed, bound and strangled with a bandana, on Sept. 1, 1979. Defense attorney James Ross said Hopkins is innocent, adding: ‘We intend to fight (these charges) vigorously.’ Police found DNA evidence on Walsh’s nightgown, the white rope that bound her hands behind her back and the bedsheet that covered her body, according to the criminal complaint. New tests of the evidence established a link to Hopkins, prosecutors said. The complaint indicates that when police interviewed Hopkins seven hours after Walsh was found, he acknowledged that he and Walsh had been lovers but said that it had been a month since they had been intimate in her home.” Residents of the small community of about 850 were reportedly shocked to hear the charges. “When I heard (about the arrest) on the news, it shocked me. I couldn’t believe it,” said one of Hopkins’ neighbors, Tim Phillippi to the Tribune. “I always thought he was a real nice guy. I never in a million years would have thought this.” Rod Weaver, who lives next door to Hopkins, said the councilman “was always very friendly to me. I would see him in the backyard and he would say, ‘Hi! How are you doing?’ We never had any problems.” Hopkins is a Republican and was appointed to the borough council in 2010. A federal grant in 2010 gave troopers the money to resubmit evidence from this and other cases for DNA analysis, which wasn’t available in 1979. The Tribune reports that Andrew J. Gall Jr., who was the first Monaca police officer to respond to Caltury’s initial call and is now a county detective, spent hours tracking similar, unsolved murders around the country. Before the crime lab analysis was finished last week and warrant for Hopkins obtained Sunday, DNA samples were obtained for Hopkins and others — some now living in Massachusetts, California and elsewhere — who police interviewed initially about Walsh’s murder. “Because of your dedication, professionalism and your relentless pursuit of justice, today has brought a measure of comfort, relief and satisfaction to our family,” ABC News reports Walsh’s brother, Francesco Caltieri, 52, said at a news conference Monday. Hopkins is being held in the Beaver County Jail without bond. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Monday.
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DNA Evidence Links Small PA City Councilman With 1979 Homicide
As potential opponents have spent the better part of the last year at each other’s throats, the Obama campaign has been quietly building up their war chest. POLITICO reports that the President’s reelection campaign raised $40 million in the last three months of 2011, ending the year with $82 million in the bank and $3 million in debt. A separate joint fundraising committee supporting Obama’s reelection and the Democratic National Committee, reported raising $24 million in the fourth quarter, spending $23 million and finishing the year with less than $1 million on hand. The Obama campaign also released a list of 450 major bundlers who combined to collect at least $74.4 million for his campaign and the DNC. Some on the list of big money bundlers live up to the stereotype from Obama’s critics of who most supports the President; entertainment elites living in Hollywood and New York. Top fundraisers include movie producer Harvey Weinstein, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, Eva Longoria, gay power couple James Costas of HBO and former White House interior decorator Michael Smith, and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. Wintour is the inspiration for Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada. Shamed investor and former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine was also on the list individuals having raised over $500,000 for the Obama campaign. AP notes that list includes two fundraisers linked to Solyndra LLC, the California solar company that received a $528 million federal loan and then later declared bankruptcy, prompting a federal investigation. Steve Spinner, an Energy Department adviser, raised at least $500,000 and Steve Westly, a venture capitalist who was an unpaid adviser to the department, raised between $200,000 and $500,000.
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Obama campaign clocks in $82 Million for 2011
This isn’t just about cutting class offerings, which is discussed at the clip by Ann-Marie Gabel, LBCC Vice President for Administrative Services. The community college system will begin prioritizing enrollment, placing part-time, recreational, and self-enrichment students at the bottom of the priority list for registration. See the Sacramento Bee , ” California community colleges prepare to ration their offerings “: Faced with state budget cuts since the recession – annual funding is now 12 percent below its 2008-09 high-water mark – community colleges have pared back course offerings. Yet demand remains sky high as costs at four-year universities shoot upward and unemployed Californians seek retraining. Community college leaders say it has become necessary to ration classroom seats like water in a drought. They plan to impose statewide rules that prioritize students working toward a degree, certificate or basic academic skills. To meet that end, students who make little progress or take classes for enrichment purposes will move to the back of the line. The hope, says California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott, is that new students won’t get locked out. State leaders want to increase the percentage of students who graduate or transfer to universities, rates that suffer when students can’t register for classes. “It was never my wish to ration attendance at community colleges, but this was forced upon us by the very severe budget cuts,” Scott said. “The reality is, we just can’t offer everything to everybody.” Boy, it’s going to be a tough year. PREVIOUSLY : ” Dr. Gaither Loewenstein Appointed New Vice President of Academic Affairs at Long Beach City College .”
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Budget Cuts Force ‘Rationing’ at California Community Colleges
**Written by Doug Powers Late last year it was reported that California’s high speed rail project wouldn’t be completed for 22 years and would end up costing about $100 billion , which is three times the initial estimate. The project received over $2 billion from the stimulus. Gov. Jerry Brown now says the cost won’t be nearly that much, because somehow carbon fees levied on businesses (some of which would no doubt flee the state) will fund a good portion of the construction: “It’s not going to be $100 billion,” the Democratic governor said on ABC 7′s Eyewitness Newsmakers program. “That’s way off.” Brown’s remarks come as his administration prepares revisions to the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s latest business plan. Brown is trying to push the project through an increasingly skeptical Legislature following a series of critical reports. “Phase 1, I’m trying to redesign it in a way that in and of itself will be justified by the state investment,” Brown said. “We do have other sources of money: For example, cap-and-trade, which is this measure where you make people who produce greenhouse gasses pay certain fees – that will be a source of funding going forward for the high speed rail.” Brown said, “It’s going to be a lot cheaper than people are saying.” Wait a minute. So if industry stops spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere right now (thereby of course saving the planet from global warming) there won’t be enough cap/trade money for the government to build the latest bankruptcy-inducing glimmer in Joe Biden’s eye? I’ve yet to hear a more convincing argument for going green. Not unlike the government taxing tobacco and using some of the money to pay for SCHIP , the “green” movement has developed a Catch-22 dependence the very things they seek to eliminate. So keep those smokestacks spewing filth and pay those carbon fees, California industry, because Moonbeam has a “green” rail system to pay for so the planet can be saved from global warming! At least it helps explain recent decisions like this . I’m amazed by a bureaucratic mindset that believes forcing a portion of the price tag of a bloated project onto select areas of the private sector will lower the cost to the government, and therefore the taxpayers. Take it away, Governor: **Written by Doug Powers Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
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Jerry Brown: C’mon, California’s High Speed Rail Will Be Way Cheaper Than $100 Billion
The Christian Science Monitor – Los Angeles Mayor
An cool piece, at New York Times , ” Preserved in Tar, Relics From Long Before Freeways “: LOS ANGELES — No one expects to stumble across a cache of Picasso’s works in the middle of a desert. So who would think that just off bustling Wilshire Boulevard, tucked between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the national headquarters of the Screen Actors Guild, lie buried some of the most exquisitely preserved fossils in the world? The fossils of the La Brea Tar Pits are just that. They were first discovered in Maj. Henry Hancock’s asphalt mine in the 1870s, when Los Angeles was but a village. Since the early 20th century, more than one million bones have been excavated from the pits; when reassembled, they provide an extraordinary time capsule of the creatures that roamed Southern California 10,000 to 40,000 years ago. Interest in these animals today, however, is more than a matter of prehistoric curiosity. Many of the species found at La Brea disappeared altogether as the planet warmed at the end of the last ice age. The reasons for their demise are not yet fully understood, but may be especially pertinent to understanding the effects of climate change on animal populations today. The tar pits have so many fossils precisely because of the tar, which one can still see bubbling to the surface in spots throughout Hancock Park. The gooey asphalt that trapped and entombed the animals turns out to be a great preservative. Thousands of perfect skulls and nearly complete skeletons representing more than 200 vertebrate species have been retrieved from the death trap. Among them are many giant beasts, including mammoths, mastodons and the short-faced bear. (Only its snout was short; the bear stood more than 11 feet tall, much larger than today’s grizzly, polar and brown bears.) There are two species of bison — one of them with seven-foot horns — and some animals not typically associated with North America, including camels that stood taller than modern dromedaries. Big cats, too, are well represented. Most famous is Smilodon fatalis, better known (but misleadingly so) as the saber-toothed tiger, a powerful predator named for its protruding seven-inch canines. More than 2,000 of them have been extracted from the tar pits. And there was an even larger predator, the American lion, 25 percent bigger than the modern African lion. Imagine meeting one while jogging in Malibu. These big animals and their relatively recent demise raise some big questions. How did they get here? What are their relationships to living species? And why did they all go extinct, and so close together in time? Continue reading . (A bunch of shilling for action on climate change at the link.) I need to take my little guy here. He loves this stuff, and I’d forgotten about it myself.
Questions linger as to what the California Congressman will do in the wake of redistricting plan.
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Rep. David Dreier’s political future still at stake
-By Warner Todd Huston The left-wing idea that it’s good for government to always wildly increase spending is dying a quick death these days. But this good sense has not made it to every state in the union yet — two disastrous states in particular; California and Illinois. These two states have not learned the lesson about
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Every Year Boondoggles Pile Up in California
Well, all are heavily liberal other than one (Washington Times) Eleven states and the District of Columbia are siding with the Obama administration in the legal battle over the constitutionality of the new health care law, as more than half the states prepare to challenge the law before the Supreme Court. Attorneys general in California, Connecticut, Delaware,
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Shocker! Heavily Liberal States Back ObamaCare
