House Passes Health Care Bill

On a vote of 220 to 215, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a sweeping health care bill. Thirty nine Democrats voted against the bill, which includes controversial new restrictions on funding for abortions. Unexpectedly, one Republican, Anh Cao of Louisiana, (the Republican who defeated disgraced Congressman William Jefferson in a heavily Democratic district), voted in favor of the bill.


The debate over national health care reform now shifts to the U.S. Senate; after the Senate cobbles together its final bill, that bill, if passed by the Senate, will be sent to a Conference Committee, where the differences between the bills will be worked out (or not.)

Sprayed or Spilled Accelerant May Have Contributed to Fire Along Hollywood Freeway

A brush fire broke out at about 7:30 p.m. this evening alongside the northbound 101 / Hollywood Freeway near Vineland in the Universal City area of Los Angeles, shutting down all northbound lanes for some time. At least some lanes now appear to have been reopened.

According to dispatcher communications, several callers reported a tanker or other truck spilling or spraying fuel or other unknown liquid onto the area where the fire started.
Those dispatcher communications are as follows:

Structure or Grass Fire - 101 North Before Vineland Av	7:28 PM
* Brush Fire	7:28 PM
* Message/Item Delivered LA Fire Department	7:29 PM
* Per Dupe Caller Advisd He Had Visual Flames About 20 Ft from the Freeway, Multi Trees on Fire About 25 Feet High	7:30 PM
* .k/2743d0927.d/rp Advised Ambers Are Coming Across the Lanes of the Freeway	7:31 PM
* Per Dupe Call Gas Tanker on Freeway-Possible Spilling Fuel Causing the Brush Fire-No Further Information	7:31 PM
* Per Dupe Caller Advised a Brush Fire, Advised Unknown Truck Spraying Unknown Liquid into Fire Area	7:32 PM
More information posted as available.

Krekorian Leads in L.A. Council Race, To Face December 8 Runoff

Despite having been outspent nearly two-to-one by his closest opponent, California State Assemblyman Paul Krekorian won a plurality of the votes cast in the open primary for Los Angeles' 2nd Council District seat.

Krekorian was the choice of 34% of voters. Christine Essel, a former executive at Parmount Pictures, came in second, with 28% of the vote. Tamar Galatzan, a Deputy City Attorney and a member of the Los Angeles Board of Education, was third with 13%.

The Second Council District Seat became vacant when City Councilwoman Wendy Greuel was elected as L.A. City Controller. The District, in the East San Fernando Valley covers all or parts of North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Sunland-Tujunga, Valley Glen and Valley Village. (A map of the district is available here.)

Followng is the final unofficial results of the September 22, 2009 primary election. The run-off will be held December 8:

VOTES	PERCENT
COUNCIL DISTRICT 2
	TAMAR GALATZAN	1,871	12.94
	JOZEF "JOE" THOMAS ESSAVI	306	2.12
	CHRISTINE ESSEL	4,104	28.39
	MICHAEL MC CUE	339	2.35
	PETE SANCHEZ	699	4.84
	DAVID "ZUMA DOGG" SALTSBURG	410	2.84
	FRANK SHEFTEL	441	3.05
	PAUL KREKORIAN	4,929	34.10
	MARY BENSON	1,198	8.29
	AUGUSTO BISANI	158	1.09

Obama's Prepared Remarks to American School Children

Here are the prepared remarks of President Obama "indoctrinating" our school children, to be given Tuesday, September 8, at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia:

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama
Back to School Event

Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009

The President: Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.

Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."

So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall.

And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

Sessions Opposes Sotomayor Because She Is "Pro Government."

Does Senator Sessions (and other Senate Republicans) truly want judges and justices who are anti-government? From the New York Times:

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the committee’s leading Republican, said just before the vote that he was compelled to oppose the nomination because of the judge’s “liberal, pro-government ideology.”

Captain Freed, Three Pirates Killed in U.S. Navy Rescue off Somalia

Richard Phillips, captain of the U.S. flagged Maersk Alabama who had been kidnapped by Somali pirates and held for ransom in a lifeboat off the coast of Somalia, has been freed unharmed during an operation by the U.S. Navy, including Navy SEALS.

The three pirates who were on the lifeboat were killed in a brief firefight; a fourth pirate was on the USS Bainbridge for negotiations with the captain of that ship, and was taken into custody.

Captain Phillips has been transported, in good condition, to the USS Bainbridge, and then to the USS Boxer for a medical evaluation.

Earlier negotiations for Phillips release, conducted through the captain of the Bainbridge under the guidance of FBI hostage negotiators, had evidently broken down, evidently due U.S. insistence that the pirates involved in the kidnapping of Captain Phillips be arrested and subjected to the criminal justice process.

Further coverage:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/04/12/somalia.pirates/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/04/12/world/AP-Piracy.html?hp

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7996087.stm

U.S. Supreme Court Lets Stand Punitive Damage Award 97 Times Compensatory Award

U.S. Supreme Court dismisses appeal of $79.5 million punitives award in tobacco case; compensatory award was $800,000, later reduced to $521,000.

From the ABA Journal:

The U.S. Supreme Court has dismissed an appeal of a $79.5 million punitive award in a tobacco case, saying it had erred in granting certiorari.

The appeal by tobacco maker Phillip Morris was “dismissed as improvidently granted” in a one-sentence order, according to SCOTUSblog and the Associated Press. The dismissal leaves undisturbed an Oregon Supreme Court decision upholding the award.

The case had been “something of a judicial minuet between the Supreme Court and the Oregon Supreme Court,” according to SCOTUSblog. The Supreme Court has twice overturned the punitive verdict, and the Oregon Supreme Court has twice reinstated it.

In its most recent decision, the Oregon high court avoided a constitutional issue that had troubled the Supreme Court—whether jurors were unconstitutionally punishing Phillip Morris for damages done to people who weren’t parties to the lawsuit. Instead the Oregon court upheld the verdict based on an independent state ground--that jury instructions proposed by the company had misstated state law.
***

So we have an exception to the previous "suggestion" by the high court that punitive damages are "generally" to be no more than nine times the compensatory damages in the case. The award will stand despite the Court's 5-to-4 ruling in the same case back in 2007 that the defendant could be punished only for harm to the plaintiff, not other smokers who were also arguably harmed by the conduct of defendant.

Further factual background on the case, Philip Morris USA v. Williams, 07-1216, in the New York Times.

(Image courtesy U.S. Supreme Court.)