Free Republic

*In 2001, leaders of the Los Angeles Community College District decided to take action. With support from construction companies and labor unions, they persuaded voters to pass a series of bond measures over the next seven years that raised $5.7 billion to rebuild every campus. The money would ease classroom crowding. It would make college buildings safer. New technology would enhance learning. And financial oversight would be stringent. That is what was promised to Los Angeles voters. The reality? Tens of millions of dollars have gone to waste because of poor planning, frivolous spending and shoddy workmanship, a Times investigation...

* Since 2009, Mr. Heicklen has stood there and at courthouse entrances elsewhere and handed out pamphlets encouraging jurors to ignore the law if they disagree with it, and to render verdicts based on conscience. That concept, called jury nullification, is highly controversial, and courts are hostile to it. But federal prosecutors have now taken the unusual step of having Mr. Heicklen indicted on a charge that his distributing of such pamphlets at the courthouse entrance violates the law against jury tampering. He was arraigned on Friday in a somewhat contentious hearing before Judge Kimba M. Wood, who entered a...

Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania said Tuesday that several state workers had been fired and the state’s abortion clinics would be subjected to stricter oversight as a result of an investigation into a Philadelphia clinic where, according to the district attorney, a woman and seven newborn babies were killed in deplorable conditions. Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69, who ran the clinic, the Women’s Medical Society, was indicted by a grand jury last month on eight counts of murder. The grand jury report found that babies were born alive in the clinic but were killed when their spinal cords cut with scissors...

Major disasters like terrorist attacks and mass epidemics raise confounding issues for rescuers, doctors and government officials. But they also pose bewildering legal questions, including some that may be painful to consider, like how the courts would decide who gets life-saving medicine if there are more victims than supplies. But courts, like fire departments and homicide detectives, exist in part for gruesome what-ifs. So this month, an official state legal manual was published in New York to serve as a guide for judges and lawyers who could face grim questions in another terrorist attack, a major radiological or chemical contamination...

Gun advocates say a landmark ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court last year, combined with a new landscape in the Illinois Legislature this year, could usher in a long-debated law to let people carry handguns in public in Illinois — the last state in the nation that doesn't allow it. "If my vote count is right, there is a majority (in the Illinois Legislature) that would support the 'carry' bill" if sponsors can get it past the opposition of legislative leaders in both chambers, said Todd Vandermyde, a National Rifle Association lobbyist in Springfield. "We're clearly there." Such optimism from...

By law, Roy Perez should not have had a gun three years ago when he shot his mother 16 times in their home in Baldwin Park, Calif., killing her, and then went next door and killed a woman and her 4-year-old daughter. Mr. Perez, who pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and was sentenced last year to life in prison, had a history of mental health issues. As a result, even though in 2004 he legally bought the 9-millimeter Glock 26 handgun he used, at the time of the shootings his name was in a statewide law enforcement database...

Seeking to end a debate that has brewed for nearly a decade, the director of the Transportation Security Administration announced on Friday that a union would be allowed to bargain over working conditions on behalf of the nation’s 45,000 airport security officers, although certain issues like pay will not be subject to negotiation. The question of whether unions can negotiate on behalf of airport security workers has been a repeated topic of partisan debate on Capitol Hill, at times threatening to hold up major pieces of legislation or even the Senate confirmation of the agency’s director. John S. Pistole, the...

Andrew Mikel II admits it was a stupid thing to do. In December, bored and craving attention, the 14-year-old used a plastic tube to blow small plastic pellets at fellow students in Spotsylvania High School. In one lunch period, he scored three hits. "They flinched. They looked annoyed," Mikel said. The school district saw it as more than a childish prank. School officials expelled him for possession and use of a weapon, and they called a deputy sheriff to the scene, said Mikel and his father, Andrew Mikel Sr. The younger Mikel, a freshman, said he was charged with three...

DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse emails that he's happy the selection process for the Democratic convention is now over -- and that Sen. Claire McCaskill lobbied the committee fairly hard to get the convention in her home state, pushing back on speculation that she wants to keep the national party at a distance during her reelection campaign. "Senator McCaskill won’t be burning up the phone lines for St. Louis anymore. She’s a one person Chamber of Commerce," said Woodhouse. The Times had reported that McCaskill privately harbored doubts about holding the convention in St. Louis: Ms. McCaskill, one of the...

The Democratic National Committee announced Tuesday that Charlotte, and not St. Louis, will be the site of its 2012 convention, ending with a thud an all-out effort by city officials here to land the event, and the thousands of visitors and national attention that comes with it. St. Louis and Charlotte were the top contenders among four finalists, a list that also included Cleveland and Minneapolis. In the end, the decision may have come down to politics. While St. Louis showcased its facilities and civic ardor, North Carolina is viewed as key to Obama's chances to return to the White...

The federal lawsuits against last year’s health care overhaul were greeted with eye-rolling and snickers from many conventional legal scholars. Nobody’s laughing now. A federal judge in Virginia ruled late last year that a key underpinning of the health care law stretches the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution past the breaking point, while another judge in Florida is expected to rule on Monday. Both cases are likely to proceed toward the Supreme Court. And the challenges to the health care reform law are just the most visible sign of a broad, national flowering of state efforts to find shelter...

Count me among the many thousands of Washington area residents who spent Wednesday night stuck in traffic as a snowstorm sowed chaos all around us. Being car-bound in sub-freezing weather for six hours can make a guy think. I counted my blessings. The situation could have been worse, I realized: My fellow commuters and I could have been trying to make it home in electric cars, like the ones President Obama is constantly promoting, most recently in his State of the Union address. It is a basic fact of physical science that batteries run down more quickly in cold weather...

As 2011 begins, nearly 15 million people are officially unemployed in the United States and another 11.5 million have either settled for part-time work or simply given up the search for a job. To regain the 5 percent unemployment level of December 2007, about 300,000 jobs would have to be created each month for several years. There are no signs that this is likely to happen soon. And joblessness now hits people harder because it follows in the wake of decades of stagnating worker earnings, high consumer indebtedness, eviscerated retirement funds and rollbacks of the social safety net. So where...

Why are Americans such wusses? Threaten the Greeks with job losses and benefit cuts and they tie up Athens, but take away Americans' jobs, 401(k)s, even their homes, and they pretty much roll over. Tell British students that their tuition is about to go up and they take to the streets; American students just amp up their doses of Prozac. The question has been raised many times in the last few years, by a variety of scholars and commentators -- this one included -- but when the eminent social scientist Frances Fox Piven brought it up at the end of...

The sole U.S. maker of a key execution drug has decided to permanently halt production of the drug, which could lead many states to face delay in carrying out the death penalty. The decision made on Friday by Hospira Inc. caps months of controversy over thiopental sodium, an anesthetic that has long been used by states as a part of a cocktail of drugs administered during a lethal injection. Previously Hospira's decision puts a wrench in the nation's capital-punishment system. States can attempt to use another anesthetic in place of thiopental, but such a switch likely would need to be...

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is rejecting gun-control legislation offered by the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in response to the weekend shootings of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and 19 others in Arizona. Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) announced plans Tuesday to introduce legislation prohibiting people from carrying guns within 1,000 feet of members of Congress. King, who has previously called for the removal of illegal guns from the streets, made the announcement alongside New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of the nation’s loudest voices for stricter gun laws. King said the legislation is not intended only for the safety...

President Obama's reelection in 2012 won't be easy, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) says. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), the new chairman of the CBC, told the group IMPACT to expect a bruising fight to secure the president a second term. "It's realistic for our party to understand the enormous challenge we're going to have, to get him back in the White House in 2012," Cleaver told the group, as reported on Monday by NBC's Washington affiliate. "It will not be a landslide or an easy victory," Cleaver added. "We're going to have to scrape and battle for...

Saturday’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and 19 others has reignited the Capitol Hill debate over the scope of the Second Amendment — an issue that’s been all but dormant in Washington for several years. Yet the liberal push to bolster the nation’s gun laws is running smack into the political reality that the current Congress simply has no appetite for gun reform — even in the wake of an assassination attempt on one of its members. As a result, Capitol Hill gun reformers are instead offering a much more limited proposal in the wake of the Arizona rampage....

“I have a Glock 9 millimeter, and I’m a pretty good shot.” The statement, by Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was made in an interview last year with The New York Times, when tensions were running high in her district. The quip about her ability to defend herself speaks to the passionate gun culture in Arizona that crosses political lines and is notable for its fierceness, even in the West. Indeed, the federal judge who was killed on Saturday in the shootings here, John M. Roll, had his wife and many people who worked with him take lessons at Marksman Pistol Institute,...

She read the First Amendment on the House floor — including the guarantee of “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” — and then flew home to Arizona to put those words into practice. But when Gabrielle Giffords tried to meet with her constituents in a Tucson parking lot on Saturday, she came face to face with an environment wholly at odds with that constitutional ideal, and she nearly paid for it with her life. Jared Loughner, the man accused of shooting Ms. Giffords, killing a federal judge and five other people, and wounding 13 others, appears to be...