The CHIME Charter Elementary School in Woodland Hills today was renamed in honor of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Part of the CHIME Institute, the Arnold Schwarzenegger Elementary School “implements a co-teaching model where general and special education teachers provide curriculum and learning experiences that meet the needs of all students,” according to a news release. It was named “Charter School of the Year” by the California Charter Schools Association in 2005, and in the same year was recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a leading model of inclusive education. Last year, the school hosted visitors from across the country and the world including from New York, Rhode Island, Korea, Japan, Australia and Scotland.
“I am honored to have a high-quality institution like CHIME Charter Elementary named in my honor. The CHIME Institute shares my commitment to educating all children,” the governor said in his release.
UPDATE @ 2:10 P.M. MONDAY: I almost forgot: today’s the governor’s 60th birthday!!! Maybe the CHIME kids will throw him a pizza party.
Three of the five health care policy advisors named today by Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani are from the Bay Area.
Daniel Kessler is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on economics, public policy, and the health care industry. Among his recent publications are, with Mark McClellan, “The Effect of Hospital Ownership on Medical Productivity” and “Designing Hospital Antitrust Policy to Promote Social Welfare.” He is also a co-author of “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System.” He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.
Dr. Scott Atlas is a senior fellow by courtesy at the Hoover Institution and a professor of radiology and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical School. His research includes free market solutions to health care and looking at the effects of technology-based innovations in medicine. Earlier, Atlas was on the faculty of the University of California at San Francisco, the University of Pennsylvania, and Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. Among his recent publications are “Relationship between HMO Market Share and the Diffusion and Use of Advanced MRI Technologies,” and “Power to the Patient: Selected Health Care Issues and Policy Solutions.” Atlas has been named by his peers in The Best Doctors in America every year since its initial publication, The Best Doctors in New York, Silicon Valley’s Best Doctors, and Top 500 Doctors in the Bay Area. He holds a B.S. in biology from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and an M.D. from the University of Chicago School of Medicine.
Sally Pipes is president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, a conservative San Francisco-based think tank founded in 1979. Prior to becoming president in 1991, she was assistant director of the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, Canada. She writes, speaks, and gives invited testimony on health care issues; Hillsdale College published her essay on health care reform in the 2006 edition of Champions of Freedom, part of a volume on “Entrepreneurship and the Spirit of America.” Pipes serves on the Medical Advisory Council of Genworth Capital’s Long-term Care Insurance Division and on the board of advisors of the San Francisco Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society. She was a member of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s transition team in 2003-04. In 2005, Pipes was named one of the Top 10 Women in the Conservative Movement in America as published by Human Events.
The other advisers named today are Dr. David Gratzer, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care;” and Donald Moran of The Moran Company health care research and consulting firm, a former U.S. Office of Management & Budget official under President Ronald Reagan.
Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, just spoke to reporters on a conference call from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, after visiting Iraq as the leader of a six-member bipartisan freshman Congressional delegation.
“It’s given me a lot to think about — I see that they are making some progress in the parts of Iraq that we saw. I look forward to minimizing the amount of violence in Iraq and bringing our soldiers home soon,” he said. “I’m sure that the soldiers are doing the very best they can in a very, very difficult situation. … I’m sure they were careful to show us the regions where they’re having the most success. … I really don’t have an opinion about what’s going on in the rest of Iraq.”
“We need to put a timetable out there, it needs to make sense,” McNerney added — a plan to bring the troops home, so that the Iraqi government is compelled to unite and take over the task of securing the country. “I think we can work to find a way forward that would be bipartisan, that would accomodate the achievements they have had in the last four or five months.”
Arriving in Baghdad on a C-130 from Kuwait, he met first with officials including Gen. David Petraeus, who he said is working very hard and is “very optimistic about what’s happening in the conflict. … He’s concerned about being given enough rope to finish the job here.”
The lawmaker then rode a Blackhawk helicopter to Ramadi in Anbar province, which had been a hotspot for the insurgency, where he met with other high-ranking officers, saw local police patrolling the streets, and walked through the marketplace with a military escort. “They’re very proud of the work they’ve done in Ramadi and overall in the Anbar province,” he said. “The Sunni population has realized that al-Qaida is much less favorable to their day to day lives than what we’re offering them.”
After returning to Baghdad, he dined with six California soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division — some of whom were on their third tours of duty in Iraq — and also left the Green Zone to meet with the commanding general of all Iraqi forces. “He has the right words, he knows we’re concerned about their relationship with the different sects and about the sectarian violence.”
The delegation left Baghdad late last night and arrived early this morning in Germany, where members met with wounded soliders — some of whom said they wished they could return to Iraq, others who were too injured badly to speak.
Local residents and members of Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) will gather to publicly protest California’s prison-expansion plan from 2 to 4 p.m. this Sunday in the Mosswood Park Amphitheatre, at Broadway and MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland. On tap: 53,000 paper dolls and a load of ice cream.
“I Scream (Ice Cream) Against Prison Expansion” will bring together local performers, youth, and other residents to continue work started in Los Angeles earlier this month to create 53,000 paper dolls to signify the 53,000 new prison and jail cells planned under a deal struck between lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Two federal judges this week ordered the creation of a three-judge panel to consider placing a cap on the state’s prison population, basically rejecting the state’s claim that the prison-expansion deal will solve the state’s overcrowding problem.
The House Armed Services Committee today voted 32-25, with two members voting “present,” to approve Rep. Ellen Tauscher’s bill to set minimum recuperation periods between deployments for troops serving in Iraq, clearing the way for a House floor vote next week.
H.R. 3159, which Tauscher, D-Alamo, introduced just this week, is the House version of an amendment (S.2012) offered earlier this month by U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., requiring that if a unit or member of a regular Armed Forces component deploys to Iraq, they will have the same time at home before they are redeployed. National Guard and Reserve troops couldn’t be redeployed to Iraq or Afghanistan for at least three years after their previous deployment. Tauscher chairs the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee.
“The Bush administration’s current strategy of multiple back-to-back deployments has stretched our military and is breaking our all-volunteer force. If we fail to act we do so at the expense of our military readiness. We need a posture that allows units adequate dwell time to recover, train and equip before their next assignment. If we do not fix this problem immediately, we will suffer massive recruitment and retention problems in the near future,” Tauscher said in a news release.
Also marked up by the committee today was H.R. 3087, of which Tauscher is an original co-sponsor, requiring the President within 60 days to send Congress a comprehensive strategy for redeployment of troops out of Iraq. This bill notes Congress’ original authorization for the war no longer has any resemblance to the current military mission in Iraq. Apparently far less contentious, this bill was passed by the committee on a 55-2 vote.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who recently called for a series of meetings with world leaders to begin discussion on a global climate change solution, will meet with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tomorrow and tour a San Jose business that’s developing greenhouse-gas emission reduction technology.
“The Secretary-General has made climate change one of his top priorities at the U.N. and has taken swift action, calling for world leaders to work together to develop a global consensus on fighting global climate change,” Schwarzenegger said in a news release. “A critical part of the global solution must address the needs of fast-growing economies like China and India and we have innovative technologies to make that happen right here in California. I am eager to show the Secretary-General our state’s advancements in technology that may help to reduce emissions and hope we can work with the United Nations on their commitment to building a global solution.”
UC Berkeley research has shown that in 2006, California received more than $1.1 billion in cleantech investment, about 44 percent of the U.S. total. Of that, Silicon Valley received about 60 percent. California also led the way in cleantech venture investments in 2006, bringing in a total of $1.1 billion, a 127 percent increase from the 2005 total. And the five most active global investors in clean technology all operate out of California: Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Khosla Ventures, Nth Power, Rockport Capital Partners and DFJ Element.
“California’s green industry is on the cutting edge of the technologies that may assist these countries in reducing their environmental impact, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to promote this,” the governor said.
The House Financial Services Committee today unanimously approved Rep. Barbara Lee’s bill to bar international companies whose business in Sudan supports the genocide in Darfur from receiving taxpayer-funded federal contracts. The bill is now scheduled for a floor vote next Monday.
“No one should have to worry that they are supporting genocide, whether it’s through their tax dollars or their pension fund,” Lee, D-Oakland, said in a release. “This bill is designed to wash the blood off of our federal contracts, protect the rights of states to divest their own public pension funds from companies doing business in Sudan and increase the financial pressure on Khartoum to end the genocide in Darfur.”
This is Lee’s third Darfur bill to reach a floor vote this year. The House in April voted 425-1 for her resolution urging the Arab League to acknowledge and step up its efforts to end the genocide. (The one dissenter was Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, R-Texas, who never votes for legislation unless it’s expressly authorized by the Constitution.) And the House in June voted 410-0 for her resolution urging China “to use its unique influence and economic leverage” to influence the Khartoum regime. Both those earlier bills are now pending in the U.S. Senate.
The House this afternoon voted 388-39 for a bipartisan amendment introduced by Reps. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose; Linda Sánchez, D-Lakewood; and David Dreier, R-San Dimas, to increase funding for the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) by $55 million to a total of $460 million for FY 2008.
SCAAP is the federal government’s reimbursement to state and local governments for the costs of incarcerating undocumented criminal aliens. California usually gets about 40 percent of the allocation.
“Many states, including California, have come to rely on SCAAP funding to help them absorb the costs of incarcerating undocumented alien criminals,” Lofgren said in a news release. “Immigration policy is an inherently federal responsibility, and the federal government should do all it can to ensure that our state and local governments are not unduly burdened by its actions. Increasing SCAAP funding is a common sense response to what has become a funding problem at the state and local level. $55 million will have a real and direct positive impact on state and local governments.”
The program began in 1994 but the Bush Administration for years has been proposing to defund SCAAP completely, including no money at all for the program in its budget proposal; each year Congress adds some money back in. Congress approved $250 million for it in 2003; $296.8 million for 2004; $301 million for 2005; $405 million for 2006; and $405 million for 2007. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plus 16 other governors in May had asked Congress to provide $950 million for SCAAP in Fiscal Year 2008.
The full House Armed Services Committee is scheduled to hear testimony at 9 a.m. EDT Thursday on “Upholding the Principle of Habeas Corpus for Detainees.” Committee member Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo, is preparing to ask pointed questions, her staff says.
