Archive for January 20th, 2011
1993 Patricia Krenwinkel Parole Hearing – Patti Tate takes the floor, opposing to the parole and speaking up for all the victims, specifically, her sister Sharon and Abigail Folger.
Patricia Krenwinkel should spend the rest of her life in prison. The California Parole Board concurs at least for another seven years.
In a decision suggesting that the brutal Sharon Tate murders are unforgivable, a parole board panel refused to consider releasing Patricia Krenwinkel, who told the board she killed for the love of Charles Manson.
The two-member panel made clear Thursday that it was the horror of the killings, one of the most notorious of the 20th century, that led them to reject the bid for parole in spite of Krenwinkel’s efforts to change her life.
They said that the murders of seven people in an extremely atrocious manner had impacted the entire world as evidenced by letters which came in from around the globe urging that she be kept behind bars.
“These crimes remain relevant,” said parole commissioner Susan Melanson. “The public is in fear.”
Melanson and Deputy Commissioner Steven Hernandez issued their decision after a four-hour hearing and more than an hour of deliberations at which Krenwinkel wept, apologized for her murderous deeds and said she was ashamed of her actions.
Members of victims’ families also cried and recalled their suffering after the murders and called for her to be kept behind bars. Melanson said the notoriety of the crimes and their viciousness weighed heavily in the decision.
Cult leader Manson, now 75, refused to appear at his most recent parole hearings where he was denied a release date. His multiple disciplinary violations and refusals to participate in rehabilitation activities make it likely that he will never be released.
At times he has said that he does not want his freedom and considers prison his home.
Krenwinkel, who has been imprisoned longer than any other woman in California, told the parole board earlier Thursday that she threw away everything good in herself and became a “monster” after she met Manson.
Krenwinkel, 63, one of Manson’s two surviving female followers, has maintained a clean prison record in her four decades behind bars, but her chances for release appeared slim following parole rejections in other Manson cases.
Krenwinkel was convicted along with Manson and two other female followers in seven 1969 murders, considered among the most notorious crimes of the 20th century.
Leslie Van Houten is the youngest of the Manson followers at 61 and is considered the only likely one to ever be released from prison. She was denied parole last summer.
The two-member parole board said after a Thursday hearing in Los Angeles that the 63-year-old Krenwinkel will not be eligible for parole again for seven years, the longest such period handed down to any of the Manson Family convicts.
The panel said they were swayed by the memory and of the crimes, along with 80 letters which came from all over the world urging Krenwinkel’s continued incarceration.
As far as I am concerned, Krenwinkel can rot in prison and should be thankful that she was NOT duly executed decades ago.
Tags: Patricia_Krenwinkel
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When Sarah Palin encounters a P.R. problem, she often takes to Twitter or Facebook, as she did to thudding effect last week following allegations that her gun-heavy rhetoric might have encouraged the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. But this time, Palin's first response came via a less familiar source: An aide, Rebecca Mansour, defended her boss on conservative pundit Tammy Bruce's podcast the day after the shooting. It was the third time Bruce has recently figured into the Palin storyline: This fall, Mansour appeared on Bruce's show to respond to an unflattering Vanity Fair profile of Palin.
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Read it all.
Having met Tammy, I find her an interesting and intelligent pundit
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James Taranto answers the question in his excellent piece on Sarah Palin in the Wall Street Journal.
Why does their hatred of her burn so hot?
Ask them, and they’ll most likely tell you: Because she’s a moron. But that is obviously false. To be sure, her skills at extemporaneous speaking leave much to be desired….
Professional jealousy and intellectual snobbery, however, only scratch the surface of the left’s bizarre attitude toward Palin. They explain the intensity of the disdain, but not the outright hatred–not why some people whose grasp of reality is sufficient to function in society made the insane inference that she was to blame for a madman’s attempt to murder Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
This unhinged hatred of Palin comes mostly from women.
Read all of the rest here.
I have to say the most vituperative comments I have heard about Sarah Palin DO come from women 25-50 – Republicans and Democrats alike
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Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee
I guess Mike Huckabee is keeping his irons in the fire, should Sarah Palin decide not to run for President in 2012. But, the evidence against a Presidential run for Huckabee is apparent.
Mike Huckabee will visit six cities in Iowa and five in South Carolina during his upcoming book tour – one more sign that the former Arkansas governor wants to keep his name in the presidential mix for 2012 even as he enjoys the comforts of a lucrative talk show career.
The tour to promote his new book, “A Simple Government,” kicks off in Davenport, Iowa on February 27 and will take him to five more cities in the first-in-the-nation caucus state over two days: Dubuque, Waterloo, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and Des Moines.
Huckabee will then travel through other states in the Midwest and south before heading to South Carolina for a two-day, five-city swing beginning on March 7. He’ll sign books in Florence, Columbia, Anderson, Greenville and Spartanburg.
That means Huckabee will be spending more than a quarter of his 40-city tour in two states that play a major role in determining who the GOP presidential nominee will be in 2012.
As I have said, the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination is Sarah Palin’s for the taking. But, should she not run, Mike Huckabee would be available as an alternative to Mitt Romney.
Plus, Huckabee gets to make some coin by selling books, while the pundits speculate on whether he will run for President.
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The story quotes Andy Davis, political director for Palin’s Sarah PAC, as saying, “The idea that we’re not in Iowa is inaccurate.”
But Davis told The Des Moines Register today that his point was to correct the perception that Palin’s advisers have not been in communication with activists in the leadoff presidential caucus state.
“We’re doing the things we need to do to help her if she decides to go,” Davis said.
Davis has kept in touch with Iowa supporters throughout the last several months, going back to before she headlined the Iowa Republican Party’s fall fundraiser in September.
But Davis said he is not executing a plan that involves talking with potential staff for the caucuses, which other prospects have begun doing.
Why are Palin aides doing this, if Sarah has no plans to run?
Answer: Freeze out Mike Pence, Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels while Sarah considers whether she wants to run or not.
Sarah Palin at last September’s Iowa Ronald Reagan Dinner
Looks like Sarah Palin is IN and Mike Huckabee is OUT for a 2012 GOP Presidential race.
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has tasked her aides with quietly gauging her level of support for a potential presidential campaign by making inquiries to a select pool of likely allies and grassroots activists in Iowa, RealClearPolitics has learned.
Key Republican officials and operatives in the nation’s first voting state had begun to assume that Palin would not run for president in 2012 since most of them have not heard a word from her or from her small circle of aides, even as other likely candidates have begun jockeying more forcefully behind the scenes. But a Palin adviser confirmed that although the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee’s footprint has not been as heavy as that of other possible candidates, her political action committee has indeed been taking discreet steps in Iowa that would help her build a credible campaign here if she decided to launch one.
“The idea that we’re not in Iowa is inaccurate,” SarahPAC adviser Andy Davis told RealClearPolitics.
But, the fact is Sarah Palin HAS been in Iowa and is going to Nevada, an early GOP Presidential Caucus state.
Palin has said she may run and that she thinks she can beat President Obama.
And, why not run?
The GOP Presidential nomination is Sarah’s – if she wants it.
The ONLY question will be: Can Sarah Palin BEAT Barack Obama?
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A group of immigrant day laborers stand near a street corner waiting for work in the Staten Island borough of New York August 3, 2010
And, most of the immigrants were illegal aliens to boot.
Over the past two years, as U.S. unemployment remained near double-digit levels and the economy shed jobs in the wake of the financial crisis, over a million foreign-born arrivals to America found work, many illegally.
Those are among the findings of a review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau data conducted exclusively for Reuters by researchers at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.
Often young and unskilled or semi-skilled, immigrants have taken jobs Americans could do in areas like construction, willing to work for less wages. Others land jobs that unemployed Americans turn up their noses at or lack the skills to do.
With a national unemployment rate of 9.4 percent, domestic job creation is at the top of President Barack Obama’s agenda and such findings could add to calls to tighten up on illegal immigration. But much of it is Hispanic and the growing Latino vote is a key base for Obama’s Democratic Party.
Many of the new arrivals, according to employers, brought with them skills required of the building trade and found work in sectors such as construction, where jobless rates are high.
“Employers have chosen to use new immigrants over native-born workers and have continued to displace large numbers of blue-collar workers and young adults without college degrees,” said Andrew Sum, the director of the Center for Labor Market Studies.
“One of the advantages of hiring, particularly young, undocumented immigrants, is the fact that employers do not have to pay health benefits or basic payroll taxes,” said Sum.
From 2008 to 2010, 1.1 million new migrants who have entered America since 2008 landed jobs, even as U.S. household employment declined by 6.26 million over that same period.
These facts are something that will need to be addressed by my Congressman Elton Gallegly as he takes over the House Immigration Subcommittee.
Americans are out of work, illegal immigrations are displacing them in the work force because they work cheaper, and the immigration laws are not enforced while thousands of folks continue to come across the boader from Mexico.
Immigration will be a Congressional issue in 2011 and in the Presidential campaign in 2012.
Tags: Elton_Gallegly, Illegal Immigration
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Danish Muhammad Cartoonist Kurt Westergaard
The Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard testified in the trial of Mohamed Geele today.
Testifying in a terrorism trial, Kurt Westergaard said he feared he would be “slaughtered” by the 29-year-old intruder who stormed into the house on New Year’s Day, 2010.
“He was like a religious, insane young man. I believed he entered the house as a holy warrior who wanted to kill an infidel,” Westergaard told the court in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city.
Westergaard locked himself inside a panic room and escaped the attack unharmed.
The defendant, who cannot be named under a court order, told the court as the trial opened Wednesday that he just wanted to scare the cartoonist and didn’t intend to hurt him.
Westergaard said that was untrue, calling the defendant a “madman” as well as a “cowardly liar.”
Yeah, this moron enters someone’s home wielding an axe, hurls it at a police officer and it is presumed he just wants to scare the occupant.
A verdict in this trial is expected in early February.
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Tags: Kurt_Westergaard
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