Tea Party darling Cruz wins primary

(AP) AUSTIN, Texas - Tea Party darling Ted Cruz convincingly defeated the Republican establishment favorite, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, in Texas' runoff election Tuesday, capturing the GOP nomination to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison as fiercely conservative voters shook one of America's reddest states to its political core.

The race had been closely watched nationally as one of the nation's most-vivid contrasts between the GOP mainstream and grassroots, conservative activists. But as results began to pour in, it turned out to be no contest. Cruz grabbed early leads in key cities around the state where Dewhurst had once enjoyed stronger name recognition, fundraising and political organization just weeks earlier.

Overseeing the state Senate from the powerful lieutenant governor's post since 2003, Dewhurst was long considered a slam dunk in his race with Cruz, the former state solicitor general and son of a Cuban immigrant. Dewhurst had the endorsement of much of Texas' Republican mainstream, including Gov. Rick Perry, who despite his failed run for president was still widely popular back home. He also had a $200 million personal fortune he could dip into at will and did, loaning his Senate campaign at least $24.5 million.

But Cruz has a fiery stage presence that made Tea Party supporters across the state swoon, and received millions from national, conservative organizations which targeted Dewhurst as too moderate. Even though the lieutenant governor oversaw some of the most-conservative state legislative sessions in Texas history and helped speed the passage of laws requiring women to undergo a sonogram before having an abortion and voters to show identification at the polls, he also occasionally compromised with Democratic lawmakers to keep the legislative agenda moving.

Meanwhile, former Democratic state Rep. Paul Saddler easily bested perennial candidate Grady Yarbrough to capture his party's nomination and face Cruz in November's general election, but Cruz begins that race the overwhelming favorite.

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Cruz memorized the U.S. Constitution while in high school and successfully painted his opponent as wishy-washy — even though they actually disagree on little, either politically or ideologically.

The 41-year-old Cruz had never run for political office but bolstered his political credentials arguing in front of the state Supreme Court as the longest-serving solicitor general in Texas history.

Cruz's father Rafael is a pastor outside Dallas. He fought with Fidel Castro's rebels in Cuba before Castro took power and eventually embraced communism, and the elder Cruz fled to the U.S. with nothing but $100 sowed into his underwear.

Texas Republicans aren't used to losing: The state has not elected a Democrat statewide since 1994. But Cruz attacked Dewhurst from the right, and the lieutenant governor's campaign had no real answer.

The state primary was pushed back from Super Tuesday to late May due to a legal fight over redistricting maps drawn by the GOP-dominated Legislature. The 66-year-old Dewhurst beat Cruz by 10 percentage points in the primary but fell about 70,000 votes short of the majority needed for an outright win in a nine-Republican field vying for the party's nomination.

Besides Perry and other state GOP big guns, Dewhurst was endorsed by former baseball great Nolan Ryan. Dewhurst also won the endorsements of former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert, who finished third in the Republican primary, and ex-NFL running back and ESPN commentator Craig James, the primary's fourth-place primary finisher.

None of it was enough.

Cruz got millions from national Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations including the Washington-based Club for Growth. He was endorsed by ex-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, radio talk show host Glen Beck, U.S. Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Kentucky's Rand Paul, as well as former GOP presidential hopeful and Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.

At a morning campaign stop in Houston, Cruz said he heard from voters statewide interested in changing what they view as insider-politics in Washington.

"That's the way the democratic process is supposed to work. It's not supposed to be a bunch of guys in a smoky room in Austin picking the next senator," Cruz added.

Just blocks away a few hours later, Dewhurst said, "This is a tough race, but if we remind voters I'm the only true conservative in the race," we can win, Dewhurst said, promising to "turn Washington upside down" if elected.

Natache Reeves, a 42-year-old nurse from the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Grapevine, said she voted for Cruz because he had Palin's support and was less likely to restrict handgun use.

"I love Sarah Palin, and she's backing Ted Cruz," Reeves said. "I pretty much agree with everything that rolls out of her mouth."

But Cruz wasn't for everyone. Frank Martinez of Dallas said despite finding Dewhurst's campaign ads "very mean" he couldn't support Cruz, even though they share Cuban roots.

"I think (Dewhurst) has more experience, and he's not a lawyer. So the ad worked," said Martinez, 54, who is unemployed after a workplace accident two years ago left him disabled.

Cruz has drawn comparisons to Indiana, where state Treasurer Richard Mourdock defeated incumbent Sen. Richard Lugar in the Republican primary. But in Texas, the nation's second-most populous state, a win by a Tea Party-backed candidate is likely to resonate even more.

Wieber bounces back for U.S. team

(CBS/AP) All Jordyn Wieber needed to bounce back from the biggest disappointment of her career was a little pep talk.

Teammate McKayla Maroney was only too happy to provide one.

Thanks to a few kind words from her best friend, Wieber returned to her world-championship form in the women's gymnastics team finals on Tuesday, helping the U.S. to its first gold medal since Atlanta in 1996.

Wieber missed out on the all-around finals after finishing as the third American during qualifying. Coach John Geddert said Wieber was given five minutes to regroup.

She certainly looked rejuvenated in the team finals. Wieber drilled her meet-opening vault and the U.S. rolled. The 17-year-old called her performance "redemption."

Wieber can add a second medal next week in the floor exercise finals.

The Americans lived up to their considerable hype, routing silver medalist Russia and everybody else on their way to their first Olympic title in women's gymnastics since 1996. Their score of 183.596 was a whopping five points ahead of Russia and made their final event, floor exercise, more like a coronation. Romania won the bronze.

The Americans had come into the last two Olympics as world champions, only to leave without a gold. But this team is the strongest, top to bottom, the USA has ever had and the rest of the world never stood a chance. After the U.S. opened with a barrage of booming vaults, everyone else was playing for silver.

"This is the best team all-time," said U.S. coach John Geddert, who is also Jordyn Wieber's personal coach. "Others might disagree. The '96 team might disagree. But this is the best team. Difficulty-wise, consistency wise, this is USA's finest."

Rediscovered Headstones Hold Clues To Calif. Quake

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  Jean McNear Powers stands between the twin headstones for her great-, great-, great-grandparents — pioneer couple Isaac and Polly Sullivan.

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  The headstone for Benjamin Taylor, who died in 1873. Taylor helped drive a wagon train for pioneers who settled in Northern California's Green Valley in 1850. His headstone has been pieced together after being found under a foot of dirt. Caretaker Tony Pires says he hopes to find the missing piece.

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  Tony Pires uses a metal rod to find a grave marker. Decades of growing plants, pecking birds and digging gophers can make things strangely "disappear" in old cemeteries like Gilliam.

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  The repaired headstone for Jonas Turner and his wife, Lewhettie, shows that he was a native of Tennessee and she was a native of Maine. They died just four months apart, in 1860.

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  The partially restored headstone for Thomas C. Potter, who traveled west from Rhode Island, shows that he died on July 21, 1871, at age 25. The inscription reads, "He has gone from the earth, With its pain and care: He is safe in a realm That is bright and fair."

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  Tony Pires (right) inspects a repaired headstone for Mitchell Gilliam (Polly's father) with Jack Boatwright of the U.S. Geological Survey.

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  The repaired headstone for Stephen Dovey notes that he died on July 12, 1870, at age 33.

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  Some of the oldest headstones at the Gilliam Cemetery were broken and buried by two factors: the 1906 earthquake that also hit nearby San Francisco, and plant and animal life that mounded dirt over broken stones.

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  Seismologist Jack Boatwright checks his notes from 2006, when he determined that two-thirds of Gilliam's headstones had very likely been shattered during the 1906 earthquake. Back then, he didn't know that Tony Pires had been resurrecting buried headstones at the cemetery.

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  The Gilliam Cemetery, near Sebastopol, Calif., received its first grave in 1852. Many of its older headstones have disappeared over the years.

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The Gilliam Cemetery, which lies 60 miles north of San Francisco, appears to be gaining residents lately. But it's not only because new people have been interred there. Instead, headstones that wound up being buried a century ago have been found and resurrected.

The cemetery's story begins in 1850, when a wagon train of pioneers left Missouri and settled near what is now Sebastopol, Calif. The Gilliam Cemetery was started in 1852, when Polly Gilliam Sullivan and her husband, Isaac, needed a place to bury their stillborn son.

Many of the town's pioneers rested peacefully in the cemetery until the morning of April 18, 1906. That's when the San Andreas Fault ruptured offshore from San Francisco, picking up speed as it traveled north.

An Analysis, 100 Years Later

U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Jack Boatwright first visited the graveyard in 2006, for the earthquake's centennial. The trip was part of his attempt to create the first digital "ShakeMap" of the quake. He confirmed that some of the strongest shaking happened in this part of Northern California.

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The Gilliam Cemetery, near Sebastopol, Calif., received its first grave in 1852. Many of its older headstones have disappeared over the years.

Cindy Carpien/NPR

The Gilliam Cemetery, near Sebastopol, Calif., received its first grave in 1852. Many of its older headstones have disappeared over the years.

And the evidence is still visible in old graveyards like Gilliam, where Boatwright found 3-foot marble headstones that had been broken in the 1906 quake — including one for pioneer Elizabeth Crowe, who died in 1889. Her grave marker looks as though it was shattered into five pieces.

At the time of his research, Boatwright noted that the quake had fractured as many as two-thirds of the gravestones in this cemetery — as NPR reported in 2006. But back then, Boatwright didn't know that some missing headstones were being found and repaired by caretaker Tony Pires.

More than a decade ago, Pires, 75, volunteered to mow the cemetery's lawn. And over the years, he found partially buried pieces of headstones as he crossed the turf. Eventually, he started trying to piece them together.

So Pires investigated further, using a skinny welding rod or poker to push gently into the ground. Sometimes he'd come upon a hard object, possibly a bottle or a can. "And sometimes," he says with a wide grin, "it's a stone. And that's when I get all excited." Often, the stone would be a long-lost part of a broken headstone.

Despite the powerful earthquake, the ground did not open up and swallow the headstones in 1906. A graveyard has a way of consuming all on its own. And it can actually be quite a lively place, as plant roots grow and birds peck for seeds — both activities loosen the dirt around broken stones.

And then, Pires says, there's the larger culprit. He points to clues all around the graveyard.

"Gopher holes and gopher trails," he says. "The stones fall into the dirt and [the pieces] get buried even more."

When Jack Boatwright was here in 2006, he never imagined the effect gophers would have on his research. "So, any stones Tony has unearthed," he says, "would increase the estimate of ground shaking that I had previously."

Descendants Of California Pioneers

So far, Pires has pieced together and reinstated close to 30 headstones, including those for the pioneer couple who started the cemetery, Isaac Sullivan and his wife, Polly Gilliam Sullivan.

They are the great-, great-, great-grandparents of Jean McNear Powers, who says she used to visit the Gilliam Cemetery with her grandmother. "I ran around and chased gophers," she recalls.

Powers believes about 40 of her relatives are buried in the cemetery. But until Pires started poking around, she didn't know where some of them were.

"It brings me peace and contentment and gratitude, because as I look at the stones, there were so many children," she says. "I have family members, like my daughter, who because of modern medicine are still alive today — and would have been one of those tiny headstones years ago."

Benjamin Taylor is another of Powers' ancestors. He drove the wagon train from Missouri and died in 1873.

"This stone was under a foot of dirt and it's missing one small triangle," Pires says. "I may never find it, but I keep looking, 'cause it's fun."

It's a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. But Pires says he knows he's likely to find something. According to records and family accounts, there are dozens more old markers and headstones missing in the Gilliam Cemetery — presumably buried and waiting to be exhumed and reassembled.