† Satellite In My Eyes, Like A Diamond In The Sky: On the first try, a Navy missile intercepted and struck (video link) a school-bus sized spy satellite orbiting 130 miles over the Pacific Ocean, before it re-entered the atmosphere. Military officials have a high degree of confidence” that the fuel tank – which would have survived re-entry and spewed toxic rocket fuel fumes over populated areas – was destroyed, Gen. James E. Cartwright of the Marines, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tells The New York Times. Cartwright said football-sized debris is already falling to Earth; most of it is expected to land in the ocean.

† Hillary’s Campaign Has Been Stiffing Small Businesses Nationwide: Hillary’s spending Other People’s Money like there’s no tomorrow, reports The New York Times:

Nearly $100,000 went for party platters and groceries before the Iowa caucuses, even though the partying mood evaporated quickly. Rooms at the Bellagio luxury hotel in Las Vegas consumed more than $25,000; the Four Seasons, another $5,000. And top consultants collected about $5 million in January, a month of crucial expenses and tough fund-raising.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s latest campaign finance report, published Wednesday night, appeared even to her most stalwart supporters and donors to be a road map of her political and management failings. Several of them, echoing political analysts, expressed concerns that Mrs. Clinton’s spending priorities amounted to costly errors in judgment that have hamstrung her competitiveness against Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

Now, extrapolate Hillary’s errors of judgment in campaign spending to spending on entitlement programs, and money given to her by donors to money taken from you by taxes. Scary, huh?

† Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II: The Washington Post reports on a rebellion by parents in several northern VA counties over a new way to teach math that just doesn’t add up:   

Greg Barlow, an Air Force officer in the defense secretary's office at the Pentagon, was helping his 8-year-old son, Christian, one recent night with a vexing problem: What is 674 plus 249?

The Prince William County [VA]  third-grader did not stack the numbers and carry digits from one column to the next, the way generations have learned. Applying lessons from his school's new math textbook, "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space," Christian tried breaking the problem into easier-to-digest numbers.

But after several seconds, he got stumped. He drew lines connecting digits, and his computation amounted to an upside-down pyramid with numbers at the bottom. His father, in a teacherly tone, nudged him toward the old-fashioned method. "How would you do that another way?" Barlow asked.

The program de-emphasizes memorization and drills and pushes students to use more creative ways to find answers, such as drawing pictures, playing games and using objects.

“Memorization will only carry you so far,” Carol Knight, Prince William's math supervisor, tells the WaPo, adding that, “With 'Investigations,' kids understand the real values of the numbers and are not doing shortcuts. When they multiply 23 times 5, they'll do five 20s to get 100, and then add five 3s to get 15, and they put that all together and get 115. What they've done is made actual use of the numbers.”

But this approach has zero credibility with a group of parents who submitted a petition to the Prince William school board with 1,000 names to get rid of the program, and have even launched a Web site to support their cause. Engineer Steve Santee and his wife, a former math teacher, are prepared to teach their first-grade daughter, Olivia, math “all the way up to calculus” if the curriculum is not changed.

† Why Middle Class Americans Can’t Afford Health Insurance: Part II: A New York Times editorial explains why NY Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo and the American Medical Association are suing UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Ingenix over how “reasonable and customary” rates are set when a patient is treated by a doctor outside a health insurance company’s network:

When patients visit an out-of-network doctor, insurers typically agree to pay 80 percent of the reasonable and customary rate charged by doctors in the same geographic area. The patient is stuck with the rest, and as any patient knows, that rate always seems to fall short of what their own doctor is charging. …

The numbers are mainly compiled by an obscure company known as Ingenix, which … collects billing information from UnitedHealth and other health care payers to compile a database that is then used by the insurers to determine out-of-network reimbursement rates.

This system is an invitation for abuse. UnitedHealth owns the company whose database will affect its costs and profitability, so both have a strong financial interest in keeping reimbursement rates low. …

Mr. Cuomo and the American Medical Association, which has a long-standing suit filed against Ingenix and various UnitedHealth companies, claim that the data is manipulated. …

The attorney general’s investigators did their own survey and concluded that $200 is the fair market rate in New York City and Nassau County for a 15-minute consultation with a doctor for an illness of low to moderate severity. Ingenix, the investigators said, calculated the rate as $77, of which United would pay $62, leaving the patient to pay $138. UnitedHealth disputes those numbers, so the attorney general will need to offer a fuller explanation of how they were derived.

Cuomo has subpoenaed 16 other health insurers to investigate their practices.

† What Freedom Of Speech Means To Muslims:  In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Flemming Rose, culture editor of Jyllands-Posten – the Danish newspaper that published the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 that sparked murderous rioting by Muslims across Europe and the Middle East – explains why democratic societies must not intimidated by “tyrants and fanatics” to relinquish their free speech rights:

For the past three months [Kurt] Westergaard and his wife have been on the run. Mr. Westergaard did the most famous of the 12 Muhammad cartoons … the one depicting the prophet with a bomb in his turban. The cartoon was a satirical comment on the fact that some Muslims are committing terrorist acts in the name of Islam and the prophet. Tragically, Mr. Westergaard's fate has proven the point of his cartoon: In the early hours of Tuesday morning Danish police arrested three men who allegedly had been plotting to kill him. …

Sadly, the plot to kill Mr. Westergaard is … part of a broader trend that risks undermining free speech in Europe and around the world. … In Oslo a gallery has censored three small watercolor paintings, showing the head of the prophet Muhammad on a dog's body, by the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has been under police protection since the fall of 2007. In Holland the municipal museum in The Hague recently refused to show photos by the Iranian-born artist Sooreh Hera of gay men wearing the masks of the prophet Muhammad and his son Ali … In Afghanistan the 23-year-old Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh has been sentenced to death because he distributed "blasphemous" material about the mistreatment of women in Islam. …

Unfortunately, misplaced sensitivity is being used by tyrants and fanatics to justify murder and silence criticism. Right now the Organization of Islamic Countries is conducting a successful campaign at the United Nations to rewrite international human-rights standards to curtail the right to free speech. Last year the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a resolution against "defamation of religion," calling on governments around the world to clamp down on cartoonists, writers, journalists, artists and dissidents who dare to speak up. …

We need a global movement to fight blasphemy and other insult laws, and the European Union should lead the way by removing them. Europe should make it clear that democracies will protect their citizens if they say something that triggers threats and intimidation.