† Hospitals Sending Uninsured Illegals Back Where They Came From: After footing the $1.5 million in treatment for his brain injuries over a three-year period, in July 2003, Martin Memorial Medical Center in Stuart, FL, bundled Luis Jimenez, an illegal immigrant, onto a chartered jet and repatriated him back to Guatemala. His cousin and legal guardian, Montejo Gaspar, is now suing the hospital for taking it upon itself to deport Jimenez, reports The Associated Press:

 

Underlying the dispute is the broader question of what do Americans expect a hospital to do with a patient who requires long-term care, is unable to pay and doesn't qualify for federal or state aid because of his immigration status.

 

Health care and immigration experts across the country are watching the case, which could set precedent in Florida and possibly beyond. Lawyers for Jimenez said this appears to be the first time a lawsuit has been filed in such a case. …

 

The case also raises the question of whether a hospital and a state court should be deciding whether to deport someone - a power long held by the federal government. …

 

Hospitals are already struggling under the staggering costs of treating the nation's roughly 47 million uninsured. Illegal immigrants make up an estimated 15 percent of this group, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

 

The issues being hashed out in this case have not been addressed  by any of the healthcare “reform” bills being drafted by various Congressional committees.

 

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: With funerals costing $6,000 on average, not counting costs of cremation or burial, Americans are increasingly opting for home funerals, reports The New York Times:

 

Advocates say the number of home funerals, where everything from caring for the dead to the visiting hours to the building of the coffin is done at home, has soared in the last five years, putting the funerals “where home births were 30 years ago,” according to Chuck Lakin, a home funeral proponent and coffin builder in Waterville, Me.

 

The cost savings can be substantial, all the more important in an economic downturn.  …

 

More people are inquiring about the lower-cost options, said Joshua Slocum, director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit watchdog group. “Home funerals aren’t for everybody, but if there’s not enough money to pay the mortgage, there certainly isn’t enough money to pay for a funeral,” Mr. Slocum said.

 

Instead of a low-cost option for fancy funerals, some are looking for a no-cost option, reports the Los Angeles Times: 

 

The poor economy is taking a toll even on the dead, with an increasing number of bodies in Los Angeles County going unclaimed by families who cannot afford to bury or cremate their loved ones.

At the county coroner's office - which handles homicides and other suspicious deaths - 36% more cremations were done at taxpayers' expense in the last fiscal year over the previous year, from 525 to 712.

The county morgue, which is responsible for the indigent and others who go unclaimed, saw a 25% increase in cremations in the first half of this year over the same period a year ago, rising to 680 from 545.

The demands on the county crematorium have been so high that earlier this year, officials there stopped accepting bodies from the coroner. The coroner's office since has contracted with two private crematories for $135,000 to handle the overflow. …

Once the county cremates an unclaimed body - typically about a month after death - next of kin can pay the coroner $352 to receive the ashes. The fee for claiming ashes from the morgue is $466. …

For the dead left to the county, officials attempt to recover cremation costs from the estates. But the county does not require relatives to prove they are too poor to pay. ... If records later show a family could have paid to claim a body, by law the county can recover the cost.

Ashes unclaimed after two years are buried in a mass grave in a potter’s field.

† See Something, Say Something, Get Sued By CAIR: In the “flying imams” discrimination suit, U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery ruled that a 2007 shield law passed by Congress that provides legal immunity to citizens who report suspected terrorist activities does not apply to law enforcement officers, reports The Associated Press:

 

The imams, who were handcuffed and questioned, sued [US Airways], several airport police officers and an FBI agent on several grounds, including discrimination and false arrest. Passengers who had complained about the imams' behavior were dropped from the lawsuit after Congress passed the shield law.

 

The FBI agent argued that he also was protected under that law because he believed he had taken "reasonable action in good faith" in response to the report of suspicious activity.

 

But Montgomery concluded that Congress put nothing in the law to change the "traditional qualified immunity principles" that apply to law enforcement officers. And while airport police had disputed that the imams were ever arrested, Montgomery concluded they were.

 

"The right not to be arrested in the absence of probable cause is clearly established and ... no reasonable officer could have believed that the arrest of plaintiffs was proper," the judge wrote.

 

 

† Mirror, Mirror On The Wall: Who’s The Corruptest Of Them All?: On the heels of an FBI and IRS dragnet that resulted in 44 arrests of “three mayors, a state assemblyman … and even someone identified as the chief rabbi of the Syrian Sephardic Jews in Brooklyn,” The Christian Science Monitor reports, “Move over Illinois and Louisiana. New Jersey is vying to be the most corrupt state in the nation":

 

The arrests are part of a 10-year investigation called Operation Bid Rig, which has already resulted in the arrest of 48 other officials. In the latest round, the FBI used a "confidential witness" who, among other activities, is alleged to have offered officials bribes to move his development projects to the top of the pile.

 

The arrests prompted federal law enforcement agents to call the state one of the most corrupt, if not the most corrupt, in the nation. …

 

Political commentator Larry Sabato, who has written two books about New Jersey's corruption, says part of the blame lies with the residents.

 

"It could never have survived or gone as deep without a wink or a nod from the voters," says Mr. Sabato, a professor at the University of Virginia. "They have not punished the people they should have punished."

 

But, he says, the state is also at fault for allowing public officials to hold multiple public offices at the same time. "You can be a state assemblyman, a mayor, and freeholder [comparable to a county commissioner] all at once," he explains. "It gives them multiple salaries but it leads to corruption."

 

If convicted, these miscreants may respond to the perennial “What exit are you from?” query by answering either “Exit 7” or “Exit 12.”

 

† Restorative Capital Punishment (second item): There are two schools of thought regarding the death penalty. Capital trials put families of murder victims through years of attending court hearings and hearing the horrific details of a loved one’s brutal murders are recited over and over again until a conviction is obtained and all appeals have been exhausted. Some see the drawn-out process as needlessly adding to a family’s suffering, while others believe that when the death penalty imposed families get a sense of finality, if not closure, reports The Associated Press:

 

At 52, Dr. William Petit faces years - perhaps decades - of emotionally draining court hearings before the two men charged with murdering his family in a 2007 home invasion may be convicted and executed. …

 

Petit, a prominent physician who was beaten during the ordeal, will sit feet away from the defendants as they assert their rights and file appeal after appeal.

 

As lawmakers weigh the future of the death penalty in some states, officials are giving greater weight to the effect of prolonged death penalty cases on victims' families. Petit realizes that the case might drag on for years, but he remains committed to seeing defendants Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky put to death.

 

Defense attorneys said this week in court that their offer to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison could have ended it all. But they said prosecutors refused because they want to win death sentences.

 

A trial could begin in January.

 

Petit countered that an attorney for Hayes was trying to shift blame to him and prosecutors for not accepting a plea bargain, "when it was his client who helped kill three innocent people." …

 

The Rev. Cathy Harrington's daughter, Leslie Ann Mazzara, was killed in 2004 in California. A 2007 plea agreement was reached in which her convicted killer, Eric Copple, got life in prison.

 

"I could see us exhaling," Harrington said of her family at the sentencing. "I hadn't realized how tense we were. I didn't have any room to really grieve properly. I was so busy trying to get through this, never knowing when the phone rang who it was going to be." …

 

"I'm so busy. I'm tired, but I feel like I can maybe start to live my life now," Harrington said.

 

She said Petit has the right to favor the death penalty in his case.

 

Rather than abolishing the death penalty on the pretext of saving families from further suffering, the same goal can be accomplished by limiting the number of appeals to speed up the process from the time a conviction is obtained until the sentence is carried out. No family should have to endure decades of trials, appeals and stays of executions until justice is done.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race): Henry Louis Gates Jr. wants to “move on” from his arrest by Sgt. James Crowley and is “hoping to use the encounter to improve fairness in the criminal justice system,” because “in the end, this is not about me at all,” reports The Associated Press:

 

In an e-mail to the Boston Globe late Friday, he said: "It is time for all of us to move on, and to assess what we can learn from this experience."

 

In a statement to The Associated Press, Gates promised to do all he could so others could learn from his arrest.

 

"This could and should be a profound teaching moment in the history of race relations in America," Gates said. "I sincerely hope that the Cambridge police department will choose to work with me toward that goal."

 

The Stiletto disagrees. It’s about Gates, and only Gates, and – this time, at least - not about the criminal justice system. It’s about his pompousness, his arrogance, his lack of common sense and his staggering sense of entitlement. Most of all, it’s about nuking people with accusations like “racial profiling” and “racist.” FOX News analyst Juan Williams comes down hard on both President Barack Hussein Obama and Gates during the “FOX News Sunday” panel discussion (3:45 into the video clip):

 

[Obama’s] going to have to walk it back some way. Obviously this is politically damaging to him … The issue is going to continue to boil … overwhelmingly there’s been a negative response. … About a third of black Americans think he didn’t handle this well, and that’s surprising because … there’s a lot of tension between black men and police.

 

In this situation the president spoke without the facts. You can’t have a teachable moment if it’s based on a lie. [T]he president … spoke about things like racial profiling … but this is not about racial profiling. … Gates, according to the police report, begins to berate the officer, make demands on the officer, talk about his mother, ask “Do you know who I am? You don’t know who you’re dealing with.” …  The president says Gates was pulled from his house. In fact, Gates pursued the officer.  

 

Is this an instance of a poor black kid being treated badly by a cop? … No, I don’t think so at all. And the president wasn’t aware of any of this when he spoke about it.

 

Conservative columnist Andrew Breitbart thinks it’s rather fortuitous that Attorney General Eric Holder’s urging a national dialogue on race involves Crowley “as the representative of the Caucasian-American side of this difficult and much-needed historic debate”:

 

Poetry was at work as the archetypal racist white cop who, according to the admittedly fact-challenged president, "stupidly" arrested his "friend." …

 

Sgt. Crowley, as it happens, is the Cambridge police force's hand-picked racial profiling expert and was selected by a former black police commissioner. …

 

We're finally talking, Mr. Holder and Mr. Obama. Why stop now? …

 

As is expected from professional race baiters, Mr. Gates instigated a public brouhaha over race. And Mr. Obama, a man who attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's racist sermons for 20 years, used the bully pulpit to grant his friend a national platform to condemn a man for doing his job. …

 

Whether he likes it or not, Sgt. Crowley is a potent symbol of how the union has managed to become more perfect, a Rosa Parks of rush-to-judgment "reverse racism."

 

Now that the facts of the case show that his friend the professor was the man doing the racial profiling, the president wants to end the discussion.

 

Now we see what the attorney general meant when he spoke of cowards.

 

The “teachable moment” will occur when the 9-1-1 tapes of the neighbor’s call and the radio transmissions from Crowley at the scene are publically released, and people learn how not to comport yourself when police are investigating a possible crime in progress. Sure Gates wants to move on, because he knows he acted like a complete ass. Now that we have elected a biracial president, Americans will no longer tolerate race-baiters simply scuttling away after hurling career-killing accusations of racism. This isn’t over until Gates’ charges are unambiguously proved, or Crowley’s good name and reputation are completely cleared.

Update: The Cambridge Police Department released the audio tape of the 9-1-1 call by Lucia Whalen, who told the dispatcher she was not certain of the race of the two men breaking in the door of Gates’ home - meaning police did not have any preconceived scenarios in mind as they pulled up to the home. In a conversation with the Cambridge dispatch center, Crowley calmly says he's "with a gentleman who says he resides here [but] is rather uncooperative" and asks for back-up, reports The Christian Science Monitor. The paper also quotes from Cornell University Law School professor William Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection blog: "We need to get to the truth of what happened in order to learn from this incident. We need a winner and a loser, based on the evidence of what actually happened. No one truly can move on, and we can't just all get along, until then." Perhaps alone amongst Americans, Gates and Obama seem to disagree with Jacobson, and are trying to shove the genie into the beer bottle. But the truth will out, as more details from Crowley's radio transmissions and affidavits from the other officers at the scene are made public.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (Deconstructing Obama’s Cairo Speech): For the women of Iran, politics is personal, reports The Washington Times:

 

Women have played an unprecedented role in Iran's postelection demonstrations, showing that the movement has strong grass-roots support that extends beyond the country's male-dominated politics and can help maintain the protests' momentum.

 

Although women have been active in street politics in Iran in the past, they have been seen by the thousands in recent weeks demonstrating, arguing with police and encouraging men to protest the disputed results of the June 12 presidential election.

 

Their participation reflects women's gains in society during the past 30 years as well as the grievances many hold against the Islamic republic.

 

"They protest alongside men, not behind them, and not in a segregated manner," said Nayereh Tohidi, chairwoman of the Gender and Women's Studies Department at California State University at Northridge, who was participating in a panel discussion July 13 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. …

 

"Women from all walks of life were active in Mousavi's election campaign because he promised reform and, along with his wife, raised their hopes for a major change in laws affecting women's rights," said Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American who directs the Middle East program at the Wilson Center.

 

"When the elections were stolen, women felt betrayed.

 

One young woman tells the paper: “[T]he world had the wrong idea about Iranian women. We don't sit in the corner and wait for the men to make change.”

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, (Judge: Veils Not Allowed In My Courtroom): After Lisa Valentine was arrested for contempt of court in December 2008 for refusing to remove her hijab at a courtroom in Douglasville, GA, the Judicial Council of Georgia voted unanimously to change its policies and allow religious and medical headgear into Georgia courtrooms, reports The Associated Press:

 

Muslim rights activists were infuriated by the incident, pressing the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the incident and organizing a protest. …

 

Debate over religious headscarves in public places has become common, said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

 

He said the group is also fighting an Oregon proposal that he said reinforces a rule banning public school teachers from wearing religious headgear.

 

The Michigan Supreme Court decided last week to give judges discretion in controlling the appearance of witnesses on the stand, after a judge told a Muslim woman she needed to remove her face covering, or niqab, so he could determine whether she was telling the truth.

 

In explaining why the Judicial Council caved to CAIR’s pressure, Supreme Court Chief Justice Carol Hunstein, said: "If this had been a nun, no one would have required her to remove her habit."

 

Yeah, well, when was the last time a nun hid explosives in her habit to carry out a suicide bombing? Come to think of it, when was the last time you saw a nun in a habit?