† How To Tell When A “Hate Crime” Has Been Committed: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that the two black students who beat up on a white student on a school bus were charged with felony aggravated battery, and that assistant state's attorney William Clay told the court that the first attacker “lost control” and “was going to beat that victim until he was tired” and that the second attacker “flashed apparent gang signs after the beating.”

† Depends What The Meaning Of The Word “Liar” Is: In a National Review Online op-ed Republican media consultant Alex Castellanos argues that Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) is being held to a standard of decorum by his colleagues that is not being asked of President Barack Hussein Obama:

Just when you think no one could drag political discourse down any lower than it is, along comes Congressman Wilson to shout an insult at our president. The Democratic majority has censured him for that breach.

Should they now censure President Obama for his more composed delivery of the same term?

A few moments before Congressman Wilson lost his cool, President Obama said, “Some of people’s concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost. The best example is the claim, made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. … It is a lie, plain and simple.” …
 
Is it inappropriate for all of our political leaders to call members of the opposing party liars on the floor of the House of Representatives? Or is there a separate standard for President Obama and the members of his party? Joe Wilson’s remark was unplanned. Our president came to Congress pleading for bipartisanship but intending to demean his opponents with the same expression. What standard are we to observe?

The standard that liberals always observe, of course: the double standard.

For his part, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer contends that “Barack Obama doesn't lie. He's too subtle for that”:

He implies, he misdirects, he misleads - so fluidly and incessantly that he risks transmuting eloquence into mere slickness. …

Slickness wasn't fatal to "Slick Willie" Clinton because he possessed a winning, nearly irresistible charm. Obama's persona is more cool, distant, imperial. The charming scoundrel can get away with endless deception; the righteous redeemer cannot.

† Obama: “Our Healthcare System Is Broken.” Oh, Really?: A new meta-analysis of international research on longevity finds that were it not for junk food, obesity and a past history of smoking, “the United States would rise to the top half of the longevity rankings for developed countries” and that “the American system in many ways provides superior treatment even when uninsured Americans are included,” reports The New York Times:

“The U.S. actually does a pretty good job of identifying and treating the major diseases,” says [Samuel] Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania who is among the leading experts on mortality rates from disease. “The international comparisons don’t show we’re in dire straits.” …

An American’s life expectancy at birth is about 78 years, which is lower than in most other affluent countries. Life expectancy is about 80 in the United Kingdom, 81 in Canada and France, and 83 in Japan, according to the World Health Organization.

This longevity gap, Dr. Preston says, is primarily due to the relatively high rates of sickness and death among middle-aged Americans, chiefly from heart disease and cancer. Many of those deaths have been attributed to the health care system, an especially convenient target for those who favor a European alternative. …

[M]ortality rates from breast cancer and prostate cancer have been declining significantly faster in the United States than in other industrialized countries.

Americans also do relatively well in surviving heart attacks and strokes, and some studies have found that hypertension is treated more successfully in the United States. Compared with Europeans, Americans are more likely to receive medication if they have heart disease, high cholesterol, lung disease or osteoporosis. …

Noting that since 1985 the U.S. has had the largest drop in the number of adults who smoke heavily - or at all - of any developed country, Preston believes that if smoking rates continue to decline, the longevity gap could shrink no matter how modest or extensive healthcare “reform” ends up being.

† There's No Such Thing As Free Healthcare: Weekly Standard editor and FOX News analyst Fred Barnes credits President Barack Hussein Obama with “persistence,” “stubbornness” and “lack of imagination” for his endless repetition of an “argument [that] has failed to persuade a sizeable majority of the American people precisely because they're not stupid”:

They understand the laws of addition and subtraction. When you offer more - much, much more in this case - of a good, it's going to cost more. Somebody has to pay for it. Yet Obama says we'll all be paying less, and that includes businesses and government. …

Obama may be unaware, but there are three programs - in Maine, Massachusetts, and Tennessee - currently testing his idea of get-more-pay-less. The evidence is already in: Expanded health care coverage costs more, an awful lot more. There are no known exceptions. …

Obama is stuck. He is promoting his health care plan as a money-saver because that's what pollsters tell him the American people want to hear. But it's plain to nearly everyone that Obamacare would be just the opposite. There is a way out: Propose a reform plan that would credibly curtail the growth in health costs. Such a plan exists. The president need only ask Republicans for a copy of it.

† Read The Bill: Voting on the first of 500⁺ amendments during the Senate Finance Committee’s markup of the America’s Healthy Future Act, Democrats quashed an amendment by Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) to hold off voting on the healthcare “reform” bill until the final legislative language of the proposal – including a cost analysis by the Congressional Budget Office - has been posted for review on the Finance Committee‘s website for 72 hours, reports The Washington Times:

The amendment would have delayed a vote on the final bill for about two weeks to allow the Congressional Budget Office to complete its final analysis on the cost and implications of the legislation.

Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln was the only Democrat to vote with Republicans for the amendment, further signaling that she may be an attractive swing vote for Republicans.

Instead, the panel passed an alternative amendment that would require the committee to post the full bill, in "conceptual" instead of legal language, as well as as [sic] a CBO cost estimate.

A similar – but bipartisan – effort to give legislators time to read the bill before they vote on it is afoot in the House, sponsored by Reps. Brian Baird (D-WA), John Culberson (R-TX) and Greg Walden (R-OR):

The lawmakers have begun circulating a discharge petition that would force House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to hold a vote on their bill, which has been stuck in committee for months. …

"The American people are angry that Speaker Pelosi didn't allow the public and their elected representatives to read the trillion-dollar 'stimulus' bill or the national energy tax before they were rammed through the House," Minority Leader John Boehner, Ohio Republican, said Wednesday. "Congress can, and must, do better." …

The discharge petition requires 218 signatures to force a vote on the bill, which has 98 co-sponsors. There are currently 256 Democrats and 177 Republicans in the House.

† King Of The Heels: Syndicated columnist and FOX News analyst Susan Estrich writes a blistering “open letter” to former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) about why he should not “publicly” acknowledge paternity of his daughter with Rielle Hunter:

Message to John Edwards: We know it's your baby. Everyone knows that. You want to do the right thing? Do it privately. Do penance for the next 20 years. Wash your wife's feet and help the poor. But don't make public pronouncements or expect public forgiveness.

Nothing John Edwards can do will change the judgment we have reached about him. World-class scumbag doesn't begin to describe it. I can think of no one in recent political history whose betrayal matches his.

A lot of politicians have affairs. I know this. I will be reminded in a matter of seconds, if I don't say it right here, that I spent years defending one of them, whose taste wasn't much better than Edwards'.

How many times did I say that an extramarital affair is not an impeachable offense? It isn't. But when your wife has metastatic breast cancer, when you use everybody around you, when you lie to her and your aides and the voters, when you distort a presidential race you had no business being in and bring a child into the world because of your arrogance and cruelty, then it's an unforgivable one.

The Stiletto recalls the number of debates in which Edwards and then-candidate Barack Obama (now President Barack Hussein Obama) ganged up on Hillary Clinton. Had he not split the blue collar vote with her (second item), she may well have won her party’s nomination.

† Daughter Kept Cashing Dead Mother’s Benefit Checks: Having pleaded guilty to theft of government funds for keeping her dead mother's body in a bedroom for six years so she could collect $237K of Social Security and military pension benefits paid out to her, Penelope Sharon Jordan, 61, of Sebastian, FL, was sentenced to a year and a day in prison, reports Reuters. Jordan was also ordered to repay the entire amount she stole to the government.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?): Writing in The Telegraph (London), columnist Edward Lucas observes that foreign leaders regard President Barack Hussein Obama as “the weakest president since Jimmy Carter”:

Regimes in Moscow, Pyongyang and Tehran simply pocket his concessions and carry on as before. The picture emerging from the White House is a disturbing one, of timidity, clumsiness and short-term calculation. …

The grizzled veterans of the Democratic leadership in Congress have found Mr Obama and his team of bright young advisers a pushover. That has gravely weakened his flagship domestic campaign, for health-care reform, which fails to address the greatest weakness of the American system: its inflated costs. …

The man who has run nothing more demanding than the Harvard Law Review is beginning to look out of his depth in the world's top job. His credibility is seeping away, and it will require concrete achievements rather than more soaring oratory to recover it.

Even Ralph Nader and Usama bin Laden are dissing him. But then, Fidel Castro is praising him while Hugo Chavez did a complete 180 on Obama being an “ignoramus”, and now thinks he’s “intelligent.” So one could argue that Obama is starting to get traction with world leaders.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Empire State Repubs Rise Again): By judicial fiat, NY has a new lieutenant governor. Overturning two lower court rulings, the state Court of Appeals ruled 4-3 that Gov. David Paterson (D) may appoint someone to fill a vacancy in the office of lieutenant governor, reports New York Law Journal:

"While there can be no quarrel with the proposition that, generally, election must be the preferred means of filling vacancies in the elective office, it does not follow that the elective principle is preeminent when it comes to filling a vacancy in the office of Lieutenant-Governor," Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman wrote for the majority in Skelos v. Paterson, 183.

By contrast, Judge Eugene F. Pigott Jr. wrote for the dissenters that the ruling opened the possibility that "citizens of this State will one day find themselves governed by a person who has never been subjected to scrutiny by the electorate" should an appointed lieutenant governor succeed to the governor's post.

"Because this is contrary to the text of the New York Constitution and affords Governors unprecedented power to appoint a successor, we respectfully dissent," he wrote. …

"The Court has given new power and authority to an unelected governor where no such power existed under the state Constitution," Senate Minority Leader Dean Skelos, R-Rockville Centre, who had challenged the appointment, said in a statement.

Paterson appointed former Metropolitan Transportation Authority chairman Richard Ravitch on July 8^th to break a 31-31 tie between Repubs and Dems in the State Senate that had brought the legislative machinery to a standstill.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Waterboarding Works): Contradicting the experience of interrogation agents in the field - who have gotten reliable information that short-circuited plots still in the planning stages - a meta-analysis by Shane O’Mara of Ireland’s Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience concludes that “waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions and the exploitation of phobias aren’t just morally reprehensible, they’re based on bad science, destroying the very memories they’re supposed to recover,” reports Wired:

O’Mara derides the belief that extreme stress produces reliable memory as “folk neurobiology” that “is utterly unsupported by scientific evidence.” The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex - the brain’s centers of memory processing, storage and retrieval - are profoundly altered by stress hormones. Keep the stress up long enough, and it will “result in compromised cognitive function and even tissue loss,” warping the minds that interrogators want to read.

What’s more, tortured suspects might not even realize when they’re lying. Frontal lobe damage can produce false memories: As torture is maintained for weeks or months or years, suspects may incorporate their captors’ allegations into their own version of reality.

The thing is, spies and terrorists are trained to lie and mislead. One can safely assume that regardless of the method used to extract information, most of what a suspect says is false - interwoven with strands of truth for verisimilitude - and it is possible that torture changes the ratio of truth to lies to the interrogator’s advantage. In other words, if suspects lie to make the torture stop, they lie before the torture starts, too. That’s why interrogators continually cross-check a suspect’s statements over time against those of other suspects.