† Read The Bill: Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) wants his colleagues to certify in writing that they have read and understood the costs associated with the hundreds of bills that pass by "unanimous consent" – that is, without a roll call vote on the floor, reports The Washington Times:

The effort comes a year after last summer's "read the bill" campaign highlighted lawmakers who acknowledged they hadn't read the entire House health care bill, even as they tried to explain its intricacies to constituents.

"The American people never know what we're doing. They don't get a hearing. They don't get to hear the policy debates on both sides of the issue," Mr. Coburn said Friday as debate on both secret holds and what Mr. Coburn calls secret spending took center stage in the Senate. [Explanatory link added by The Stiletto.]

Fewer than one in 10 measures the Senate passes actually receives a roll-call vote, according to the Congressional Research Service. Most of the rest of those bills pass with just a senator or two on the floor, reading a long list of items that have been approved by the top Democrats and top Republicans, who are supposed to have checked with their caucuses to see if there are any objections. …

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) is co-sponsoring Coburn’s Amendment 3996 to the Financial Regulations Bill S.3217.

Coburn, along with Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Russ Feingold (D-WI), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced the “Earmark Transparency Act of 2010” (S.3335) to create a user-friendly online database of all congressional earmark requests.

† There’s Many A Slip ‘Twixt The Cup And Lip: As of now 2/3 of states are initiating legal or legislative challenges to Obamacare’s requirement Americans either buy healthcare coverage or pay a penalty tax, reports The Washington Post:

Supporters of the overhaul argue that if insurance were not mandated, costs would rise to prohibitive levels: Since the law will bar insurers from excluding people with pre-existing conditions the sick and elderly would be vastly over-represented in the insurance pool if other people held back. They also point to the Supreme Court's long record of upholding congressional authority to regulate the economy by imposing taxes, to impinge on personal freedoms in the national interest and to supersede conflicting state laws. …

For all his work coordinating it, [Clint Bolick, litigation director of the Goldwater Institute] said "the frontal assault on Obamacare faces very tough odds. … I'm hoping that this will die a death of a thousand cuts."

It’s interesting that Repubs want to protect civil rights at the expense of corporate profits, while Dems want to protect corporate profits at the expense of civil rights.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office now guesstimates that the law could potentially add $115 billion or more to government healthcare spending over the next 10 years if Congress funds all of the additional discretionary spending called for in the legislation, pushing the total cost past the $1 trillion mark.

† Homelessness In The Time Of Obama: It took nearly two hours for authorities to forcibly remove Keith Sadler and six protestors barricaded for a week in his home of 20 years, which he had lost to foreclosure, reports The Toledo Blade:

Authorities broke down the front door of the U.S. 20 home about 6:30 a.m. Friday, Mr. Crandall said. About 30 protesters stood in the pouring rain and chanted "Keith's house" as Mr. Sadler was carried out by his hands and feet and placed into a Wood County sheriff's vehicle just before 8 a.m. …

Last year, State Bank and Trust Co. of Defiance foreclosed on the house, then bought it at a sheriff's sale in March for $33,333, court records show. Mr. Sadler was supposed to be out of the house by midnight Monday but said he would not leave his home voluntarily.

Mr. Sadler, who mostly has worked in factories, said he made his mortgage payments for 12 years after buying the house from his father but fell behind last year after he was off work from Dana Corp. for medical reasons.

† A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ: The Washington Times reports that AZ is on the cutting edge when it comes to enforcing immigration law within its borders. Similar bills have been introduced or are in the works in ID, MN, MD, MS, NC, NE, OK, PA, SC and TX.

Meanwhile, according to a report by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars finds that over the years cities in several states – including CA, IL – and, paradoxically, TX – have passed laws that “focus more on trying to accommodate them rather than restrict them,” reports The Washington Post:

[A]cross the country, more laws expanding immigrants' rights are enacted than those contracting them. …

An analysis of 1,059 immigration-related bills in 50 state legislatures in 2007 found that 19 percent of 313 bills expanding immigrant rights were enacted, while 11 percent of 263 bills contracting rights were enacted, the report says.

Bills contracting immigrant rights included those such as one approved that year in Prince William County allowing police officers to check people's immigration status if there was probable cause to believe that they were in the United States illegally. The bill was later amended to require a status check for all arrestees.

Bills expanding immigrant rights included a measure in New York that eliminated citizenship requirements for such occupations as police officer, firefighter and teacher; a Texas bill that made it an offense to obtain labor or services by threatening to report someone to immigration; and a Nevada bill that designated new crimes and penalties around involuntary servitude and human trafficking.

The study also found that elected officials are spending increasing amounts of time on immigration-related legislation instead of tacking other pressing matters: In 2005, 300 immigrant-related bills were introduced; five times that number were introduced last year.

† So Easy, A Conservative Can Do It: Part III: Here’s an interesting addendum to all those studies purporting to show that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives from The Wall Street Journal:

Researchers ... examined why some kids lie more than others, and have found that it isn't related to better moral values or religious upbringing. Rather, it's kids with better cognitive abilities who lie more. That's because to lie you also have to keep the truth in mind, which involves multiple brain processes, such as integrating several sources of information and manipulating that information, according to Shawn Christ, a neuropsychologist at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

So putting it all together, if liberals are smarter than conservatives they are also better liars.

† For The Good Of The Children?: To desegregate urban schools, local school boards first used the stick of forced busing and then the carrot of creating magnet schools offering specialized programs in the performing arts, technology or an International Baccalaureate diploma, but both approaches ultimately failed. Like Seattle (sixth item), Portland, OR, is poised to return to neighborhood school placement, reports the Los Angeles Times:

White, middle-class parents adept at school bureaucracy got their children into the best schools. Poor families got left behind in ever-shrinking, underfunded and poorly performing neighborhood schools. …

Now, in a move that in another era and another city might have been seen as segregationist, Portland is preparing to abandon its liberal cross-town transfer policy and go back to the once-discredited model of neighborhood schools.

An ambitious high school redesign under review by the school board proposes to set up a network of eight "core" schools in neighborhoods rich and poor across the city. The schools would be distinguished by their sameness: Every school would offer a full college-prep curriculum; every school, even in the well-to-do neighborhoods where students have supposedly never needed learning aids, would also offer a full menu of academic support.

The Stiletto - herself a victim of forced busing from the ages of 10 to 13 – agrees with this approach. Instead of doling out a set number of white students to inner city schools and minority students to middle class neighborhood schools, it makes more sense to give every student a quality education.

† All The News That’s Fart To Print: Joshua Nelson (AKA “The Toilet Paper Bandit”), who robbed a Lincoln, NE,  convenience store last month wearing a mask made from TP wrapped around his head, was flushed out by a police informant who told the authorities that Nelson told him about the robbery. His story was corroborated by a man who found a discarded knife, rolls of coins like those taken in the robbery and a prescription bottle with Nelson's name on the label, reports The Smoking Gun. Nelson has admitted  “in a recorded and Mirandized interview” that he robbed the store.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Why We Need Gitmo): Southern District of New York Judge Lewis A. Kaplan refused to dismiss criminal charges against accused U.S. Embassy bomber Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, because the government’s case against him will not use information he gave up while subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques – therefore, his right to due process under the Fifth Amendment has not been violated, reports New York Law Journal:

"The government here has stated that it will not use anything that Ghailani said while in CIA custody, or the fruits of any such statement," Kaplan said in United States v. Ghailani, 98 Crim. 1023. "In consequence, any deprivation of liberty that Ghailani might suffer as a result of a conviction in this case would be entirely unconnected to the alleged due process violation. Even if Ghailani was mistreated while in CIA custody and even if that mistreatment violated the due process clause, there would be no connection between such mistreatment and this prosecution." …

Ghailani was indicted in 1998 for the conspiracy that included the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people. But he was not captured until six years later in Pakistan, where he was turned over to the CIA. …

He was sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2006 and then on to New York in 2009 for trial before Kaplan. His defense lawyers have attempted to have the indictment against him dismissed on multiple grounds, including a speedy trial motion now under consideration by the judge.

Just last week, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to hear a motion to exempt Ghailani from visual body cavity inspections by corrections officers before or after attending court, because they triggered torture flashbacks that could render him unable to participate in his defense. And last month, Kaplan denied a defense motion to adjourn the criminal proceeding for nine months on the grounds. Ghailani’s attorneys seem to have an endless supply of these delaying tactics.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, When A Patient’s Rights Stop Where A Healthcare Provider’s Rights Begin): Depending on who is doing the interpreting of the vague verbiage, certain provisions of the bloated healthcare “reform” law either expose healthcare providers to career-killing penalties if they refuse to perform certain medical procedures out of religious conviction, or they endanger patient care by allowing healthcare providers to withhold information about all treatment options, reports The Washington Post:

The new legislation mandates that plans offered through the state-based insurance marketplaces called exchanges do not "discriminate against any individual health care provider or health care facility because of its unwillingness to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions." The legislation also bars discrimination against those opposed to "assisted suicide, euthanasia, or mercy killing." In addition, Obama's accompanying executive order, signed as part of last-ditch efforts to pass the legislation, reaffirms all existing federal conscience protections.

But some argue that the legislation does not go nearly far enough, given the breadth of the new legislation and possible unanticipated effects. For example, the legislation does not protect workers who oppose abortion from discrimination by any entities other than health plans, leaving federal, state and local governments, clinics, hospitals and others potentially free to compel providers to perform abortions, they say. …

And the legislation does not safeguard doctors, nurses and others who object to anything else, especially care that might be mandated by the federal government as "essential services," such as birth control pills, sterilization, genetic testing and in-vitro fertilization. …

For their part, abortion-rights advocates are alarmed that the legislation did not include equal defenses for health-care workers who perform abortions. With abortion providers dwindling in number as they face protests and sometimes even violence, advocates fear the legislation will lead health plans to exclude doctors still willing to terminate pregnancies. …

In addition, critics of the conscience language argue, the legislation in some ways expands protections for those who oppose abortion by shielding providers who refuse to even refer women to a willing doctor.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, 10 Reasons Michelle Obama Should Be Proud – Really Proud – Of America): This latest installment in The Stiletto Blog’s ongoing series meant to help instill the necessary pride of country in Michelle Obama’s consciousness to enable her to serve as an unofficial ambassador focuses on Nola Ochs, who became the world’s oldest college graduate three years ago at the age of 95, Now, she’s in the record books again, reports The Kansas City Star:

On Saturday, with gobs of family members in the audience wearing gray T-shirts sporting her name and waving the American flags she requested, the great-grandmother of 15 will get her master’s degree. Don’t forget, she’s 98 now. …

“She’s the classic example of a person who learns for the love of learning,” said Kent Steward, a spokesman with Fort Hays State University. “She has just absolutely blossomed in this setting.”

When her husband died in 1972, Ochs said she started preparing to die. She just figured with him gone, she’d be gone soon, too. …

"[Now] I tell people, ‘Eat your carrots. Eat your spinach. The 90s are great.’”