THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Turning back the tide of information overload with a digest of the latest developments in news conservatives need to pay attention to:

† What Freedom Of Speech Means To Muslims (The U.S. Edition): Jessica Felber and another student sued the University of California-Berkeley for not doing enough to prevent Jewish students from being verbally harassed – and in her case physically assaulted by being rammed with a shopping cart – during a 2010 anti-Israel “Apartheid Week” protest by the Muslim Student Association and Students for Justice in Palestine. The protest included checkpoints set up by the Muslim students all over campus at which their classmates were asked if they were Jewish. U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg ruled that “the harassment, even if true, constituted protected political speech and dismissed the case against the university,” Greely Gazette (Greely, CO) reports: 

Seeborg said the university did not have any obligation to intervene in any dispute where a private individual on campus was allegedly interfering with another’s constitutional rights. He instead appeared to indicate that the incident was an outcome of Felber’s counter protest.

 

“The incident in which Felber was assaulted with a shopping cart, for example, did not occur in the context of her educational pursuit,” Seeborg wrote. "Rather, that event occurred when she, as one person attempting to exercise free speech rights in a public forum, was allegedly attacked by another person who likewise was participating in a public protest in a public forum."

 

Robert Spencer, founder of Jihad Watch, characterizes the judge’s decision as defining assault as protected speech. But only when a Muslim is assaulting an Infidel (that is to say, Christians and Jews). The other way around, as we all know, is a hate crime.

 

† Skeletal pundit Alan Colmes is just another liberal ghoul: The Daily Caller's Jim Treacher writes that Alan Colmes hit the nail on the head when he disagreed with Rich Lowry’s prediction that “I think even some of the dastardly characters we have in the mainstream media are not gonna go as low as you just have” after Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson made nearly identical remarks in an interview with Rachel Maddow:

 

[Santorum]‘s not a little weird, he’s really weird. Some of the positions he’s taken are just so weird that I think some Republicans are gonna be off-put. Not everybody is going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the stillborn child whose body they took home to kind of sleep with and introduce to the rest of the family. It’s very weird story… Let’s repeat that, every time we talk about Rick Santorum, let’s be clear: This a guy who should never become president, in my view. [Emphasis, The Stiletto.]

 

Whether intentionally or not, Robinson let the cat out of the bag: Dems will try to undermine Santorum’s presidential campaign with dead baby jokes. As Treacher puts it: “You’re on notice, Republicans: If your child dies and you ever want to run for president, you’d better check with the liberal left to make sure you’re mourning correctly.”

 

A new fad amongst new mothers is to ingest their placenta. This is no weirder – OK, it is way, way weirder – than allowing family members to cuddle a stillborn or dead neonate before burying it, as some experts recommend.

 

† There’s No Such Thing As Free Healthcare: President Barack Hussein Obama famously asserted that doctors unnecessarily perform surgery just to keep their bottom lines healthy. The truth is that doctors – from family practitioners to cancer specialists – are quietly going under, thanks to insurance companies and the federal government putting the squeeze on how much they can charge for their services, regulations and paperwork and rising drug costs, CNNMoney reports:

 

Dr. Neil Barth … has been in the top 10% of oncologists in his region, according to U.S. News Top Doctors' ranking. Still, he is contemplating personal bankruptcy.

 

That move could shutter his 31-year-old clinical practice and force 6,000 cancer patients to look for a new doctor.

 

Changes in drug reimbursements have hurt him badly. Until the mid-2000's, drugs sales were big profit generators for oncologists.

 

In oncology, doctors were allowed to profit from drug sales. So doctors would buy expensive cancer drugs at bulk prices from drugmakers and then sell them at much higher prices to their patients.

 

"I grew up in that system. I was spending $1.5 million a month on buying treatment drugs," he said. In 2005, Medicare revised the reimbursement guidelines for cancer drugs, which effectively made reimbursements for many expensive cancer drugs fall to less than the actual cost of the drugs. …

 

"I was $3.2 million in debt by mid 2010," said Barth. "It was a sickening feeling. I could no longer care for patients with catastrophic illnesses without scrutinizing every penny first." …

 

"I recently got a call from a divorced woman with two kids who is unemployed, house in foreclosure with advanced breast cancer," he said. "The moment has come to this that you now say, 'sorry, we don't have the capacity to care for you.' "

 

Half of all doctors in the U.S. are in private practice. There has been a systematic effort to destroy the private practice healthcare delivery model that predates Obama but certainly intensified in his tenure. Soon a doctor have no choice but to become salaried employees -- first for a medical institution like Cleveland Clinic or Mayo Clinic, later as a government employee. Given the huge investment in schooling and huge medical school debt how soon before people do the math and decide an MBA is better than an MD? Then the government will start paying medical school tuition – as has already been proposed in MA – and events will spool out just as Reagan predicted in this 1961 speech warning of the perils of socialized medicine.

 

BTW, back then the American Medical Association opposed socialized medicine and distributed copies of Reagan’s speech. Today the AHA has thrown its support behind Obamacare, which will lead inexorably to socialized medicine.

 

† Why Shouldn’t Illegals Get Government Healthcare?: Marco Antonio Fuentes has spent 374 days at Community Regional Medical Center – longer than any other patient the staff at the Fresno acute-care hospital can remember. Fuentes was admitted to the hospital Dec. 26, 2010 with necrotizing pancreatitis, a complication of untreated gallstones that had progressed to an acute infection that had eaten gaping holes in his intestines. Pancreatitis typically requires a hospital stay of between 45 to 65 days, but in Fuentes’ case, “The holes in his intestines allowed bile and feces to escape into his abdomen – and he had blood infections and blood clots in his lungs that were life-threatening” and had to take nutrition and hydration via IV for more than 11 months, The Fresno Bee reports. It took 12 surgeries to patch Fuentes up so he could go home.

 

Here’s the kicker. “Home” is Mexico. The Bee did not inform readers that Fuentes was an uninsured illegal from Mexico until 17 paragraphs and 440 words into the 860-word article (related article, fifth item on the page):

 

[F]amily, including a brother, uncle and cousins, came from as far away as South Carolina to visit, staying at Terry's House across the street from the hospital, said Denise Goodman, the hospital hospitality house manager. …

 

In August, his eighth month hospitalized, his mother, Estella Castillo, came from Mexico. She had been ill, and Fuentes realized his condition worried her. "I had a lot of emotions," he said. "I was sad. I didn't want her to see me that way."

 

The Bee didn’t try very hard to find out and report how much his care cost and where the money comes from for the $100 million in charity care that the hospital provides to patients like Fuentes every year (Hint: Ask yourself, why a bottle of Tylenol costs a few bucks when you buy it at your local drugstore, but $100 per pill when a nurse places it on your bed tray in a little paper cup):

 

On Tuesday, the final cost of Fuentes' care was not available. Much of it will be taken on by the hospital as charity care. …

 

Fuentes began to rally after a final surgery on Nov. 11.

 

Over nine hours, surgeons were able to rebuild his gastrointestinal tract.

 

And three weeks ago, he had his first hospital food. …

 

On Dec. 20, hospital staff threw him a Christmas party. For that occasion, he had homemade enchiladas. They were "really, really" good, he said. …

 

After a couple of weeks convalescing at an uncle's home in Red Bluff, Fuentes will go to Mexico to live with his parents and work at their small, tortilla-making business.

 

The Stiletto knows that had she been treated at a hospital without insurance and no means to pay for the services and facilities she was using, no one would have made her a special meal at Christmas. Only in CA.

 

† Chevy Volt: An electric Edsel: General Motors is recalling asking customers to return 8,000 Volts sold in the U.S. in the past two years to fix a defect that caused the plug-in car’s lithium ion battery to ignite after routine crash testing by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (related article, second item on the page). The Associated Press reports:

 

The fixes are similar to a recall [but] GM's move is considered a step below a recall, which would be issued by a car company and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. …

 

The Volt has a T-shaped, 400-pound (181-kilogram) battery pack that can power the car for about 35 miles (56 kilometers). After that, a small gasoline generator kicks in to run the electric motor.

 

NHTSA has been investigating the batteries after a Volt caught fire in June at a crash test facility in Wisconsin. The fire broke out three weeks after a side-impact crash test. …

 

GM has said that the liquid solution used to cool the Volt's battery leaked and crystallized, causing an electrical short that touched off the fire.

 

The company now sends out a team to drain the batteries after being notified of a crash by GM's OnStar safety system.

 

† The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II: Anyone who’s bummed out over having to tell Aunt Martha how yummy her fruitcake was or let down by getting socks and PJs – again—consider Sarah McKinley’s holiday season. The 18-year old lost her husband Kenneth to lung cancer Christmas Day, and then on New Year’s Eve was faced with two men wanting his pain meds trying to break into her mobile home, People magazine reports:

 

"I walked over and got the 12 gauge, went in the bedroom and got the pistol, put the bottle in [my son's] mouth, then I called 911,” McKinley tells Eyewitness News 5, explaining she wanted the baby to remain quiet so the intruders would not know where she was standing as they charged through the door.

 

As she laid out the situation to dispatcher Diane Graham, McKinley said, "I've got two guns in my hand. Is it OK to shoot him if he comes in my door?"

 

Graham responded: "You do whatever you have to do to protect your baby."

 

Justin Shane Martin, 24, died clutching a knife in his gloved left hand, says a police affidavit.

 

His alleged accomplice, Dustin Louis Stewart, 29, who turned himself in to police, has been charged with murder. The sheriff says the charge is appropriate when a felony leads to someone being killed, whereas McKinley did not violate the law in any way.

 

Note that neither intruder wrested her weapons from her hands and used them on her, and that McKinley shot the intruder she was aiming at rather than herself or her three-month old son – two scenarios liberals always cite when explaining why people should not have guns for their own protection.

 

† Every Bubble Bursts Eventually: Shortly after Barack Hussein Obama was elected -- but not yet inaugurated -- schools were being named after him, supposedly at the behest of students (related article, fourth item on the page) who thought he was the coolest dude ever. Now, students at Shaker Heights High School in Shaker Heights, OH are laughing at him, reports RealClearPolitics:

 

"I want you to know you're the reason that I ran for this office in the first place. You remind me what we are still fighting for," Obama said to tepid cheers.

"You inspire me," Obama said to an audience that laughed at him.

 

† 10 reasons Michelle Obama should be proud – really proud – of America: This latest installment in The Stiletto Blog’s ongoing series (previous article, last item on the page) 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 Michael Dodd, owner of Applied Orthotics and Prosthetics in San Jose, who came to the rescue when Amber Stime, who lost her hands when she picked up a landmine in her native Ethiopia as a toddler, needed replacements for her worn-out prosthetic hands. Palo Alto Daily News reports:

 

Dodd … outfit[ed] Stime with a brand-new set of prosthetics.

The mocha-colored hands took about a week to fabricate and if billed through insurance would have cost about $40,000, Dodd said as he used a sewing machine to finish piecing together a harness. He did most of the work over the holidays.

 

Dodd said it's been a goal of his to build the prosthetics for Stime since meeting her in 2009, when she connected him with an Ethiopian girl who needed artificial limbs following a car wreck.

 

Over the past five or six years, Applied Orthotics and Prosthetics has taken on a handful of such pro bono cases. …

 

Dodd said her reaction was payment enough.

 

"I'm just happy for her," he remarked when Stime posed for a photograph with her new hands outside his office. "Just look at her smiling face. That's what it's all about. It's all for her."

 

Editorial Note: Since Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated, The Stiletto Blog has run more than 100 posts about extraordinary Americans. The Stiletto would have liked to say that she accomplished her goat with her ongoing series, but this New York Times profile of the FLOTUS excerpted from Jodi Kantor's new book, "The Obamas," suggests that Obama just doesn't like her fellow citizens – and is anything but “post racial”:

 

Mrs. Obama is a supportive but often anxious spouse, suspicious of conventional political thinking, a groundbreaking figure who has acutely felt the pressures and possibilities of being the first African-American in her position and a first lady who has worked to make her role more meaningful. ...

 

A Harvard-trained lawyer, she had given up her career for what initially seemed to her a shapeless post, and she tried to wriggle out of some ceremonial events that she saw as not having much purpose, including the annual luncheon for Congressional spouses held by the first lady since 1912. She tried to limit her public exposure, saying she would work only two days a week; inside the White House, the difficulty of getting Mrs. Obama to agree to doing an event became a running joke. ...

 

Mrs. Obama often found herself caught in an internal debate about how the Obamas should look and live, travel and entertain. As the first African-American first lady, she wanted everything to be flawless and sophisticated; she felt “everyone was waiting for a black woman to make a mistake,” a former aide said.

 

And as with other behind-the-scenes peeks at the Obama White House, Kantor's book depicts an administration in complete disarray:

 

Several West Wing aides … wondered: was the president using his wife to convey what he felt?

In September 2010, after a summer of infighting throughout the West Wing, things finally exploded.

 

Early on Sept. 16, Robert Gibbs was scanning the news when a story stopped him short: according to a new French book, Michelle Obama had told Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the French first lady, that living in the White House was “hell.” It was a potential disaster — the equivalent of the $400 haircut, Mr. Gibbs feared, coming just weeks before election day and on the heels of a vacation in Spain that had drawn accusations of lavish spending.

 

Mr. Gibbs asked her aides to find out if she had said anything even close (no, the answer came back), and then fought the story back for hours, having the book translated and convincing the Élysée Palace to issue a denial. By noon the potential crisis had been averted.

 

But at Mr. Emanuel’s 7:30 a.m. staff meeting the next day, Ms. Jarrett announced that the first lady had concerns about the White House’s response to the book, according to several people present. All eyes turned to Mr. Gibbs, who started to steam.

 

“Don’t go there, Robert, don’t do it,” Mr. Emanuel warned.

 

“That’s not right, I’ve been killing myself on this, where’s this coming from?” Mr. Gibbs yelled, adding expletives. He interrogated Ms. Jarrett, whose calm only seemed to frustrate him more. The two went back and forth, Ms. Jarrett unruffled, Mr. Gibbs shaking with rage. Finally, several staff members said, Mr. Gibbs cursed the first lady – colleagues stared down at the table, shocked – and stormed out.