Obama Slams Clarence Thomas

For Clarence Thomas the lynching never ends. Obama didn't think that Thomas was a stong enough legal thinker. He then went on to praise Scalia for his "intellectual brilliance" and said that John Roberts was "clearly smart" & "thoughtful". I guess Thomas just doesn't measure up intellectually in Obama's eyes.

It is not the first time they have called him ignorant. Indeed, this appears to be straight out of the Democratic playbook...

While being interviewed on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" on Dec. 5, Sen. Reid was asked about the possibility of Justice Thomas replacing current Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who is currently being treated for thyroid cancer. Reid called Thomas "an embarrassment to the Supreme Court" and said his opinions "are poorly written."

In the same interview, Senator Reid praised Justice Antonin Scalia, calling him "one smart guy." Scalia and Thomas share many of the same views. Scalia, of course, is white.

Legal scholars are not as critical of Justice Thomas' legal prowess as are liberal politicians and activists. Commenting on liberal criticism of Thomas' jurisprudence, University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse wrote: "It is my observation that liberals tend to lapse into the lazy belief that those who don't agree with them must be stupid or evil, and to me Reid's remarks look a bit like that. ... I realize the senators can't get away with opposing a judicial nomination on the grounds that they simply disagree with their opinions ... but to attack Thomas' intelligence is shameless."

Man do they hate Clarence Thomas You could only imagine what the reaction would be if the situation was reversed and Republicans were smeering a liberal who happened to be black. Could you even imagine?

Hat tip to Riehl World View Sphere: Related Content

Cool in the Windy City

Decade has had fewest 90-degree days since 1930

Decade has had fewest 90-degree days since 1930
By Tom Skilling
August 13, 2008

August is the wettest and often the muggiest month of the year. Yet, summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century's opening decade. There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That's by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930.

This summer's highest reading to date has been just 91 degrees. That's unusual. Since 1928, only one year—2000—has failed to record a higher warm-season temperature by Aug. 13.

What an inconvenient truth. Somebody should clue them in to the program. Global warming is here and the debate is over. Sphere: Related Content

Bring Out Your Dead!

Michigan Central Station

Flight of the dead: Suburban families move loved ones from Detroit cemeteries

Detroit has lost half its population since its heyday of the 1950s, and every year the city hemorrhages an estimated 5,000 people more. First it was white flight to the suburbs; then with the city's continued spiral into poverty and violence, blacks began to flee to those same suburbs. And while census figures show that whites are returning to some of the nation's largest cities, Detroit is experiencing a flight of a different kind. As the Imbrunones' second funeral demonstrates, Detroit is experiencing the flight of the dead.

The movement of the dead from the nation's largest black city to its overwhelmingly white suburbs is a small, though socially symbolic phenomenon, revealing the grinding problems of race, crime and economics that plague both sides of Eight Mile.

From 2002 through 2007, the remains of about 1,000 people have been disinterred and moved out of the city, according to permits stored in metal filing cabinets in the city's department of health. Looked at in another way, for about every 30 living human beings who leave Detroit, one dead human being follows. Moreover, anecdotal evidence compiled by a Detroit professor suggests the figure may be twice as high, meaning city records may be incomplete and that thousands upon thousands of deceased people have been relocated from the city over the past 20 years.

According to Dr. Stephen Vogel, the official numbers are vastly under reported...

Dr. Stephen Vogel, dean of architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy, believes the out-migration of the dead from Detroit is undercounted.

He and his researchers conducted a study three years ago, interviewing the director of each of Detroit's 28 cemeteries. According to that study, about 400 to 500 disinterments occur each year.

When even the dead flee you know you have hit rock bottom.

Could people left on their own ever do this to themselves? You look at the pockets of poverty in Detroit and those exposed by Katrina and you see the hand of government all over them.

Related: House Sells For $1 in Detroit Sphere: Related Content

Let's Hear It For Government Health Care!

3 Southern California hospitals accused of using homeless for fraud

But as investigators began to unravel the incident, they say they found something far different: a massive scheme to defraud taxpayer-funded healthcare programs of millions of dollars by recruiting homeless patients for unnecessary medical services.

The elaborate enterprise churned thousands of indigents through hospitals over the last four years and billed Medicare and Medi-Cal for costly and unjustified medical procedures, federal, state and local investigators said Wednesday.

Those involved in the alleged conspiracy "ranged from street-level operatives to the chief executive of a hospital," U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O'Brien said.

Another abuse of government funding. Doesn't come as a surprise. This is what happens when you have government health care.

According to court filings, "runners" or "stringers" on skid row looked for homeless recruits. Prospects were offered small sums of money, typically $20 or $30, to be paid upon completion of a hospital stay of one to three days. The street recruiter typically received $40 for each homeless recruit with Medicare eligibility and $20 for each recruit with Medi-Cal benefits, according to the city attorney's lawsuit.

Some solicitations were direct, but others were coded, according to the city attorney's lawsuit. One alleged street pitch referred to the color scheme of the Medi-Cal eligibility card: "Red, white and blue, just make it do what it do, for me and you."

I have to hand it to them. It takes some moxy to have such an elaborate setup and to be selling government fraud on street corners...

From the New York Times:

Alleged Scheme Involved Homeless

LOS ANGELES — An investigation into what the authorities say was a scheme that used homeless people to bilk tens of millions of dollars from federal and state health insurance programs began four years ago with a tip from a rescue mission employee.

The employee, Scott Johnson, who works for the Union Rescue Mission in the heart of Skid Row, said he had noticed vans and cars loading up homeless people.

“Sometimes they were so full of people that they put people in the trunks of cars,” Mr. Johnson said Thursday as he passed out bottles of water to the homeless. “I wondered what was going on, so I called the state authorities.”

They certainly were not bashful about it. I guess you need a production line and a feeder if you want to generate millions of $ worth of claims.

And then their was this interesting quote from the times:

Although Medicare scams are relatively common, Mr. O’Brien said they usually implicated small clinics or doctors’ offices. The scale and duration of this enterprise is unusual, investigators said.

The fact that medicare scams are "relatively common" is just a thought in passing. The fact that this is the case doesn't merit much discussion. This case is just exceptional in scope. Perhaps they should look at numbers for health care expenditures on the homeless across the nation. They might even notice a patern.

Auditors of Medicare fraud should get down to busting businesses

Medicare bureaucrats promised to fix bogus billing six years ago, but the shenanigans continue. Our federal government gave $11 billion to crooked doctors and medical suppliers last year.

In South Florida, federal agents found that one out of three medical equipment businesses billing Medicare didn't exist. Unfortunately, they discovered that after the bogus "businesses" raked in $97 million in 2006.

Government Health Care is building on the great tradition of government housing and government schools. Let's hear it for Government Health Care! Sphere: Related Content

Jonah Goldberg on Capitalism

Link: The Spoiled Children of Capitalism by Jonah Goldberg

People ask, “Why is there poverty in the world?” It’s a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil. As individuals and as a species, we are born naked and penniless, bereft of skills or possessions. Likewise, in his civilizational infancy man was poor, in every sense. He lived in ignorance, filth, hunger, and pain, and he died very young, either by violence or disease.

The interesting question isn’t “Why is there poverty?” It’s “Why is there wealth?” Or: “Why is there prosperity here but not there?”

At the end of the day, the first answer is capitalism, rightly understood. That is to say: free markets, private property, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the conviction that the fruits of your labors are your own.

For generations, many thought prosperity was material stuff: factories and forests, gold mines and gross tons of concrete poured. But we now know that these things are merely the fringe benefits of wealth. Stalin built his factories, Mao paved over the peasants. But all that truly prospered was misery and alienation.

His approach should be applauded. Sometimes we don't find the correct answer because we aren't asking the right questions. I liked this one too:

[On Capitalism] Leaving religion out of it, no idea has given more to humanity. The average working-class person today is richer, in real terms, than the average prince or potentate of 300 years ago. His food is better, his life longer, his health better, his menu of entertainments vastly more diverse, his toilette infinitely more civilized. And yet we constantly hear how cruel capitalism is while this collectivism or that is more loving because, unlike capitalism, collectivism is about the group, not the individual.

Above is the reason that when we debate poverty in America we are debating relative poverty vs absolute poverty. Absolute poverty can't be found in America, and our working poor have a relatively high standard of living compared to the rest of the world or when compared to generations past. So we concentrate between the differences between the rich and the poor and promote class warfare. For those who stand to benefit, it is a winning strategy. For society as a whole it has harmful implications for freedom and prosperity. Sphere: Related Content

Larry Elder take's on CNN's "Black In America"

Here is the article: A Black Conservative Lament by Larry Elder

In the article a friend of Larry's wrote him a letter describing how he was interviewed for hours and then they cut him down to sound bites. He was ticked to say the least. Here is a shot from him:

They spoke to a professor from Columbia, who was droning on about how the legacy of slavery is to account for blacks' out-of-wedlock birthrate. Slavery?! This nonsense was seconded by another panelist. When I corrected them and said that the out-of-wedlock rate was lower during Jim Crow … eyes began rolling

I am tired of the legacy of slavery being the account for all black ills. Thomas Sowell has provided facts and figures for quite some time. The black family started it's collapse in the 60's (the 1960's, not the 1860s). The problems of black literacy and education also started in the 1960's. If we want to affix blame, we need to look back at what happened in the 1960s.

The money shot of the article comes from Elder:

The problems of the "black community" have to do with the welfare-state-induced breakdown (or, more accurately, non-formation) of the family. This causes a disinterest in education and leads to poor values, reckless and irresponsible breeding, as well as a lack of the job skills necessary in an information-age society. We also have grievance groups – black "leaders"; the oh-so-sympathetic media; fear- and guilt-laden whites who refuse to say (as they do to their own children) work hard and play by the rules; and many reluctant blacks who refuse to preach the message of "no excuses, hard work" for fear of being labeled "Uncle Toms."

I told my sister-in-law that nearly half of Harvard's black freshman class consists of blacks from the Caribbean or Africa – areas less prosperous with far less opportunity. Care to explain that?

I agree with the 'Sage from South Central' whole heartedly on these matters.

I watched Black in America on CNN. I tried to watch as much as I could but I didn't view the whole thing. When they talked about education I didn't see them bring up the idea of school choice and vouchers. Blacks support school choice more than any other demographic. How can you cover what it is like to be Black in America and discuss the issue of urban education without even bringing that up? I was stunned. I shouldn't have been.

When they talked about poverty, they never questioned if government programs we part of the problem. I think they are a large part of the problem, as does Larry Elder. They don't even ask the question.

The whole series is biased because of excluded viewpoints. I wonder who makes the decision that vouchers would not be covered. It would be one thing if they loaded the deck against the voucher movement, it is quite another when it isn't even raised as an issue. Sphere: Related Content

U.S. Leads The World In Illegal Drug Use

The War On Drugs sees no end in sight...

U.S. Leads The World In Illegal Drug Use (CBS)
Survey Says People With Higher Incomes More Likely To Use Legal And Illegal Drugs, Marijuana Use Widely Reported In U.S.

Despite tough anti-drug laws, a new survey shows the U.S. has the highest level of illegal drug use in the world.

The World Health Organization's survey of legal and illegal drug use in 17 countries, including the Netherlands and other countries with less stringent drug laws, shows Americans report the highest level of cocaine and marijuana use.

For example, Americans were four times more likely to report using cocaine in their lifetime than the next closest country, New Zealand (16% vs. 4%),

Marijuana use was more widely reported worldwide, and the U.S. also had the highest rate of use at 42.4% compared with 41.9% of New Zealanders.

In contrast, in the Netherlands, which has more liberal drug policies than the U.S., only 1.9% of people reported cocaine use and 19.8% reported marijuana use.

US leads world in substance abuse, WHO finds (Reuters)

Survey Finds U.S. Leads World in Substance Abuse (Fox News)

The World Health Organization Report:

Toward a Global View of Alcohol, Tobacco, Cannabis, and Cocaine Use: Findings from the WHO World Mental Health Surveys

You can read Friedman below, and that was back in 72 when Nixon was coining the phrase "War on Drugs".

Stop the insanity. Sphere: Related Content