The CBC report says that Iranian opposition will continue to challenge election results: Mousavi. The ABC writes Eyewitness: Massacre in Baharestan Square.

The Iranian authorities have come down so hard and cut off so many avenues of reporting that it is hard to judge the reliability of information coming out of Iran, or to determine if it is coming from actual witnesses, or from people with an agenda.

In the early days there were still enough journalists on the ground to evaluate the raw data based on comparison to the professional reporting. Lately you can’t be sure if some of the reports aren’t agitprop designed to inflame the situation.

The election was a sham. I have been voting for forty years, so I have a really good feel for how long elections like Iran’s take, and they announced the results too quickly. They don’t have the requisite number of elections to find the “magic precincts” that will predict an election with minimum returns. They don’t have exit polling to give them an idea of what happened. They waited a couple of hours and announced a result – just not possible.

[Read more →]

Well, the Miami Herald was busy yesterday on the medical fraud front: Feds: Miami-based Medicare fraud ring busted, and Medicare fraud probe targets 53 suspects in Miami, elsewhere.

There were two separate cases of fraud being pursued by the Feds at the same time, and both involved the Republican, capitalistic, Cuban entrepreneurs, and members of the medical professions from Miami. When the Feds closed in a number of the people involved decided that Fidel wasn’t so bad.

Hundreds of millions are being stolen from insurance companies by these schemes. They should be sentenced to two weeks in an HCA hospital as a patient, but the Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishments.

CNN reports on the latest Supreme Court finding: Teen strip-searched in school wins partial victory

The justices concluded that the search was unreasonable but that individual school administrators could not be sued.
…

The Supreme Court found little agreement on key issues. Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed that the search was illegal but would have also made individual officials liable for damages by Redding.

“Wilson’s treatment of Redding was abusive, and it was not reasonable for him to believe that the law permitted it,” said Ginsburg, who was especially forceful oral arguments in April criticizing the school’s actions.

But Justice Clarence Thomas took the opposite view: that administrators deserved immunity but that the search was permissible.

“Preservation of order, discipline and safety in public schools is simply not the domain of the Constitution,” he said. “And, common sense is not a judicial monopoly or a constitutional imperative.”

Mr. Justice Thomas, what part of “Constitution of the United States”, I assure you it says that in the preamble of the document, can be interpreted as “except schools”. Everything that involves government in the United States is in the domain of the Constitution. In some cases the Constitution tells government to not do something, like conduct unreasonable searches, and in other cases it is told it must do something, conduct a census, but it is the domain of the Constitution.

I do agree that you are a prime example of your second point on common sense.