Mcnorman's Weblog

Administration asks court to reconsider ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ order.

The Obama administration Thursday evening asked a federal appeals court in California to reconsider its order last week temporarily blocking the U.S. military from enforcing its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays and lesbians serving in the military.

U.S. officials have been moving ahead with dismantling the policy but had objected to having the courts force the government to officially repeal it at this time.

At issue in the complex legal fight is whether “don’t ask, don’t tell” can remain in effect — even in name only — while the legal fight over its constitutionality is being carried out in the federal courts. Judges have been at odds over the enforcement issue for months.

Does this administration understand anything?

Let’s face it, would you want the likes of Weiner in charge of your healthcare?  By no means do I believe that anyone is protecting Medicare at this point.

“What should control health care isn’t IPAB. It isn’t even Congress. What should control health care is the relationship between doctors and patients. Injecting more government into the equation only punishes patients and squeezes out the cutting-edge science that could treat them. This is just one more reason to contact your congressmen and tell them to not rest until ObamaCare is laid to rest,” Perkins said.

via Sebelius Faces Congressional Hot Seat Over Obamacare Rationing.

Mail-order hymens available to Canadians.

Starting at just $29.95, women can order a false hymen online, shipped from China.

The imports are officially banned in many Middle Eastern and North African countries, but women in North America and Great Britain are a fertile market.

“We have many urgent requests from women, begging us for urgent delivery before their wedding night,” says Mike Munro, with the Hymenshop.com. The online store opened in March 2010, and sells a couple thousand per month.

“There are some cultural notions out there that the ordinary person cannot just challenge and try and change them without paying a very dear price and in some case with their own lives.”

In Canada, some young women from predominantly Muslim backgrounds are desperate to appear as virgins, fearing they could be killed by their families if they do not have an intact hymen on their marriage beds after arranged marriages in their cultural home countries.

Some are getting plastic surgery in Canadian private clinics to re-attach their hymens.

The mail-order version is a thin film containing a packet of red fluid. The website advises to insert the film 20 minutes prior to sex in order to mimic the breaking of the hymen and showing the required “blood.”

The parcels come with alternate markings from generic sounding companies, evading interception.

What kind of religion of peace creates such anxiety?

Imagine driving across the border and getting nailed for a crime you did not commit.

Last week, Martínez, a Juárez resident and a teacher at La Fe Preparatory School in El Paso, was an inmate in Cereso prison. Martínez was trying to convince the Mexican justice system that she was being held for a crime she didn’t commit.

snip

Martínez’s case was also aided by her well-documented trajectory as a hard-working teacher, neighbor testimonies declaring strange men had broken into her vehicle and strong evidence that the drugs did not belong to her.

Yet the turning point came last week when an affidavit submitted to a federal court by the FBI described the arrest of a man accused of participating in a cross-border drug-smuggling ring.

The document described how the men targeted students and professionals who crossed regularly to El Paso using the dedicated commuter lane and then used the vehicle identification numbers on their cars to make copies of the vehicles’ keys.

via Miss Ana’s release: El Paso teacher thankful for freedom.  Yeah, living on the border is just peachy king Janet.

More high-tech tools for drug cartels.  They’re now using social networking to chronicle their crimes and spread fear.  There’s also concern they’re using some sites to track victims.

There’s the drug war on the streets and then there’s the war online.  YouTube videos, social networking sites, there’s even  a blog, Del Narco, which offers an anonymous, self-described uncensored view of drug cartel activities.

“That is the Twitter generation,” said Tony Payan, of the University of Texas-El Paso.  ” Those people are quick. They know how to use these media, these new media and they know how to send these message. They know how to become viral practically in their messages.”

Cartel messages rally supporters, threaten rivals, or try to intimidate authorities.  But there’s also concern cartels are secretly using social networking sites to target kidnapping victims in Mexico.

Whether mining personal data secretly or sending a message to millions, social media is one more weapon in the hands of cartel criminals.

You decide.  Fresh doubt cast on Obama’s health care story.

Scott, who had access to Dunham’s correspondence from the time, reveals that Dunham unquestionably had health coverage. “Ann’s compensation for her job in Jakarta had included health insurance, which covered most of the costs of her medical treatment,” Scott writes. “Once she was back in Hawaii, the hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month.”

Scott writes that Dunham, who wanted to be compensated for those costs as well as for her living expenses, “filed a separate claim under her employer’s disability insurance policy.” It was that claim, with the insurance company CIGNA, that was denied in August 1995 because, CIGNA investigators said, Dunham’s condition was known before she was covered by the policy.

The term is called pre existing.

Dunham protested the decision and, Scott writes, “informed CIGNA that she was turning over the case to ‘my son and attorney, Barack Obama.’ ” CIGNA did not budge.

Uhm, apparently his mommy didn’t understand how deductibles worked either.

A dozen years later, her son turned her ordeal into a campaign pitch for national health care. But the story Obama told, Scott writes, was “abbreviated” — the abbreviation was to leave out the fact that Ann Dunham had health insurance that paid for her treatment. “Though he often suggested that she was denied health coverage because of a pre-existing condition,” Scott writes, “it appears from her correspondence that she was only denied disability coverage.”

…in 1994 Dunham took a job with an American company called Development Alternatives, which had a contract with the Indonesian State Ministry for the Role of Women. Dunham returned to Jakarta to work, and Scott reports the job provided Dunham with health insurance, a housing allowance, and a car.