2899 Record Cold Temps vs 667 Record Warm Temps in U.S.
More evidence of global warming for the period July 24, 2013 – August 19, 2013.
Judge throws out blood tests in Scottsdale DUI cases
Arizona Republic: “Blood-test results will be suppressed in at least 11 felony drunk-driving cases that originated in Scottsdale following a Superior Court Judge’s ruling this week, which could affect hundreds of other cases. The DUI cases were consolidated and set before Superior Court Judge Jerry Bernstein because they all had one thing in common: a challenge to the validity of the blood-testing equipment in the Scottsdale Police Department’s crime lab.”
Arizona’s anti-abortion Medicaid law struck down
Arizona Republic: “Arizona has lost another battle in its ongoing war to restrict abortions, adding to a growing list of defeats this year for the state’s anti-abortion movement. On Thursday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Arizona cannot strip Medicaid funding from doctors and clinics that perform abortions, upholding a lower-court ruling. House Bill 2800, which the Legislature passed and Gov. Jan Brewer signed in 2012, would have halted Medicaid reimbursements for contraceptives, cancer screenings, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and annual women’s exams at the state’s more than 80 hospitals and clinics that also perform abortions.”
CDC Study Ordered by Obama Contradicts White House Anti-gun Narrative
New American: “In January, following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, President Obama issued a ‘Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence’ . . . . study refuted nearly all the standard anti-gun narrative and instead supported many of the positions taken by gun ownership supporters. For example, the majority of gun-related deaths between 2000 and 2010 were due to suicide and not criminal violence . . . . In addition, defensive use of guns ‘is a common occurrence,’ according to the study:
Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.
Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal
Rolling Stone: “The federal government has made it easier than ever to borrow money for higher education – saddling a generation with crushing debts and inflating a bubble that could bring down the economy. . . . But the dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It’s not the cost of the loan that’s the problem, it’s the principal – the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008. . . . Tuition costs at public and private colleges were, are and have been rising faster than just about anything in American society – health care, energy, even housing. Between 1950 and 1970, sending a kid to a public university cost about four percent of an American family’s annual income. Forty years later, in 2010, it accounted for 11 percent. Moody’s released statistics showing tuition and fees rising 300 percent versus the Consumer Price Index between 1990 and 2011.”