News bits...

[tangaroa]

• A Florida hospital deported a disabled, impoverished patient in 2003. They literally chartered an airplane out of the country and shoved him on it. Current legal action brought the news to my attention via Fark. I have to wonder how one patient could rack up $1.5 million in bills over three years. That is over a thousand dollars a day.
• A man still has dignity to be offended: an angry bank customer closed $190,000 of accounts with a bank after it denied him an $80,000 loan.
• Sometimes money is just numbers in a spreadsheet and not actual wealth: Harvard University's $37 billion endowment was largely in bad investments, forcing the world's richest university to take heavy cost-cutting measures.
• The founder of Free Republic, a popular right-wing website in the U.S., has called for the overthrow of the U.S. government and the installation of the Secretary of State as the new President. It took 80 comments before someone noticed that the Secretary of State is Hillary Clinton.
• Mike the Mad Biologist lists a few examples of the influence of money in the U.S. conservative movement.
• Harvard professor Henry Gates was arrested for breaking into his own home, after proving to police that he was the rightful homeowner. Related: The arresting officer defends himself.
• A photographer in the U.K. was arrested for taking photographs of a normal city street.
• An LJ user reports, based on American Postal Workers Union handouts, that U.S. Postal Service management is planning to privatize the organization. The U.S. has a strong set of private mail carriers, but the postal service is required by law to deliver anywhere in the U.S.
• California's right wing is telling people not to blame Proposition 13 for the state's deficit, but the numbers in their own arguments say that the deficit would go away if Proposition 13 had not passed. Joel Fox, formerly of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers' Association, says that the state is undervaluing properties to the effect of losing $36 billion in annual tax receipts while Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee puts the reduction in annual receipts at around $100 billion. California's deficit is about $24 billion.
• The conservative blog "Provocateur" reports that there might actually be an ACORN scandal -- or several of them -- involving embezzlement and money laundering. Among the interesting information on the blog is that ACORN fired eight board members for demanding to see the company's financial records..

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7/25 Update: In relation to the Gates case, Digby has an excellent discussion of the problem of police authoritarianism in U.S. culture. Also, Digby commenter Kel notes a Massachusetts court case of 2003, Commonwealth v. Mulvey, which found no cause for arrest in a similar case on private property.