Enough is enough... again!

MIAMI-DADE, FL - One of the most, or maybe THE most, cherished treasure a human being can have, is their offspring. It is a well-known fact that in the animal kingdom, when a mother of virtually any species, feels her offspring is being threatened in any way, “momma” gets really upset and she becomes very dangerous. In a very similar way, human mothers are the same.

We as “rational” beings can accept the fact that even fathers (males) get sometimes violent when his descendants are somehow threatened  in any way. Said this, it’s important to point out that our children, in general, are the most precious thing we have; not only that, they are, literally, the future of society and therefore the future of the world itself. That’s why any incident when children are hurt is so disturbing to all of us or at least the ones with a spine.

This time, it was one school shooting, unfortunately one more (so far in the year 2022 there have been 21 school shootings in the US) Uvalde, Texas was the unfortunate scenario of the latest one, where 19 of our precious descendants die in a very violent and unnecessary death.

Now, is it appropriate to start the conversation, again, of gun control? or are we going to fly with the right-wing narrative of “it’s not about guns, it’s about mental health”? It’s obvious that in order to go outside with the intention of killing a lot of innocent people, you have to be somehow mentally unstable, but take that as an excuse to not talk about gun regulations when in fact, a 2018 report of the FBI on the characteristics of active shooters found that only 25% of shooters from 2000-2013 had confirmed mental illness, is unacceptable.

At this point, let’s say the same old quote that has been repeated over and over again for quite a while now: enough is enough!

It’s clear to all of us that the NRA and the rest of the weaponry industry have been buying consciousness of politicians through lobbies forever, they fund and flood their campaigns with millions of dollars and therefore they don’t even care to consider legislate against them; which is not true, by the way, another talking-point from the right. Nobody wants to “get rid of your arms”, they want to regulate their acquisition, that’s it, make it a little harder so we won’t see another derailed teenager easily and legally buying two AR-15's or any other assault weapon or semi-automatic machine gun the moment he turns 18 in order to kill us all or our children.

Is it that hard to understand? Really that hard? Or, as many of us suspect, is it a matter of money? Unfortunately paid with the blood of our children, families or our own.

Written by Ricardo Martinez

In Wake of Massacres, the Supreme Court Is Poised to Expand Gun Rights

WASHINGTON — In the coming weeks, with the nation reeling from mass shootings in New York and Texas, the Supreme Court is set to issue a major decision on what states may do to limit carrying guns in public. Based on the justices’ questions when the case was argued in November, they are likely to strike down a New York law that requires people seeking a license to carry a handgun in public to show a “proper cause.”

The decision will be the court’s first significant statement on the scope of Second Amendment rights outside the home. In 2008, in ruling that the amendment protects an individual right untied to militia service, the court said only that law-abiding citizens have a constitutional right to keep guns in their homes for self-defense.

The new case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, is a test of constitutionality laws requiring licenses for carrying guns in public. California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island have laws similar to the one in New York.

At the argument, several justices said the New York law imposes an intolerable burden on the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

“You don’t have to say, when you’re looking for a permit to speak on a street corner or whatever, that, you know, your speech is particularly important,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. “So why do you have to show in this case, convince somebody, that you’re entitled to exercise your Second Amendment right?”

But several justices seemed open to allowing the state to exclude guns from crowded public settings or other sensitive places.

Indeed, the 2008 decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, indicated that the court would be prepared to sustain at least some gun control laws, including ones banning guns in schools.

“Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, wrote for the majority.

Reported by: Adam Liptak on Wed, May 25, 2022,

© 2022 The New York Times Company

The tragedy of being sick is not even the sickness

MIAMI-DADE, FL - When a family member or a dear friend gets sick is not an experience recommended for anybody. When that time arrives, it’s time to run, getting fewer hours of sleep, more stress than usual and of course, the money issue, which curiously is the source of many, if not all, the aforementioned consequences of having our loved one sick. Now comes the trip to the hospital and then the real stress kicks in, not necessarily at the beginning of the hospital journey but rather close to the discharge process. Why? You may ask, well, unfortunately in our country we don’t have what other developed countries have: “Free & Universal Health Care System” or translated for us who don’t speak “medicine”: Free Health Care for everybody. (Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, among many other developed and some underdeveloped countries, have Universal Health Care). Not only that, the cost of the health treatment of any kind in the United Sates is ridiculously high, not affordable for the majority of people and the network of businesses around that health system have flourished exponentially, precisely because of that fertile ground for money, money and more money. The fact that an insurance company is the one with the final answer in a situation where your health is in jeopardy and you don’t have the financial resources to take care of the most precious gift we all have, which is our health or our family’s, is disheartening given that we all know for a fact what is the most important factor in the decision, and that is money and its ramifications. Having the consciousness that a bunch of executives from a private company are the ones deciding the future of our health is terrifying; the ones responsible for my health or literally my death, in any case my well-being is at risk because of the policies of a private company. I don’t even want to visit the fact that they’ve been advised by a medical advisory board, who responds to the money interest of their bosses. Do you see the problem here?

This is common practice in the insurance realm.

10 Bad Faith Insurance Claim Practices:

1. Unjustified delay of settlement. Insurance companies may delay your claim for no valid reason. They do this in hopes that if they take too long, you will just forget about it.

2. Lack of communication. In some cases, the insurance company may not notify you of its decision in a timely manner or may fail to respond to correspondence.

3. Lack of proper investigative techniques. When investigating your claim, the insurance company may use illegal or unethical methods to obtain information regarding your claim. In some cases, the company may refuse to investigate your claim at all and simply deny it.

4. Unreasonable demands. In order to delay the process or find a way to deny the claim, the company may ask for an unreasonable amount of documents in order to start the process. It may ask for items unrelated to the case and deny your claim if you cannot provide them.

5. Lowball offers. In this case, the insurance company may offer an unreasonably low settlement. Do not accept any offer before consulting your attorney.

6. Use of threats. The company may threaten the victim by ordering him or her to do something or to not do something or else the company will refuse to pay the claim.

7. Changing the policy. A company may change the terms of the policy after a claim is filed, and use its new terms to deny the claim.

8. Cancelling the policy. The company may cancel the policy after a person makes a claim.

9. Not disclosing the policy limits. If the adjusters will not reveal aspects of the policy, you may be dealing with a bad faith insurance claim practice.

10. Conflict of interest. An insurance adjuster may attempt to handle your claim and the claim of the other party.

One thing of paramount importance to consider in this complex and entangled situation is empathy. How much empathy those executives have for us? Do they have the same conditions if they need some health care for them or their family than any regular person that their company insured? Or do they have special treatment and therefore they simply don’t care? Those are very interesting question that not only need to be answered in an honest way, but those answers should indicate many things, one of them would be: are the insurance companies treating the insured properly, compassionately, empathetically? If there’s a no in one of those answers, which I’m pretty sure is the case, it has to be changed, the system is flawed and even though it sounds like a typical cliché, we as a developed country can’t continue giving such a deficient though expensive health care, to a community with no resources not only to afford financially but to fight back for their rights. It’s not fair, it has to be changed and it has to be now, too many lives in danger, too many families in distress, too many human beings in suffering, because a bunch of executives think about their income and their company’s more than the happiness of the same people paying their premiums. The irony!

Written by Ricardo Martinez

Hospitals and options

MIAMI-DADE, FL - When a family member or a dear friend is sick, even worse, when it's an emergency and you have to rush to the hospital with said family member or friend, stress and despair start to reign your life, hopefully for a few days, unfortunately it usually lasts a lot more, directly proportionate with the age and previous health conditions of the patient.

It's disheartening enough being in such position when you have to take care of your elderly, injured, family member or friend; but if on top of that the personnel at the hospital, the bureaucracy, the irregularities of different departments of the health center flourish during that time, things get really disturbing.

Not only the fact that your family member is suffering, but for you having to endure poor performance of some of the nurses, or directors, or chiefs of department, or any other people involved in the recovering of your loved one, the situation tends to be, at times, unbearable.

My experience has been every time I have spent some time either on the hospital bed or being company of someone else, that we're going to find people from every part of the spectrum: great professional, others than suck, great facilities, other things not that great; amazing organization, other times, not that much.

The point I try to make is no matter where or when you get to a health center, you have two options: one, pick a fight with every other person you encounter, no matter if that person is a janitor or a neurosurgeon; a nurse, or a physical therapist.

The other option would be to focus on the good people (that you indeed will find) and work things around if you find them uncomfortable or even in detriment, according to your assessment of the circumstances, of the health of either you or the person you're taking care of.

In the meantime, do something useful, read a book or do some research online, while waiting in the cafeteria. After that, entertain yourself with some fun and don't forget to be happy!

Written by Ricardo Martinez

The judge who tossed mask mandate misunderstood public health law, legal experts say

When U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle tossed out the federal government's transportation mask mandate on Monday, she relied in part on her interpretation of the term "sanitation."

The 10-letter word can be found in the Public Health Service Act, a sprawling 1944 law that gave the federal government certain powers to respond to public health emergencies.

The Biden administration relied on a piece of the Public Health Service Act to defend its COVID-19 mask mandate on airplanes and other forms of mass transit.

Specifically, the law says that if the government is trying to prevent the spread of communicable diseases, it can "provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary."

The administration argued that masks qualified as "sanitation" under the law, but Mizelle disagreed, opting for a much narrower definition of the term that would exclude measures like face coverings. Legal experts say her interpretation missed the mark.

"If one of my students turned in this opinion as their final exam, I don't know if I would agree that they had gotten the analysis correct," said Erin Fuse Brown, a law professor at Georgia State University.

"It reads like someone who had decided the case and then tried to dress it up as legal reasoning without actually doing the legal reasoning," she added.

What counts as 'sanitation'?

In her opinion, Mizelle says that a common way judges decide the meaning of words in laws is to look up dictionary definitions that were contemporaneous with the passage of the law. In this instance, that's 1944.

Mizelle says "sanitation" could have been taken to mean either actively cleaning something or measures to keep something clean, but ultimately settles on the former definition.

"Wearing a mask cleans nothing. At most, it traps virus droplets," Mizelle wrote. "But it neither 'sanitizes' the person wearing the mask nor 'sanitizes' the conveyances."

Mizelle says her reading is bolstered by the fact that other words listed alongside "sanitation" in the 1944 law — such as "fumigation" or "pest extermination" — refer specifically to cleaning something or trying to wipe out a disease.

But Fuse Brown says that while this understanding of "sanitation" may be true for lay people, it's not how the term is used in the public health field or understood by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which issued the mandate.

"Sanitation was just the old way in public health parlance of taking traditional public health steps to prevent the spread of disease," she said.

She suggested the opinion will make it harder for the Biden administration to control the spread of COVID-19.Fuse Brown points to the widespread mask-wearing during the 1918 influenza outbreak, which came roughly two and a half decades before the passage of the Public Health Service Act.

"The reasoning is poor, but it also has really drastic and dire consequences for public health, which is the part that makes it not just a joke, but it actually makes it really frightening," she said.

The opinion could have lasting effects on the CDC's authority

Mizelle's opinion also restricts the CDC's ability to respond to public health emergencies in ways it deems appropriate, and if the opinion is upheld by a federal appeals court or the U.S. Supreme Court, legal experts warn it could hobble the government's ability to control future outbreaks.

"If this particular type of opinion took on greater precedential value as it rises up through the court system, if that happens, it's big trouble for CDC down the road," said James Hodge, a law professor at Arizona State University.

Mizelle also criticized the agency for not following standard rule-making procedures before instituting the mandate. Hodge said she misunderstood how the federal government operates during a national public health emergency. Mizelle substituted her own definition of "sanitation," Hodge said, brushing aside a legal norm known as "agency deference" that compels judges to yield to the interpretation of federal agencies when a law's language is unclear.

"This is really a serious deviation from not just what we're trying to do to protect the public's health, but a misstatement of federal authority in emergencies to a great degree," Hodge said.

Fuse Brown agreed, suggesting the opinion amounted to a "breathtaking amount of political judicial activism" that "should chill us all."

"Even if we're skeptical about agencies or even about Congress's ability to make good judgments in this ... time, we certainly do not want these decisions to be in the hands of a single unelected judge," she said.

NPR's Pien Huang contributed reporting to this story.

Is it posible to be dumber than this?

MIAMI, FL - Being an alumnus from Harvard University, being a seasoned debater since his teen years, proudly a Supreme Court contender and not less important and relevant, a US Senator, there is no reason or  explanation in the whole wide world to be so dumb.

Wait, could it be a posible explanation a political interest? Or political gain? Maybe money interest somehow?

The Republican Senator from Texas Ted Cruz said that Biden announcement of his pick for SCOTUS, a black woman, is "offensive" to the rest of the population. He argues that only 6% of the US population is "black women" therefore, the "offense" is for the rest 94% of the population.

There is so much to unpack here that I don't even know where to begin. First of all, offensive for whom? The white privileged men that have been the picked options almost since the beginning of the SCOTUS? or is Senator Cruz pretending to compare the social representation that white men have had against black people or more specifically black women? or he's not aware of the significance of having a minority represented in such a high platform as the SCOTUS? or he just forgot that he, himself, is part of a minority taking into consideration that his own father was cuban, meaning he is latino by heritage?

I really don't know what to think other that the confusion or ill-intention or ignorance or pure evil of this Senator is something worthy of deep psychological analysis or I would say, simply enough reason to vote him out because he seems to be really mentally unstable.

Reported by Ricardo Martinez

A witness corroborated the claim that Rep. Matt Gaetz was told in 2017 he'd had sex with a minor

A witness has confirmed to federal prosecutors that Rep. Matt Gaetz was informed in 2017 that he'd had sex with a minor, sources told The Daily Beast.

In a letter obtained by The Daily Beast in April 2021, Gaetz's associate Joel Greenberg said he discovered a girl he and the congressman had engaged in "sexual activities" with was 17 at the time.

"Immediately I called the congressman and warned him to stay clear of this person and informed him she was underage," Greenberg wrote, according to the outlet. He added Gaetz was "equally shocked and disturbed by this revelation" and that "there was no further contact with this individual until after her 18th birthday."

According to The Daily Beast, someone else was in the room when Greenberg called Gaetz to convey that information: Joe Ellicott, Greenberg's close friend and a former employee at the Seminole County tax office. Both men are now cooperating with federal investigators in the sex-crimes probe into Gaetz.

Ellicott's decision to cooperate is likely bad news for the embattled Florida congressman, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in connection to the sex-trafficking probe.

"After nearly a year of false rumors, not a shred of evidence has implicated Congressman Gaetz in wrongdoing," his chief of staff told Insider on Thursday. "We remain focused on our work representing Floridians."

Among other things, Ellicott and Greenberg reportedly exchanged text messages via the encrypted messaging app Signal, in which Ellicott disclosed that a woman they both were associated with "knew [the minor] was underage the whole time, had sex with her, and they both went to see other guys."

Greenberg pleaded guilty to sex trafficking in May and agreed to cooperate fully with the government on other investigations. Ellicott agreed to cooperate this week and will plead guilty to two federal crimes — conspiracy to commit wire fraud and distribution of a controlled substance — in a case separate from the Gaetz investigation, ABC News reported.

No charges have been brought against Gaetz, but several recent developments indicate the investigation is heating up. Among other things, Gaetz's ex-girlfriend testified before a federal grand jury earlier this month. NBC News reported that the ex, whose name Insider is withholding to protect her privacy, has been talking to prosecutors for months and was granted immunity in exchange for her testimony.

NBC also said prosecutors are investigating whether Gaetz sex-trafficked the 17-year-old; if he violated the Mann Act, which prohibits the transportation of "any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose" across state lines; or if he obstructed justice. Gaetz has denied all three claims.

With respect to the obstruction probe, investigators are said to be scrutinizing a three-way call after the investigation started between Gaetz, his ex, and another woman who was cooperating with federal authorities and who was reportedly recording the phone call. NBC reported that authorities suspect Gaetz of obstructing justice during that conversation; he's denied the allegation.

An attorney for Ellicott declined to comment on reporting about his client's cooperation deal. A spokesperson for Gaetz and a lawyer representing Greenberg did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Read the original article on Business Insider