Bush wrong on immigration

President Bush has criticized the Minuteman Project. On this issue, he is wrong.

President Bush yesterday said he opposes a civilian project to monitor illegal aliens crossing the border, characterizing them as "vigilantes."

He said he would pressure Congress to further loosen immigration law.

More than 1,000 people — including 30 pilots and their private planes — have volunteered for the Minuteman Project, beginning next month along the Arizona-Mexico border. Civilians will monitor the movement of illegal aliens for the month of April and report them to the Border Patrol.

First, the Minuteman Project is not composed of "vigilantes." The website dictionary.com defines vigilante as "[o]ne who takes or advocates the taking of law enforcement into one's own hands." The Minutemen have explicitely stated that they will not "take the law into their own hands," but are to observe and report what they observe to the proper authorities.

Second, President Bush is wrong to "further loosen immigration law." We need to solve the problem of illegal immigrants in our country first. Only then might it be proper to consider whether or not to "further loosen immigration law."

Third, the President should do like he promised and add 2,000 agents to the Border Patrol. We need them. Last December, he signed intelligence overhaul legislation which would have added 2,000 Border Patrol agents; however,

The president's 2006 budget allows enough money to add only 210 agents for the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico.

Only a measley 210 agents, when the legislation called for an additional 2,000, and most of those 210 additional agents would be deployed to the Canadian border! Give me a break!

Also, see "Is Vicente Fox a hypocrite?" "Illegal Population Surges," and "Illegals flood Los Angeles hospitals."

Limitations of so-called "living wills"

In my state of residence, the document known as a living will is no longer in use, having been superseded by the more comprehensive advance health care directive. Because of all of the publicity given the case of Terri Schiavo, I have been giving thought to completing an advance health care directive. Today, while scanning michellemalkin.com, I read her entry, "The Truth About Living Wills," which points out that such documents are often not effective in insuring that the individual involved receives the amount and type of care that she or he wants.

Ms. Malkin referenced a publication entitled, "Killing Terri," which appears on the web site of American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Here is an excerpt:

But scholars have shown that we have greatly exaggerated the benefits of living wills. Studies by University of Michigan Professor Carl Schneider and others have shown that living wills rarely make any difference. People with them are likely to get exactly the same treatment as people without them, possibly because doctors and family members ignore the wills. And ignoring them is often the right thing to do because it is virtually impossible to write a living will that anticipates and makes decisions about all of the many, complicated, and hard to foresee illnesses you may face.

For example, suppose you say that you want the plug pulled if you have advanced Alzheimer's disease. But then it turns out that when you are in this hopeless condition your son or daughter is about to graduate from college. You want to see that event. Or suppose that you anticipate being in Terri Schiavo's condition at a time when all doctors agree that you have no chance of recovering your personhood and so you order the doctors to remove the feeding tubes. But several years later when you enter into a persistent vegetative state, some doctors have come to believe on the basis of new evidence that there is a chance you may recover at least some functions. If you knew that you might well have changed your mind, but after entering into a PVS you can make no decisions. It is not clear we would be doing you a favor by starving you to death. On the contrary, we might well be doing what you might regard as murder.

There is a document that is probably better than a living will, and that is a durable power of attorney that authorizes a person that you know and trust to make end-of-life decisions for you.

The advance health care directive form endorsed by the State of Mississippi incorporates a durable health care power of attorney.

Leaves

Isn't this a pretty leaf?

Illegal aliens

Malaysia is doing something about illegal immigration. Why won't the United States? It is, among other things, a question of national security.