A visit to the cemetery

Usually, I take my Mother to do her errands, such as grocery shopping, every Saturday morning. This week, it was different. I took her to the grocery store Friday afternoon, after I got off work.

Saturday afternoon, I took her to her church to have her photograph made for inclusion in the members' directory. She will, also, get a free eight inch by ten inch color photograph, "suitable for framing." After we left the church, we went to the Family Dollar store and bought some artificial flowers to take to the cemetery.

Sunday afternoon, after we had eaten lunch and my Mother had watched the church service on television, I prepared the flowers, dividing the four bunches that we had bought into two sprays. I then wrapped old newspapers around the stems of each spray and tied them, tightly, with twine.

We rode out to the cemetery, and, after setting up a folding chair for my Mother, I put a spray into the vase on my Father's marker and a spray into the vase on my sister's marker. My Father died four years ago. Had he lived, he would have been ninety-four years old, yesterday. My sister died nineteen years ago, when she was forty-three.

"Old media" vs. "new media"

Hannibal has written a succinct summary of the topic.

If you follow US politics and opinion journalism even peripherally, then you know that the one thing that the entire political spectrum--right, center, and left--can agree on is that the American news media is in trouble. Of course, pundits from different ends of the spectrum disagree on their diagnoses of the problem and on their prescriptions for a cure. If you listen to the left, the success of Fox News, talk radio, and Sinclair Broadcasting has not only polluted the waters of political discourse, but it has also motivated less openly partisan news outlets like CNN and Time to move to the right in search of an audience. The right, for its part, never misses an opportunity to decry the bias of the so-called "MSM," an acronym that used to mean one thing in HIV/AIDS public health circles but has now come to mean "mainstream media."

Professor Bainbridge vs. The Minuteman Project

I am tired of "reporters" in the partisan media, which used to be the "mainstream media," and pointy head academics, most, if not all, of whom have no, or very little, knowledge about the subject, trashing the Minuteman Project. So is Michelle Malkin. Her latest post on the subject is, "Stop Smearing the Minutemen."

Cuomo speaks from experience

When he gave the party's weekly radio address, erstwhile New York Governor Mario Cuomo became the chief bloviator for the Democrat party, temporarily taking the place of Ted Kennedy.

If Republicans rewrite Senate rules to more easily end filibusters, the country will experience "exactly the kind of 'tyranny of the majority' that James Madison had in mind," former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo said Saturday.

If you only get your news from the partisan media, which, by the way, used to be called the mainstream media, before it ceased to be mainstream, then here's what else you need to know.

Never before, in the history of the United States Senate, has the filibuster been used to delay a floor vote on nominees to the federal bench, nominees who, otherwise, would be confirmed. Now, there is only one political party whose members have resorted to this unconstitutional measure. That party is the Democrat party. The Democrats are in the minority in the Senate (the House, too), thus making such a maneuver a "tyranny of the minority."

Cuomo continued:

Cuomo, in the Democratic Party's weekly radio address, said Senate Republicans "are threatening to claim ownership of the Supreme Court and other federal courts, hoping to achieve political results on subjects like abortion, stem cells, the environment and civil rights that they cannot get from the proper political bodies."

The previous statement is really very interesting, because, for decades, the Democrats were the ones who claimed "ownership" of the courts. Why? Because, only through judicial activism could the Democrats force their radical agenda on the public. Democrats knew that they could never get their extreme, socialist ideas through state legislatures or the Congress. Cuomo, therefore, knows whereof he speaks, because it has been his own party that has been guilty of the "crimes" that he is disingenuously accusing the Republican party of committing and of wanting to commit.

The rant continues:

"How will they do this? By destroying the so-called filibuster, a vital part of the 200-year-old system of checks and balances in the Senate," Cuomo said.

The Republicans have no intention of "destroying" the filibuster, Cuomo knows it, and, therefore, he is lying. The constitution mentions seven specific instances where the filibuster is allowed. Blocking a floor vote on nominees to the federal bench is not one of them. Cuomo knows this. The filibuster has never been used in such a way. Cuomo knows this, too.

It is enlightening to note that Cuomo doesn't speak of a filibuster, only of a "so-called" filibuster. It is only the threat of a filibuster that has paralyzed the Republicans. If they had a collective spine, they would call the Democrats' bluff and force them to actually filibuster. Then we would truly see how long the American public would put up with Democrats bringing "the business of the people" to a screeching halt.

The anonymous Associated Press author of the piece builds upon Cuomo's deception:

Democrats blocked 10 of President Bush's appellate court choices during his last term by filibustering. Bush re-nominated seven of them this term, and Democrats are threatening to block them again. They contend those seven are two (sic) sharply conservative to fill the lifetime appointments.

Deception number one: When the Democrats blocked judicial nominations during Bush's first term, they did not filibuster. They merely threatened to filibuster. Deception number two: The seven that Bush re-nominated are not "sharply conservative." They are "originalists," that is, they are judges who believe in the "original" sense of the Constitution, not in the sense that extreme, Socialist, liberals (i. e., the left-leaning individuals who run the Democrat party) have "given" it.

"A hate-filled, ideologically driven murderer"

The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

A US soldier said to have hated America has been sentenced to death for the murder and attempted murder of comrades during the invasion of Iraq.

Sgt Hasan Akbar used grenades and a rifle to kill two officers and wound 14 other personnel at a camp in Kuwait in the opening days of the war.

Utter nonsense!

Even after last month's deadly courthouse shooting in Atlanta, Georgia, "there's no plan to make security decisions based on officers' gender or strength," according to the Fulton County Sheriff's office.

Investigators blame last month’s deadly Atlanta courthouse shooting on a series of mistakes and missteps. But some affirmative action critics say it boils down to the fact that there was a woman deputy escorting accused gunman Brian Nichols... .

"You have a female officer who is about 5 feet 2 inches tall, versus a criminal in this case — a former linebacker who is 6 feet tall," said John Lott, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington.

Those in favor of affirmative action — the policy of hiring and recruiting with the intent of eliminating effects of past discrimination or preventing discrimination altogether — say the practice shouldn’t get the blame for the March 11 shooting rampage at Fulton County Superior Court ... in Atlanta.

"Affirmative action certainly cannot be the scapegoat for sloppy procedures or for not being attentive," said Bob Ethridge of the American Association for Affirmative Action. "A lot of different things went wrong."

Affirmative action policies can be blamed, however, when they are at least partially responsible for what happened. In this instance, it seems that they were.

Mr. Ethridge, "a lot of different things" may, in fact, have gone wrong, but that does not mean that affirmative action policies weren't to blame, at least in part, and possibly in large part, for what happened.

It is patently obvious to me that a five foot two inch tall grandmother shouldn't be escorting a six foot tall, thirty-three year old former football line backer, at the very least not by herself!

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.