Eleanor Duckwall's Spotlight

Useless Eaters

John Griffing

While Americans worry over government insurance plans, longer waits for treatment, and "healthcare rationing," a more sinister agenda lurks in the shadows of the healthcare bill now before the House of Representatives. Today's Medicare recipients could be the first to experience our government's new solution to America's "useless eaters."

Section 1233 of HR3200, the healthcare reform measure under consideration, mandates "Advance Care Planning Consultation." Under the proposal, all senior citizens receiving government medical care would be required to undergo these counseling sessions every five years. Further reading of the law reveals that these sessions are nothing more than a not-so-veiled attempt to convince the elderly to forego treatment. HR 3200 calls outright for the compulsory consultations to recommend "palliative care and hospice." These are typically administered in the place of treatment intended to prolong life, and instead focus on pain relief until death. These are, of course, reasonable and beneficial options for terminally ill patients and their families.

Revaluing work: Why some American jobs went bye-bye

You won't hear this from the White House or in the MSM for fear of lynch mobs. But, who exactly is to blame as this has been going for a long, long time.

"Revaluing Work: A Class Division Exacerbated by Immigration Hits a Wall (Finally)"

Brenda Walker at Vdare:

The rapid changes in society caused by technology and bad public policy have had some negative side effects, to say the least. When computers began to come on like gangbusters, the big influential brains foresaw a brilliant future for America based on information technology. That vision might have been more accurate if not for outsourcing and cheap H-1b labor, but a Jetsons meme took hold, and the educational system retooled and re-imagined accordingly. No more icky manufacturing spewing dirt into the air: America's future would be white-collar, educated and take place in a clean comfy office.

The mask slips for Obama

Is Barak Obama a racist in disguise? He ran as the great post-racial candidate, a unifier, but words from his own mouth are telling a different story.

• At the NAACP, Obama Removes His Mask as the Great Unifer
• Gates and Obama's nostalgia for racism
• The Vulnerability of Black Men in America
• President Obama steps on third rail of race
• Who was 'Stupid' in the Gates arrest?
• Promoting Racial Paranoia
• Race baiter in chief

Eleanor: As did certain comedians and radio-talk-show-hosts, Obama will learn that when it comes to comments about race, or self-misrepresentation on the subject, there is no going back, no do-over, no expunging of the record, even if you are president of the United States.

The mask has slipped and the true Obama has shown through.

Should the U.S. be characterized as a "sick" society?

"Robert Edgerton's 'Sick Societies (1992) Revisited: Is Culture Adaptive?'"

Thomas F. Bertonneau, The Brussels Journal

A critique of cultural relativism by ethnologist and anthropologist of longstanding high repute, Robert B. Edgerton's Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (1992) has implications not only for how one might evaluate the pre-modern, non-Western folk societies (primitive societies) studied by professional ethnographers and anthropologists, but for how one might understand both institutions and social practices - and perhaps even political ones - more generally. Sick Societies provoked moderate controversy when it appeared, but probably few remember the book today. Nevertheless, Sick Societies deserves not to disappear into the oblivion of the library stacks. Revisiting it nearly twenty years later indeed holds promise of intellectual profit. Sick Societies might well be a meditation on culture urgently relevant to the current phase of the West's seemingly interminable crisis at the end of the first decade of the Twenty-First Century.

Will internet free speech crackdowns come to America?

As Canada and Australia seek broad surveillance powers over the web, an Obama advisor wants to eliminate "destructive falsehoods" online.

Kathy Shaidle at Pajamas Media:

We don't hear much about "the Anglosphere" anymore. The term was coined after 9/11 to distinguish freedom-loving Western allies from those nations sympathetic or indifferent to Islamic Jihad.

Sadly, the Anglosphere's cheerleaders have since learned that the West isn't always a reliable champion of liberty, either. Two "Anglospheric" nations in particular - Australia and Canada - have revealed a troubling urge to stifle free speech, especially on the Internet.

Recently, for example, Canada's ruling Conservative government introduced the Investigative Powers for the 21st Century (IP21C) Act.

The act, observes Dr. Michael Geist, "is pretty much exactly what law enforcement has been demanding and privacy groups have been fearing."

Geist is the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa and an internationally recognized expert on technology law. He warns that the act "will embolden broad new surveillance capabilities in the Canadian Internet."

Urge to merge coming back under a different name?

since the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America was broadly rejected by the American public, the obama administration has a fix- change the name, Jerome Corsi's Red Alert reports.

"Two top Washington think-tanks have now formally suggested in writing that the Obama administration should rename the SPP as a public relations ploy to advance the North American integration agenda without drawing so much flak from those of us interested in preserving U.S. sovereignty," Corsi wrote.

In a new report written for the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. titled "Negotiating North America: The Security and Prosperity Partnership," Sands and his University of Alberta political science professor, co-author Greg Anderson, characterized the "extreme charges" of SPP critics as "baseless" and "unhelpful," asserting that the criticism "should be forcefully rebutted by the leaders, members of the [SPP] ministerial group, and others without direct knowledge."

Club of Zacatecans Growing in the U.S. - A Mexican Fifth Column?

The following is an example of the reason why the presence of so many Mexicans in the United States is troubling:

El Sol de Mexico (Mexico City) 7/20/09 Zacatecas, Mexico, in the U.S. Dateline: Chicago, IL. - Amalia Garcia, governor of the (Mexican) state of Zacatecas, formally inaugurated three new clubs of Zacatecans in Illinois and urged the immigrants from that area to maintain their "alliance" with the government of Zacatecas so that, as bi-nationals, they will continue to strengthen links with their places of origin. "Accompanied by local congressmen as well as by mayors from Zacatecas, and in front of more than 800 persons, among which were representatives of the Federation of Zacatecan Clubs in other parts of the United States, Amalia Garcia renewed her commitment to look after the welfare and security of those who have emigrated in search of a better standard of living."

Eleanor: "Alliances" with other governments should make these "immigrants" or "migrants" agents of foreign governments. Such agents are required to register with the U.S. government. Should this happen, the roll call will be in the millions.

We have a Mexican fifth column living and operating within the United States, and no on seems to notice ... or to care.

Double Standard

Is Sotomayor another useful idiot and misunderstander of Islam?

David J. Rusin at IslamistWatch.org:

The United States holds a unique advantage in the fight against radical Islam: buttressed by the First Amendment, Americans' freedom to speak and write about the Islamist threat is unmatched anywhere in the Western world. However, such protections can suffer at the hands of judges who seek to mold the Constitution according to their own personal preferences. With Sonia Sotomayor nearing confirmation to the Supreme Court, there is no better time to explore which judicial approaches are most likely to weaken First Amendment rights.

Three qualities in particular should set off alarm bells for those concerned about free speech:

• Advocacy of the "living Constitution" model. When judges are "amending the Constitution and other laws as the judges see fit," a straightforward statement such as "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" can become disturbingly pliable. If legal reasoning could be found to restrict political speech (e.g., McCain-Feingold), could not the same fate befall other types of speech?

• Citation of foreign law. This increasingly popular trend on the Supreme Court should put the fear in the heart of anyone intent on protecting anti-Islamist speech, as practically every Western country has hate speech laws on the books, many of which have been employed against critics of Islamism. Just ask Ezra Lavant, Mark Steyn, Oriana Fallaci, Geert Wilders, and a host of others.
• Fixation on group identity. Those who see the group, not the individual as the central building block of society are more likely to curtail individual rights for the purpose of mollifying certain racial, ethnic, gender, or religious groups. Such thinking undergirds European-style hate speech laws.

Unfortunately, all three of the above qualities are reflected, to some extent, in Sotomayor's past remarks. A sampling: "Our society would be straight-jacketed were not the courts ... constantly overhauling the law," she wrote in 1996, effectively offering a thumbs-up to legislating from the bench - where, as she once put it, "policy is made." Furthermore, she asserted recently that "foreign law will be very important in the discussion of how to think about the unsettled issues in our own legal system"; she also has cited foreign cases in her decisions. Finally, her musings on the virtues of the "wise Latina woman" and the possibility that gender and ethnicity "will make a difference in our judging" do not bode well on the identity politics front.

Radical Islam will never be defeated without the freedom to discuss faith and culture frankly - even if it means offending some Muslims. With hate speech laws and grievance tribunals, much of the West is on the wrong path. America must not follow - not for a single step.

Readers are invited to express their views about free speech and Islamism to the Senate Judiciary Committee whose members may be contacted through the homepages compiled here.

Note: The Sotomayor Committee vote is scheduled for July 28, 2009, at 10:00 A.M. in room 315 of the Hart Senate Office Building. The meeting will be webcast live online.

Eleanor: Sotomayor's views on other aspects of the Constitution are also troubling. For instance, her stand on whether states or local jurisdictions should be able to violate the Second Amendment by writing and implementing statutes against gun ownership, possession and use is troubling.

In other words, she is not a strictly read and interpret the Constitution to uphold the rights we have enjoyed for two centuries.

Simon Hughes, Useful Idiot and Misunderstander of Islam

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna blog offers this video of Simon Hughes, the UK Liberal Democratic Member of Parliament for North Southwark and Bermondsey, during which he said, "We need you to lead our politics" to British Muslims gather for the Global Peace and Unity Event on October 25th, 2008.

He also said, "Every country of the world is your country."

And naively he said that Muslims believe in unity and equality which shows that he is totally clueless about the goals and tenets of Islam.