Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Thomas Sowell looks at a disturbing idea.

One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have “a duty to die,” rather than become a burden to others.

This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken over by the government.

Make no mistake about it, letting old people die is a lot cheaper than spending the kind of money required to keep them alive and well. If a government-run medical system is going to save any serious amount of money, it is almost certain to do so by sacrificing the elderly. …

John Fund discusses an interesting point about Elena Kagan and the Supreme Court.

…But Mr. Obama’s choice comes at some short-term cost. Because Ms. Kagan is his solicitor general, she would have to recuse herself as Justice from any cases in which she had been involved as an administration official. Those would likely include lawsuits over ObamaCare and the treatment of terrorism suspects.

Ms. Kagan’s recusals would limit her role in at least her first year on the court. Thurgood Marshall, the last Supreme Court justice she clerked for, was Lyndon Johnson’s solicitor general when he was picked for the court in 1967. In his first year after confirmation, he had to recuse himself from 57% of the cases that were heard. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on various aspects of the nomination, including the recusal issue.

Elena Kagan, as expected, was nominated to the Supreme Court. Her remarks were unexceptional and humble, appropriate to the occasion. Obama was partisan and ludicrous, even by his own standard. Justice John Paul Stevens was many things. But an exemplar of judicial restraint he was not. And Obama’s waxing lyrical on this score struck one as bizarrely insincere. Moreover, his attack on Citizens United and praise for Kagan’s role in it was wholly unnecessary and, frankly, wrong. It’s the law of the land, and his continual invective against it betrays a lack of respect for the Court.

Moreover, come to think of it, is Kagan now recused from cases that evaluate and would seek to modify or reverse that case? It would seem so — particularly because she, according to Obama, made such a big deal of choosing this case as her first to argue before the Court as solicitor general. Now that’s a small bonus for conservatives, if true. And Republican senators should pin her down on that point.

John Steele Gordon comments on Elena Kagan’s stance on military recruitment, given her Supreme Court aspirations.

…As Bill Kristol points out, tracking Ed Whelan’s fifth point, Elena Kagan appears anti-military here, not just pro-gay. She has consistently blamed the military for implementing what was, in fact, an act of Congress (and a Democratic one at that) that had been signed into law by a Democratic president. Does she think the military has a moral obligation to mutiny in this case? …

Jennifer Rubin criticizes Obama’s remarks on Elena Kagan.

…Obama also pronounced, “Elena is widely regarded as one of the nation’s foremost legal minds.” This is preposterous. She’s written little, and what she has written is banal and unexceptional. Her speeches as dean are not analytical or historical discourse but pep talks and generic spiels on ethics and the wonders of Harvard Law School’s reputation.

So she brings neither an abundance of non-elite experience nor an intellectual record of achievement. That doesn’t mean she isn’t qualified or won’t make a capable justice, but it does serve to emphasize — once again — the president’s penchant for exaggeration if not fabrication. …

Jennifer Rubin has more to say on the recusal issue.

Yesterday, I raised the issue of Elena Kagan’s recusal in a case that might try to reverse or modify Citizens United. It seems the White House has already thought this through:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama took the issue into consideration when he looked at Kagan for the nomination. “The president had to make a decision similar to past presidents that have tapped solicitor generals to serve on the high court,” Gibbs said. “Next year, I think we anticipate recusals in about a dozen cases, and then maybe less than half of that in the year after that.”

Really — how did they count? What standard are they using? Kagan should be very clear about what sorts of cases and what issues she believes she will be recused from. This is critical not only in determining her ethical posture but also in figuring out whether Democrats will be “down a vote” for some period of time. Is she going to opine on the constitutionality of ObamaCare? On Guantanamo cases? On this, the Senate should insist on clear and definitive answers. After all, it goes directly to her ability to perform the job for which she has been nominated.

Abby Thernstrom gives some advice to the RNC.

Mr. Steele (and RNC staff), just as a little experiment, you might try thinking before you speak.

In a tribute to Justice Thurgood Marshall shortly before his death, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan quoted our first black Justice as having said the Constitution as originally conceived and drafted was “defective.”

“Does Kagan Still View Constitution ‘As Originally Drafted And Conceived’ As ‘Defective’?” the RNC now asks. A litmus test for Kagan, it implies.

But of course the answer should be, yes. Might the Three-Fifths Clause have been a wee bit of a defect?

The NRO staff posted Krauthammer’s take on the nomination.

On Elena Kagan as a possible Supreme Court nominee:

Kagan is the safer choice. She has friends on the right as a result of how she conducted herself as the dean of Harvard Law School, where she was open to ideological diversity on the faculty — which is rather shocking on an Ivy League campus which is [as] open to ideological diversity as the Supreme Soviet was in the old days. . . .

The one advantage Kagan has is her youth. She’s 50. She could be on for three decades. Long after America goes bankrupt, she’ll still be on the court.

Ralph Reed first notes that Obama looked in the mirror and decided on a nominee. He goes on from there.

…For all the attempts by the liberal fog machine to obfuscate her extremist views, Kagan is a committed liberal. Her attempt to defy federal law — reversed by the Supreme Court — by banning military recruiters from Harvard’s law school during a time of war is only the most well-known example of her radical views. Her belief that political speech is selectively protected by the First Amendment based on the form of media used to express it is more frightening. (One of her few scholarly articles in a thin academic resume defends the right of the government to regulate “hate speech.”) Nor is her belief in strictly constraining constitutional liberty confined to the First Amendment. In response to questions during her confirmation as solicitor general, Kagan argued the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, like freedom of speech, enjoys “strong but not unlimited protection.” This is a dangerous view of the law when it leads to the creeping erosion of the Bill of Rights. …

In Contentions, Rick Richman comments on Trials of the Diaspora by Anthony Julius.

In the New York Times Book Review, Harold Bloom reviews Anthony Julius’s monumental new book, Trials of the Diaspora. It is a cover review — an indication of the book’s importance — and a uniformly favorable one: a “strong, somber book” reflecting “extraordinary moral strength.” But even those complimentary terms, from one of America’s leading literary critics, do not begin to convey the scope and magnitude of Julius’s achievement.

The book’s subtitle is A History of Anti-Semitism in England, which itself understates the significance of the book, since the book covers aspects of the psychology and sociology of anti-Semitism that extend far beyond a single country’s experience. …

…Julius is particularly eloquent on two matters: first, the sheer surreality and incoherence of anti-Semitism:

The Holocaust should have altogether put paid to anti-Semitism. It should have rebutted once and for all the principal anti-Semitic fantasy of malign Jewish power; it should have satiated the appetite of the most murderous anti-Semites for Jewish death. And yet instead it precipitated new anti-Semitic versions or tropes …

In the NY Times, Harold Bloom reviews Trials of the Diaspora.

Anthony Julius has written a strong, somber book on an appalling subject: the long squalor of Jew-hatred in a supposedly enlightened, humane, liberal society. My first, personal, reflection is to give thanks that my own father, who migrated from Odessa, Russia, to London, had the sense, after sojourning there, to continue on to New York City.

With a training both literary and legal, Julius is well prepared for the immensity of his task. He is a truth-teller, and authentic enough to stand against the English literary and academic establishment, which essentially opposes the right of the state of Israel to exist, while indulging in the humbuggery that its anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Endless boycotts of Israel are urged by this establishment, and might yet have produced a counter­boycott of British universities by many American academics, whether Jewish or not. However, under British law the projected boycotts may be illegal. The fierce relevance of Julius’s book is provoked by this currently prevalent anti-Semitism. …

Christopher Hitchens applauds French legislators standing up for Muslim women’s rights.

The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burqa—whether the garment covers “only” the face or the entire female body—are often described as seeking to impose a “ban.” To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face. The proposed law is in the best traditions of the French republic, which declares all citizens equal before the law and—no less important—equal in the face of one another. …

…So it’s really quite simple. My right to see your face is the beginning of it, as is your right to see mine. Next but not least comes the right of women to show their faces, which easily trumps the right of their male relatives or their male imams to decide otherwise. The law must be decisively on the side of transparency. The French are striking a blow not just for liberty and equality and fraternity, but for sorority too.

In the WSJ, Meghan Cox Gurdon reviews Susan Yager’s new book, The Hundred Year Diet.

…Yet worries over overeating, as Susan Yager interestingly reminds us “The Hundred Year Diet,” preoccupied the public long before Americans en masse became so massive. These days we may track the content of trans-fats and high fructose corn syrup—the staples of processing that make much food so cheap and unhealthful—but in the 1970s we were already measuring out our lives with tablespoons, trying to follow the Atkins or Pritkin or Beverly Hills diets. Indeed, back in 1960 John F. Kennedy was worrying in the pages of Sports Illustrated that the nation’s youth had become flabby and dangerously “soft.” …

…Ms. Yager’s bite-sized chapters are easy and pleasant to digest as she takes us through America’s fat-fighting history, from its now comical-seeming beginnings through the wild pendulum swings of the late 20th century (when carbohydrates and fats alternated as public enemy No. 1) to the promise of the fat-substitute Olestra (with its regrettable intestinal consequences) and today’s gastric bypass surgery for the severely obese. …