The Bradenton (FL) Herald had a routine article the other day [Group to educate on immigration, by Maura Possley, February 12, 2008] about a couple of local activists who are out to obfuscate the difference between immigrants and illegal aliens.

(You might want to complain to the reporter about her shoddy reporting in parroting the activists’ agenda. She, too, conflates legal and illegal immigration, even where she isn’t directly quoting the two bleaters. Her email address is given in the article.)

More interesting is one of the online comments associated with the article. It’s comment 6536.27, posted by “TC12″ at 9:38 p.m. on February 12. TC12 writes, in part:

My son needed surgery. I called Manatee Memorial and it was going to cost $11,000 for a 45 minute surgery. I called Manatee Surgery Center & the same procedure cost $2500. You know why? Because the surgery center doesn’t have to take everyone that walks in the door, insurance or not (mostly not!)

This is interesting, because the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (the EMTALA law of 1986, 42 U.S.C. § 1395dd) is the unfunded mandate that is — via uncompensated care provided in their emergency rooms — beggaring hospitals nationwide, especially under the demands of illegal aliens. As Wikipedia describes it,

[EMTALA] requires hospitals and ambulance services to provide care to anyone needing emergency treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay. There are no reimbursement provisions. As a result of the act, patients needing emergency treatment can be discharged only under their own informed consent or when their condition requires transfer to a hospital better equipped to administer the treatment.

(Wikipedia also quotes a Kaiser Family Foundation study to the effect that illegal aliens are disproportionately low users of hospital emergency rooms. My skepticism over such claims is informed by reportage such as this by VDARE’s own Joe Guzzardi. Joe was actually writing about people here legally, but why would the dynamics be different for illegal aliens?)

Anyway, I urge any medically knowledgeable VDARE readers who can educate us on distinctions among types of medical facilites with respect to the EMTALA law — such as made by commenter TC12, quoted above — to do so.

The other comments associated with that Bradenton Herald article are overwhelmingly heartening, with a few of the usual mindless exceptions mixed in.

Bush’s friends in the home of the “Religion of Peace” are busy fighting spell-flinging witches. How better to protect Saudi Arabia’s stone-age values than to execute the occasional powerless woman to keep Allah’s rabble entertained?

The fun never stops in The Kingdom.

A leading human rights group appealed to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah on Thursday to stop the execution of a woman accused of witchcraft and performing supernatural acts.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement that the kingdom’s religious police who arrested and interrogated Fawza Falih, and the judges who tried her in the northern town of Quraiyat never gave her the opportunity to prove her innocence in the face of “absurd charges that have no basis in law.”

Falih’s case underscores shortcomings in Saudi Arabia’s Islamic legal system in which rules of evidence are shaky, lawyers are not always present and sentences often depend on the whim of judges.

The most frequent victims are women, who already suffer severe restrictions on daily life in Saudi Arabia: They cannot drive, appear before a judge without a male representative, or travel abroad without a male guardian’s permission.

Witchcraft is considered an offense against Islam in the conservative kingdom.
[Saudis to Execute a Woman for Witchcraft, Google AP Feb 14 2008]

Make no mistake, the punishment for alleged sorcery activism is the separation of head from body: International fury over Saudi Arabia’s plans to behead woman accused of being a witch.

But there is an outcry, so at least the Saudis won’t be able to chop with impunity.

A young man shot a bunch of people at Northern Illinois University, and then shot himself. I’ve already found a story identifying his race. And why is the gunman’s race mentioned? Because he’s white.

The man, who shot up to 18 people, was armed with a shotgun and pistol. He was described as a young white male dressed all in black.Gunman goes berserk in classroom - World -Sydney Morning Herald February 15, 2008 - 10:18AM (Australian Time, this is about now our time)

As you might expect, Northern Illinois University students are required to be unarmed and defenseless at all times–here’s the official policy:

3-1.5 Dangerous Weapons:

1.5a Possession, use, sale, or distribution in any residence hall, building, or grounds under university control of: fireworks, firearms, shotguns, rifles, hand guns, switchblade knives, any type of ammunition, explosives, and all other serious weapons.

1.5b Misuse of martial arts weaponry, BB guns, pellet guns, clubs, knives, and all other serious weapons.

Students who wish to bring firearms to the campus must obtain written permission from the chief security officer of the university. Firearms must be stored at the University Security Office except with written permission of the chief security officer of the university. At no time will any of the above dangerous weapons be allowed in the university residence halls.

[Student Code Of Conduct (PDF)]

Hazleton, Pennsylvania set up a site called SmallTownDefenders.com, to solicit donations to help defend its model Illegal Immigration Relief Act.

The problem was that Hazleton’s enemies include many well-funded foundations and organizations like the ACLU, MALDEF, and for some reason, Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund. (I mentioned it here.)The reason they have to ask for money is that the legal costs cut deep into the budget of a small town. The reason people gave them money is that Hazleton’s enemies are America’s enemies too. The Wilkes-Barre Times Leader went to court to get the names of the people who supported Hazleton:

Hazleton settles TL suit | Wilkes-Barre News | timesleader.com - The Times Leader
Paper will get Illegal Immigration Relief Act defense fund names.

By Steve Mocarsky smocarsky@timesleader.com
February 12

HAZLETON – City officials have agreed to turn over financial records The Times Leader requested more than 15 months ago as part of a settlement agreement that ends a lawsuit the newspaper filed against the city in 2006.
The newspaper in October 2006 requested to review receipts and expenditures to and from the city’s Illegal Immigration Relief Act Defense Fund – an account set up to accept public contributions to defray the cost of a lawsuit filed against the city by Relief Act opponents.

The city provided an account of expenditures and a list of the donation amount and hometown of each donor but refused to provide the names of the donors.

The newspaper notified the city it was violating the state Right to Know Law, but the city refused to budge from its position that the name of a donor was personal information exempt from the law and that releasing donors’ names could cause them harm.

The newspaper sued the city in Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas that December.

In the settlement reached Monday, the city agreed to provide the names, addresses and contribution amounts of all donors to the fund as well as the names and addresses of all recipients of any money paid from the fund.

The Times Leader agreed not to record or publish the Social Security, bank account, credit card or personal identification numbers of any donor or payee.

Of course, the concern here is that any such list of names will be used to attack Hazleton, if there’s a “racist” on the donor list. Equally, if you are a donor, you can be attacked for contributing to something “racist.” They’ll get you coming or going.

I would much rather see an investigation into the sources of funding for the other side. In 2007, Investor’s Business Daily reported that the massive 2006 demonstrations, with their large and expensive Mexican flags, had been financed by George Soros. [The Soros Threat To Democracy, September 24, 2007 ] Do you think the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader could investigate that? Email Editor and Publisher Richard L. Connor and ask.

This is from Edge.org One hundred and sixty-five eminent thinkers, researchers, and communicators, at the annual request of the edge.org website, answered the following question: “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?”, and here’s one man’s answer:

Races do not exist

Mark Pagel, evolutionary biologist, Reading University

There is an overbearing censorship to the way we are allowed to think and talk about the diversity of people on Earth. Officially we are all the same: there are no races. Flawed as the old ideas about race are, modern genomic studies reveal a surprising, compelling and different picture of human genetic diversity. What this all means is that, like it or not, there may be many genetic differences among human populations—including differences that may even correspond to old categories of ‘race’—that are real differences in the sense of making one group better than another at responding to some particular environmental problem. This in no way says one group is in general ’superior’ to another, or that one group should be preferred over another. But it warns us that we must be prepared to discuss genetic differences among human populations.

Via Kathy Shaidle, who headlined it Racial differences are real, says prof who’d better damnwell have tenure. The late Richard Herrnstein suffered for his opinions in spite of tenure. Peter Brimelow wrote:

[O]ne day in the early 1970s found himself hidden under a sink in the University of Iowa faculty lounge (”having a very pleasant chat with a graduate student”) while radical demonstrators bayed for his blood. He was eventually rescued by armed guards. This was the flower-child generation’s response to Herrnstein’s September 1971 cover story in Atlantic Magazine discussing intelligence and its social implications. For a year every class he gave at Harvard was disrupted. The Harvard administration waffled.

But they couldn’t fire him.

“But Dick would never have backed off an unpopular idea,” says Charles Murray. “He thought that was what tenure was for.”

In Herrnstein’s 1994 obit, Charles Murray described a discussion they had before The Bell Curve came out:

About four years ago, shortly after Dick and I had begun to collaborate on a new book about intelligence and social policy, we were talking over a late-evening Scotch at his home in Belmont, Mass. We had been musing about the warning shots the prospective book had already drawn and the heavy fire that was sure to come. The conversation began to depress me, and I said, “Why the hell are we doing this, anyway?”

Dick recalled the day when, as a young man, he had been awarded tenure. It was his dream fulfilled — a place in the university he so loved, the chance to follow his research wherever it took him, economic security. For Dick, being a tenured professor at Harvard was not just the perfect job, but the perfect way to live his life. It was too good to be true; there had to be a catch. What’s my part of the bargain? he had asked himself. “And I figured it out,” he said, looking at me with that benign, gentle half-smile of his. “You have to tell the truth.” There was no self-congratulation in his voice, just an answer to my question.

All these discussions of the important but mysterious topic of what kind of President Barack Obama would turn out to be remind me of how hard it is to forecast anything about the intersection of politics and personalities.

For example, I just stumbled upon this extraordinary example of how the leading men of the age can’t see even months into the future. It’s a 1910 book review from the New York Times of a biography of Porfirio Diaz, the 80-year-old dictator of Mexico, who had ruled it most of the time since the 1870s, during which period Mexico enjoyed civil stability and technological progress. It features a symposium of 200 leading men of America and Canada praising Diaz to the skies.

PORFIRIO DIAZ OF MEXICO; The Life and Work of the Master — Builder of a Great Commonwealth Set Forth in an Entertaining New Volume by Jose F. Godoy.

March 19, 1910, Saturday

Section: The New York Times SATURDAY REVIEW OF BOOKS, Page BR1, 1504 words

PORFIRIO DIAZ, President of the Mexican Republic, should be a very happy man, for he not only enjoys the ardent admiration of the civilized world but knows he has fairly earned, it. No public servant ever had more perfect reward, than his, and no public servant ever was more deserving. It would be hard to exaggerate his deserts, so great and wonderful have been the results of his life’s work for his country. … The well-informed person knows that nobody can write about Diaz withour praising him in generous phrases.

For example, Elihu Root, Teddy Roosevelt’s Secretary of State and winner of the 1912 Nobel Peace Prize, said:

“It has seemed to me that of all the men now living, President Porfirio Diaz was best worth seeing … I look to Porfirio Diaz, the President of Mexico, as one of the greatest men to be held up for the hero worship of mankind.”

The book review continues:

That is the common view of those who have contributed to Mr. Godoy’s symposium, and undoubtedly that is the view the world takes of the great Mexican. Mr [Andrew] Carnegie [steelman and philanthropist] thinks Diaz is perhaps the greatest of all those who stand as the heads of nations, ‘for,’ he remarks, ‘he is at once the Moses and Joshua of his people.’ …

He has held the office continuously since [1884], and if nothing unforeseen takes place will be re-elected for a term of six years in the coming July. … Mr. Godoy believes the republic is now in such a state of prosperity and enlightenment that there need to be no fear of its backsliding. He is confident the days of revolution and civil war will never return.

The punchline is that later that same year, 1910, the Mexican Revolution broke out after Diaz cheated to win re-election and jailed his opponent. The next year, Diaz fled to exile in France. The Revolution raged for most of the decade and killed between one and two million people.

Perhaps a general rule can be extracted from this, however: Presidents-for-Life should not try to live too long.

I have an interview scheduled with Melanie Morgan and Lee Rodgers, on Friday, February 15th, at 6:35 a.m. Pacific Time, on KSFO 560 AM, San Francisco. You can listen online here.