Schiavo's Other Woman

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musicman said:
Well, you and I don't disagree often, OCA, but we definitely part company on this one. I believe Congress acted properly here, yet I wear my states rights credentials proudly. Here's the difference, as I see it:

When the federall government, in the person of an intrusive, micro-managing judiciary, tells states (and ultimately, therefore, the community and the individual) what their attitudes and actions must be on matters of behavior such as abortion and homosexual marriage, that's a violation of states rights.

When this same tyrannical judiciary is able to make the leap from "Congress shall make no law concerning religion" to "no government at ANY level, from the U.S. Congress to the board of directors of a lemonade stand, shall as much as utter God's disgusting, hurtful name", that's a violation of state's rights.

When a clearly plausible possibility exists that an American is about to be deprived of her life without due process of law, and Congress steps in to determine jurisdiction in the matter, as is its duty under the U.S. Constitution, I cannot, for the life of me, see a violation of state's rights.

Moreover, I see - as you do - politicians paying a price down the road for their hypocritical stand on the Schiavo case. We differ in that I see those being hurt as the liberals who - overnight - underwent the miraculous transformation into states-rights advocates. They did this for the same reason they do anything - political expediency. But what was convenient today is going to bite them on the ass - hard - in the very near future. How are they going to justify blocking the nomination of a strict constitutionalist judge tomorrow, in light of their rabid federalism today? They've shot themselves.

You'll notice that the smart liberal - the one they're sending to the big show in '08 - stayed out of this one.

Music, can you with a strait face honestly say she was deprived of due process the past 15 years?

Shit Music i'm swimming upstream against alot of people here i've never battled or had reason to battle with before. Its kind of surreal, don't take any offense unless I get real nasty which so far I haven't been seen any reason to do.
 
musicman said:
When a clearly plausible possibility exists that an American is about to be deprived of her life without due process of law, and Congress steps in to determine jurisdiction in the matter, as is its duty under the U.S. Constitution, I cannot, for the life of me, see a violation of state's rights.
I am still trying to ascertain how many years through the court systems is now required to verify that right to due process has been obtained with this new outlook by right to lifers.
 
OCA said:
Surprise us! Say something intelligent....I dare ya.

Given a right triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the sides.
SCARECROW.JPG
 
OCA said:
Music, can you with a strait face honestly say she was deprived of due process the past 15 years?

Shit Music i'm swimming upstream against alot of people here i've never battled or had reason to battle with before. Its kind of surreal, don't take any offense unless I get real nasty which so far I haven't been seen any reason to do.



Nah - no worries here, OCA. I've always found our conversations cordial and respectful, agreeing or not. :beer:
 
SmarterThanYou said:
I am still trying to ascertain how many years through the court systems is now required to verify that right to due process has been obtained with this new outlook by right to lifers.



Questions remained in what you'll certainly admit were extraordinary circumstances. What choice did Congress have? The only aspect of the case they addressed was jurisdiction, which is absolutely within their purview. In the end, Judge Greer's ruling was upheld. In what conceivable way does this constitute a power grab?
 
musicman said:
Questions remained in what you'll certainly admit were extraordinary circumstances.
all of these questions were answered several times in different state courts. The only reason some people say they remained unanswered is that they did not agree with the same findings by several judges and courts.

musicman said:
What choice did Congress have?
They had several choices, they chose the wrong one in many peoples opinion.

musicman said:
The only aspect of the case they addressed was jurisdiction, which is absolutely within their purview. In the end, Judge Greer's ruling was upheld. In what conceivable way does this constitute a power grab?
It was more than jurisdiction. They created a new law for just one person to have a federal court review the entire process so they could get a feeding tube re-inserted. Their power grab was the usurpation of a state jurisdiction in which all questions had been legally answered and/or resolved in the hopes that they could get a decision they wanted overriding decisions that had been made following all the laws of florida AND the US constitution.
 
SmarterThanYou said:
all of these questions were answered several times in different state courts. The only reason some people say they remained unanswered is that they did not agree with the same findings by several judges and courts.



The only questions answered in the various courts were jurisdictional. The only "findings" were the upholding of Judge Greer as the sole finder of fact.



SmarterThanYou said:
They had several choices, they chose the wrong one in many peoples opinion.



Lies, damned lies, and POLLS. Load the questions, acheive the predetermined result. It's one of the dirtiest games being played today.



SmarterThanYou said:
It was more than jurisdiction. They created a new law for just one person to have a federal court review the entire process so they could get a feeding tube re-inserted. Their power grab was the usurpation of a state jurisdiction in which all questions had been legally answered and/or resolved in the hopes that they could get a decision they wanted overriding decisions that had been made following all the laws of florida AND the US constitution.



No - it was jurisdiction - period, paragraph. Congress' extraordinary actions reflect the extraordinary circumstances. The clock was ticking; going through "normal" procedures would have been rather silly and pointless in view of Terri's condition, don't you think? How can there have been a "power grab" when no power was grabbed? Congress acted within its authority. Judge Greer's ruling was upheld. We're going to have to be content to leave usurpation to its master practitioners - the liberal activist federal judges who presume to ram their social agenda down America's throats.
 
This is long, but the Spectator has a complicated registration system. Obviously this was written prior to Terri's death:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article_pfv.php?id=5916

Public execution
Mark Steyn

New Hampshire

Do you remember a fellow called Robert Wendland? No reason why you should. I wrote about him in this space in 1998, and had intended to return to the subject but something else always intervened — usually Bill Clinton’s penis, which loomed large, at least metaphorically, over the entire era. Mr Wendland lived in Stockton, California. He was injured in an automobile accident in 1993 and went into a coma. Under state law, he could have been starved to death at any time had his wife requested the removal of his feeding tube. But Rose Wendland was busy with this and that, as one is, and assumed there was no particular urgency.

Then one day, a year later, Robert woke up. He wasn’t exactly his old self, but he could catch and throw a ball and wheel his chair up and down the hospital corridors, and both activities gave him pleasure. Nevertheless Mrs Wendland decided that she now wished to exercise her right to have him dehydrated to death. Her justification was that, while the actual living Robert — the Robert of the mid-1990s — might enjoy a simple life of ball-catching and chair-rolling, the old Robert — the pre-1993 Robert — would have considered it a crashing bore and would have wanted no part of it.

She nearly got her way. But someone at the hospital tipped off Mr Wendland’s mother and set off a protracted legal struggle in which — despite all the obstacles the California system could throw in her path — the elderly Florence Wendland was eventually successful in preventing her son being put down. He has since died of pneumonia, which is sad: the disabled often fall victim to some opportunist illness they’d have shrugged off in earlier times, as Christopher Reeve did. But that’s still a better fate than to be starved to death by order of the state.

Six and a half years later, the Terri Schiavo case is almost identical to Robert Wendland’s — parents who wish to care for a disabled daughter, a spouse who wants her dead, a legal system determined to see her off. The only difference is that this time the system is likely to win — it may already have done so by the time you read this — and that Mrs Schiavo’s death is being played out round the clock coast to coast, with full supporting cast. It is easy to mock the attendant ‘circus’, the cheapest laugh of the self-identified sophisticate. A 12-year-old boy has been arrested for attempting to offer Mrs Schiavo a glass of water. Ha-ha.

On the other hand, if one accepts the official version that the court is merely bringing to an end (after 15 years) the artificial prolongation of Mrs Schiavo’s life, since when has a glass of water been deemed medical treatment? In the public areas of Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, the waiting journalists grab a Coke or a coffee or even a glass of water every half hour or so without anyone considering it ‘medical treatment’. That it is, uniquely, a crime to serve Mrs Schiavo a beverage underlines the court’s intent — not to cease the artificial prolongation of life but actively to cause her death.

When poor Terri Schiavo broke on to the front pages, several commentators said the case was another Elian Gonzalez — the Cuban boy whose mother died trying to bring him to freedom in America. That’s to say, it was one of those stories where all sorts of turbulent questions of law, morality and politics collide. Two weeks on, if it’s Clintonian analogies we’re after, it seems to me the public regard it as something closer to the whole Paula/Monica/Juanita production line culminating in impeachment: if you recall, a large number of people were outraged by the President, a smaller number of people were determined to defend him to the end, and a huge number of people just didn’t want to hear about it; and the more Republicans went on about the DNA analysis of the dress stain and Mr Clinton lying about whether his enumerated parts had been in contact with her enumerated parts and the DNA analysis of the dress stain, the more they stuck their hands over their ears and said, ‘La-la-la, can’t hear you.’

That seems to be what’s happening here. Whether or not there’s anything in the various dubious polls claiming to show people opposed to Congressional efforts to reinsert Mrs Schiavo’s feeding tube, it seems clear that many of us would rather she’d been like Robert Wendland — a faraway local story of which they know little. A lot of Americans have paced hospital corridors while gran’ma’s medical taxi-meter goes ticking upward and, if my mailbag’s anything to go by, they’d rather this sort of stuff stayed in the shadows. Nobody likes to see how the sausage is made, or in this case the vegetable, if that indeed is what Terri Schiavo is. Many people seem to be unusually anxious to pretend that this judicial murder is merely a very belated equivalent of a discreet doctor putting a hopeless case out of her misery, or to take refuge in the idea that some magisterial disinterested ‘due process’ is being played out — or as a reader wrote to me the other day: ‘Why are you fundamentalists so clueless? It’s the law, dickbrain. Michael Schiavo isn’t acting for himself; he’s been legally recognised as the person qualified to act for Terri in expressing her wishes based on her own oral declarations.’

Which sounds fine and dandy, until you uncover your ears and a lot of the genteel euphemisms and legalisms and medicalisms — ‘right to die’, ‘guardian ad litem’, ‘PVS’ — start to sound downright Orwellian. PVS means ‘persistent vegetative state’, and because it’s a grand official-sounding term it’s been accepted mostly without question by the mainstream media, even though the probate judge declared Mrs Schiavo in a persistent vegetative state without troubling to visit her and without requiring any of the routine tests, such as an MRI scan. Indeed, her husband hasn’t permitted her to be tested for anything since 1993. Think about that: this woman is being put to death without any serious medical evaluation more recent than 12 years ago.

La-la-la, we don’t want to hear how the vegetable’s made....

Fortunately, if you want to execute someone who hasn’t committed a crime, you don’t need to worry with any of this ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ stuff. If an al-Qa’eda guy got shot up resisting capture in Afghanistan and required a feeding tube and the guards at Guantanamo yanked it out, you’d never hear the end of it from the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International and all the rest. Even given the litigious nature of American society, it still strikes me as remarkable that someone can be literally sued to death, and at the hands of a probate judge. Unlike other condemned prisoners, there’s no hope of a last-minute reprieve from the governor. That’s to say, he did reprieve her, and so did the legislature, and the US Congress and President — and the Florida courts have declared them all irrelevant. So, unlike Death Row, there’s no call from the governor, and no quick painless lethal injection or electrocution or swift clean broken neck from the hangman’s noose, and certainly no last meal. On Tuesday, getting a little impatient with the longest slow-motion public execution in American history, CBS News accidentally posted Mrs Schiavo’s obit on their website complete with vivid details that have yet to occur — the parents at her bedside in the final moments, etc. In this, they seem to be in tune with their viewers: sad business, personal tragedy, no easy answers, prayers are with her family, yada yada, is it over yet?

Just to underline the Clinton comparison, the Sunday Times’s Andrew Sullivan has dusted off his impeachment act and damned those of us opposed to Mrs Schiavo’s judicial murder as dogmatic extremist fundamentalist religious-right theocrats. If he’d stop his shrill bleating for a couple of minutes, he might notice that the ‘theocrats’ who want Terri Schiavo to live include Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader and Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who’s not just a Democrat but a gay one.

True, the TV networks — as they often do with what they see as socially conservative issues — prefer to train their cameras on some of Mrs Schiavo’s more obviously loopy defenders. But, for all that, it seems far weirder to me to be quite so enthusiastic about ending her life. I’ve received innumerable emails along the lines of, ‘If Terri Schiavo didn’t want this to happen to her, all she had to do under Florida law was make a “living will”’ — one of those documents that says in the event of a severe disability I do/do not want to be kept alive (delete as applicable). Well, OK, I haven’t received ‘innumerable’ emails, but I’ve received enough that I now send back a form response politely inquiring whether the correspondent has himself made a living will. I’ve yet to receive any answers. But I can’t see why, in a free society, healthy persons in their twenties should be expected to file legal documents in order to pre-empt a court order mandating their death a decade or two hence.

Even if you believe in living wills, it’s hard to argue that Michael Schiavo’s wildly inconsistent statements of his wife’s casual remarks about living on a tube should have the force of one. I’d be irked to find I was being deported to Pyongyang on the grounds that, while watching a TV documentary late one night in 1987, I’d been heard to say, ‘Wow, you know it’d be kinda cool to go to North Korea, don’t you think?’ But the Florida legal system’s position remains — as a reader, Adrienne Follmer, paraphrased it to me the other day — ‘We don’t know for sure if this woman wanted to live so let’s starve her to death.’

La-la-la, still can’t hear you....

One consequence of abortion is that, in designating new life as a matter of ‘choice’, it created a culture where it’s now routine to make judgments about which lives are worth it and which aren’t. Down’s Syndrome? Abort. Cleft palate? Abort. Chinese girl? Abort. It’s foolish to think you can raise entire populations — not to mention generations of doctors — to make self-interested judgments about who lives and who doesn’t and expect them to remain confined to three trimesters. The ‘right to choose’ is now being extended beyond the womb: the step from convenience euthanasia to compulsory euthanasia is a short one. Until a year or two back, I spent a lot of my summer Saturdays manning the historical society booth at the flea markets on the town common, and I passed many a pleasant quarter-hour or so chit-chatting with elderly ladies leading some now middle-aged simpleton child around. Both parties seemed to enjoy the occasion. The child is no doubt a ‘burden’: he was born because he just was; there was no ‘choice’ about it in those days. Having done away with those kinds of ‘burdens’ at birth, we’re less inclined to tolerate them when they strike in adulthood, as they did in Terri Schiavo’s case.

In that sense, the Schiavo debate provides a glimpse of the Western world the day after tomorrow — a world of nonagenarian baby boomers who’ve conquered most of the common-or-garden diseases and instead get stricken by freaky protracted colossally expensive chronic illnesses; a world of more and more dependants, with fewer and fewer people to depend on. In Europe, where demographic reality means that in a generation or so all the dependants will be elderly European Christians and most of the fellows they’re dependent on will be young North African or Arab Muslims, the social consensus for government health care is unlikely to survive. Terri Schiavo failed to demonstrate conclusively why she should be permitted by the state to continue living. As Western nations evolve rapidly into the oldest societies in human history, many more of us will be found similarly wanting.

Michael Schiavo’s lawyer, George Felos, is a leading light of the so-called ‘right-to-die’ movement, and his book, Litigation as Spiritual Practice, makes interesting reading. On page 240 Mr Felos writes, ‘The Jewish people, long ago in their collective consciousness, agreed to play the role of the lamb whose slaughter was necessary to shock humanity into a new moral consciousness. Their sacrifice saved humanity at the brink of extinction and propelled us into a new age.... If our minds can conceive of an uplifting Holocaust, can it be so difficult to look another way at the slights and injuries and abuses we perceive were inflicted upon us?’

Mr Felos feels it is now Terri Schiavo’s turn to ‘agree’ to play the role of the lamb whose slaughter is necessary to shock humanity into a new moral consciousness. As I read Felos’s words, I heard a radio bulletin announce that the Pope may now require a feeding tube. Fortunately for him, his life is ultimately in the hands of God and not a Florida probate judge.
 
Said1 said:
Would Mike Schiavo lost legal guardianship of Teri had he divorced her? I'm not down on all the details of his case, but the thought had just occured to me.

I believe he would have, yes.
 
Kathianne said:
This is long, but the Spectator has a complicated registration system. Obviously this was written prior to Terri's death:



That's eerie - especially the part about the parents standing at their dying daughter's bedside.
 
musicman said:
That's eerie - especially the part about the parents standing at their dying daughter's bedside.

Like I've been saying, while I disagree with the way this was handled, especially in light that it failed, I believe in life.
 
Great article, Kathianne. I would rep you for bringing it to the board if I could. As Steyn indicated, this was certainly a judicial execution from start to finish. No wonder so many people are breaking down the doors to get a living will on file. As a result of the Schiavo case, no one can say we all haven't been warned about this emerging "culture of death".
 
musicman said:
That's eerie - especially the part about the parents standing at their dying daughter's bedside.



Ah, well. In a fast-paced, ever-changing world, at least we can count on CBS News' standards of accuracy remaining constant.
 
Shattered said:
If I encouraged you to cheat on your wife, would you do it?

That doesn't make it right!

Yep but it does make hypocrites out of the parents now for talking shit. They are probably Demos taking both sides.
 
musicman said:
Lies, damned lies, and POLLS. Load the questions, acheive the predetermined result. It's one of the dirtiest games being played today.

Lies????????????? What lies?????????? The poll question was one very simple question: do you agree or disagree with congressional involvement?

How the hell is that a damned lie or loaded question?
 
OCA said:
musicman said:
Lies, damned lies, and POLLS. Load the questions, acheive the predetermined result. It's one of the dirtiest games being played today.

Lies????????????? What lies?????????? The poll question was one very simple question: do you agree or disagree with congressional involvement?

How the hell is that a damned lie or loaded question?

OCA bias isn't built or absent with just one question. There is a difference between:

Q Do you think the spouse should have the right to carry out the oral request to withold/remove extraordiary means of support when there is little/no chance of recovery?

to:

Q Do you think food/water through a tube removal, from a person with severe brain damage, but otherwise healthy?

or:

Q If a tube for food/water is removed, should the person be offered some water/ice cubes/swabbing of mouth, if these do not cause gagging?
 
OCA said:
musicman said:
Lies, damned lies, and POLLS. Load the questions, acheive the predetermined result. It's one of the dirtiest games being played today.

Lies????????????? What lies?????????? The poll question was one very simple question: do you agree or disagree with congressional involvement?

How the hell is that a damned lie or loaded question?



The poll to which I'm referring is proof that the devil is in the details, or - in the case of the "art" of polling - the wording. This poll threw around words like "vegetable" and "life support" in a successful (apparently) attempt to load the result. According to the polling expert at Wall Street Weekly, public disapproval with Congress dropped - dramatically - in direct proportion to the increased quality of information given respondents.

These pollsters are sneaky bastards, OCA. In 1995, when "bad old Newt Gingrich and the mean-spirited Republican Congress" spoke of cutting funding for PBS, PBS itself conducted a poll. The question? "If funding for PBS were cut, who would suffer more - children or adults?" Objective, huh? That ranks right up there with, "Are you still beating your wife?" Whether or not ANYONE would suffer is not even considered; that children and adults will suffer is a given - it is now only a matter of the specific degree.

Polling has become so underhanded and agenda-serving that the first thing I want to know is, who's conducting this thing - followed by, what outcome would they like to see from this poll - then, what have they done to help us see it their way? May I see the precise wording used, and the statistics-gathering methodology employed? It's usually pretty enlightening.
 
Just a reminder, I was against the involvement of the feds. That doesn't change that FL and the press made some very bad choices.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=bias+polls+feeding+&btnG=Search+News

4/11/05
By John Leo
End of the Affair

Some final notes on the Terri Schiavo case. The behavior of conservatives: Uneven and sometimes awful, with lots of vituperation and extreme charges. (Jeb Bush does not remind me of Pontius Pilate; I don't think it's fair to circulate rumors that Michael Schiavo was a wife-beater.) Worse were the revolutionary suggestions that the courts be ignored or defied, perhaps by sending in the National Guard to reconnect the tube. This is "by any means necessary" rhetoric of the radical left, this time let loose by angry conservatives. Where does this rhetoric lead?

The behavior of liberals: Mystifying. While conservative opinion was severely splintered, liberal opinion seemed monolithic: Let her die. Liberals usually rally to the side of vulnerable people, but not in this case. Democrats talked abstractly about procedures and rules, a reversal of familiar roles. I do not understand why liberal friends defined the issue almost solely in terms of government intruding into family matters. Liberals are famously willing to enter family affairs to defend individual rights, opposing parental-consent laws, for example. Why not here? Nonintervention is morally suspect when there is strong reason to wonder whether the decision-maker in the family has the helpless person's best interests at heart.

A few liberals broke ranks--10 members of the black caucus, for instance, plus Sen. Tom Harkin and Ralph Nader, who called the case "court-imposed homicide." But such voices were rare. My suspicion is that liberal opinion was guided by smoldering resentment toward President Bush and the rising contempt for religion in general and conservative Christians in particular. We seem headed for much more conflict between religious and secular Americans.

The behavior of the news media: Terrible. "Pro-life" columnist Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice called it "the worst case of liberal media bias I've seen yet." Many stories and headlines were politically loaded. Small example of large disdain: On air, a CBS correspondent called the Florida rallies a "religious roadshow," a term unlikely to have been applied to Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights demonstrations or any other rallies meeting CBS's approval. More important, it was hard to find news that Michael Schiavo had provided no therapy or rehabilitation for his wife since 1994 and even blocked the use of antibiotics when Terri developed a urinary infection. And the big national newspapers claimed as a fact that Michael Schiavo's long-delayed recollection of Terri's wish to die, supported only by hearsay from Michael's brother and a sister-in-law, met the standard for "clear and convincing evidence" of consent. It did nothing of the sort, particularly with two of Terri's friends testifying the opposite. The media covered the intervention by Congress as narrowly political and unwarranted. They largely fudged the debates over whether Terri Schiavo was indeed in a persistent vegetative state and whether tube-feeding meant that Schiavo was on life support. In the Nancy Cruzan case, the Supreme Court said that tube-feeding is life support, but some ethicists and disability leaders strongly dispute that position.

Unsettled questions. Public opinion: Polls showed very strong opposition to the Republican intervention, but the likelihood is that those polled weren't primarily concerned with Terri Schiavo or Republican overreaching, if that's what it was. They were thinking about themselves and how to avoid being in Terri Schiavo's predicament. Many, too, have pulled the plug on family members and don't want these wrenching decisions second-guessed by the courts or the public.

If this is correct, it means the country has yet to make up its mind on the issue of personhood and whether it is moral and just to remove tube-supplied food and water from people with grave cognitive disabilities. The following candid exchange occurred on Court TV last month in a conversation between author Wesley Smith and bioethicist Bill Allen. Smith: "Bill, do you think Terri is a person?" Allen: "No, I do not. I think having awareness is an essential criterion for personhood." Fetuses, babies, and Alzheimer's patients are only minimally aware and might not fit this definition of personhood, and so would have no claim on our protections. Smith points out that other bioethicists narrow protection further, requiring rationality, the capacity to experience desire, or the ability to value one's own existence. Tighter definitions of personhood expand the number of humans who can be killed without blame or harvested for their organs while still alive. On Court TV, Allen argued that the family could have removed Terri's organs while she was alive, "just as we allow people to say what they want done with their assets." This issue has been hiding behind the Terri Schiavo case for years. Soon it will be out in the open.
 
General information for the board:

I'd like to recommend a great read. It's a book called, "It Ain't Necessarily So". Co-written by three scientists whose names elude me at the moment, it details how science is being manipulated in the name of a political agenda. These men always considered science safe from such perversions, dealing - as it does - with cold, hard, immutable truths. But, they've found, it's happening just the same.

There's a whole chapter on polling. Fascinating stuff.
 
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