[quote]rainjack wrote:
deanosumo wrote:
I see that Tom Delay said that Terri Schiavo was sent by God to help the conservative cause. What an ass-clown.
Time will tell about that. I’m not denying that was an inappropriate thing to say, but I wouldn’t dismiss it out-of-hand.[/quote]
He’s a hypocrite. He said publicly that it’s not a political issue, that it’s a life and death issue, but behind closed doors he says how God sent her to help the conservatives.
[quote]deanosumo wrote:
He’s a hypocrite. He said publicly that it’s not a political issue, that it’s a life and death issue, but behind closed doors he says how God sent her to help the conservatives.
[/quote]
If he said it behind closed doors, how did you hear it all the way over in Japan? Something doesn’t add up. either the quote was manufactured (which the left NEVER does), or it was made in front of the press - which makes it public.
Either way, the statement is true. The pro-lifers will galvanize arounf this issue. The left had better start some damage control now, or they will lose even more seats in a year and a half.
Look how incensed the right was over the tax increase of 1993. It resulted in a house cleaning.
I’m not trying to equate a tax hike with the right to life, but the end result will be the same for the wacked out death mongers.
[quote]rainjack wrote:
deanosumo wrote:
He’s a hypocrite. He said publicly that it’s not a political issue, that it’s a life and death issue, but behind closed doors he says how God sent her to help the conservatives.
If he said it behind closed doors, how did you hear it all the way over in Japan? Something doesn’t add up. either the quote was manufactured (which the left NEVER does), or it was made in front of the press - which makes it public.
Either way, the statement is true. .[/quote]
I severely doubt God sent Terri to help Tom DeLay’s career.
For those who want to hear what he said:
http://www.au.org/site/PageServer?pagename=press_audio
This poor woman should not be Tom DeLay’s (or anyone elses’) political football. Let her die, or let her live, but don’t score points off her.
This is the same Tom Delay that has other Senators and Congressman saying he is unethical?
You’re pretty much sucking scum from the bottom of the pond when THAT happens!!!
Mufasa
What Tom Delay on TV? Hasn’t he been dodging cameras and reporters, what with all the ethics investigations and finance scandals? Then he appears on TV championing the rights of Schiavo. This is so political it is sick. Delay is a criminal. Bill Frist has presidential ambitions and knows the pro-lifers are a core part of the base.
This is a legal matter over the husband having rights. After 15 years of litigation no court has ever ruled in favor of the parents. What does that say? The U.S. Supreme Court has turned down the case twice. Still, they filed for the S.C. again today.
How does a legal matter turn into “you just want Terri dead!!!” ?
Another funny thing, Republicans, especially the cultural warriors, are becoming increasingly inconsistent: state’s rights on Abortion, federal ammendment on gay marriage, federal intervention on Florida case.
Man…
I’ve been outta town, and came across the new developments down here in Florida, and I thought “why don’t I start a thread about right-to-die stuff, and see if anyone wants to talk about it?”
Shoulda known you guys would have an eight million-post thread going already!
Some thoughts:
Whoever said “why the rush to kill Terri?” obviously has no idea just how mind-numbingly constant the efforts of her caregivers have been over the past what… 15 years or so? That is hardly a rush to do anything. This woman has been dead for a very long time now. I would think that it would be more appropriate to say that we are finally giving her body the peace it has been denied for a decade and a half, don’t you?
Anyway, I saw a few posts where folks were saying they would want to die under even less crippling circumstances than Terri is under, and I want to also say I feel the same. My Dad and I have a kind of “death pact” where if either one of us ends up in a state like Terri, we inject the other one with an unholy amount of morphine to make sure the job is done right… kind of like an assisted suicide thing. We’ve seen too many hospice patients and end-stage cancer cases roll through our respective ER’s (he’s a retired ER physician) through the years, maybe…
I’ve also seen a few posts which spoke about the “cruelty” of letting Terri starve to death. Well, you can blame that on our built-in legal prohibition against taking anything more than a “let nature take its course” action in cases like this. Some of you have been touting a right-to-life thing here when the issue is really the right to die.
I don’t know if this has been mentioned before, but without a cerberal cortex there is no ‘painful starvation’ or ‘feeling her lips crack as her body is dehydrated’.
She will not feel a thing. Don’t think that wasn’t taken into consideration by the husband.
[quote]TravisCS84 wrote:
I don’t know if this has been mentioned before, but without a cerberal cortex there is no ‘painful starvation’ or ‘feeling her lips crack as her body is dehydrated’.
She will not feel a thing. Don’t think that wasn’t taken into consideration by the husband.[/quote]
huh.
so perhaps we can starve you and see if your lips crack or if you feel it?
Look…there are a ton of doctors who are on board now saying she does feel pain.
But of course…if she can feel it, that makes it bad, as long as she’ll never know it, it’s okay that a single judge has ordered her killed?
Why is it that everyone who disagrees with your point of view is a kook?
WTF?
[quote]100meters wrote:
good link regarding the kookiness of doctors working for Terri’s parents including Joe Weider’s main man:
http://www.miami.edu/ethics/schiavo/Nov22%202002%20TC%20%20trialctorder11-02.txt
and one that discredits another Weider favorite, the lady who lied about terri’s husband (When is she going to die?):
both are court findings.[/quote]
BTW, I KNOW what the judge had to say about those affidavits. Its actually one of the problems I have with the whole mess. Why does he continually ignore any testimony/evidence that goes against his apparent bias?
[quote]100meters wrote:
good link regarding the kookiness of doctors working for Terri’s parents including Joe Weider’s main man:
http://www.miami.edu/ethics/schiavo/Nov22%202002%20TC%20%20trialctorder11-02.txt
and one that discredits another Weider favorite, the lady who lied about terri’s husband (When is she going to die?):
both are court findings.[/quote]
[quote]Joe Weider wrote:
TravisCS84 wrote:
I don’t know if this has been mentioned before, but without a cerberal cortex there is no ‘painful starvation’ or ‘feeling her lips crack as her body is dehydrated’.
She will not feel a thing. Don’t think that wasn’t taken into consideration by the husband.
huh.
so perhaps we can starve you and see if your lips crack or if you feel it?
Look…there are a ton of doctors who are on board now saying she does feel pain.
But of course…if she can feel it, that makes it bad, as long as she’ll never know it, it’s okay that a single judge has ordered her killed?
[/quote]
All of those docs that you posted about seem to be out for the publicity. I already told you that swallowing is not a sign of higher brain activity…so why is that one doctor stating that it is? Your first comment was simply ridiculous. I am quite sure he has a cerebral cortex.
Face it, waiting for 15 years is not a rush to kill someone. Waiting 6 years before any further action is taken to see if there is a chance for recovery is also not a rush to do anything. A man who was married who hasn’t even been able to hold a conversation with his wife or be intimate with her for a decade and a half who finds another woman is not bigamy. All of your insults actually speak more highly of the husband than you seem to be able to realize. There are marriages that don’t last as long as this man waited to see if there was a chance of recovery.
[quote]Mufasa wrote:
This is the same Tom Delay that has other Senators and Congressman saying he is unethical?
You’re pretty much sucking scum from the bottom of the pond when THAT happens!!!
Mufasa[/quote]
I don’t know about all the various charges against Delay, but the latest ones are silly. They involve a staffer of his taking some junket to South Korea a few days after a rule was changed that made it inappropriate.
[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
Some of you have been touting a right-to-life thing here when the issue is really the right to die.[/quote]
lothario –
It’s only a “right to die” case if Terri made the decision herself. Unfortunately, that is not at all clear.
Me, I wouldn’t want to be continuing in her state. But as a society we need to be extremely careful about letting other people decide these things for someone else who would very well live for many years.
As a moral issue it’s about line-drawing: where are we going to draw the line when it comes to individual consent?
[quote]Professor X wrote:
Face it, waiting for 15 years is not a rush to kill someone. Waiting 6 years before any further action is taken to see if there is a chance for recovery is also not a rush to do anything. A man who was married who hasn’t even been able to hold a conversation with his wife or be intimate with her for a decade and a half who finds another woman is not bigamy. All of your insults actually speak more highly of the husband than you seem to be able to realize. There are marriages that don’t last as long as this man waited to see if there was a chance of recovery.
[/quote]
Good spin, ProfX. I think you need to speak to Howard Dean about a job in the DNC, they could really use you. You’d be great on the talk shows!
(btw I was being serious.)
[quote]TravisCS84 wrote:
Another funny thing, Republicans, especially the cultural warriors, are becoming increasingly inconsistent: state’s rights on Abortion, federal ammendment on gay marriage, federal intervention on Florida case.[/quote]
Word.
[quote]doogie wrote:
TravisCS84 wrote:
Another funny thing, Republicans, especially the cultural warriors, are becoming increasingly inconsistent: state’s rights on Abortion, federal ammendment on gay marriage, federal intervention on Florida case.
Word.
[/quote]
Federalism and states’ rights are two different, though occasionally related, concepts.
An amendment to the Constitution, BTW, cannot be inconsistent with the Constitutional federal system. That’s why we have elected Senators now even though it changed the initial federalist set up.
In this case though, I can discern no good legal reason for Congress to get involved.
Pretty good post from the Belmont Club on this issue:
http://www.wretchard.com/blogs/the_belmont_club/archive/2005/03/24/201.aspx
Terri Schiavo
There are two ways to parse the Terri Schiavo deathwatch. The first is from the perspective of law and policy and the second political. Legal interpretations are best left to lawyers. We know that Glenn Reynold’s believed, probably correctly, that the narrow Congressional intervention would not be helpful:
[i] For Congress to pass a law aimed at a single individual isn’t necessarily unconstitutional (if it were aimed at punishment it would be a bill of attainder, and those are unconstitutional, but it’s not, so it isn’t). But as Ann Althouse writes, that doesn’t make it a good idea:
"Congress ought to have given more consideration to the work of the state courts. And even if the statute is constitutional despite its singling out of one person for special, positive treatment, Congress ought to have felt constrained, knowing that it would not routinely give special treatment to other persons like Terri Schiavo. Its unwillingness to write a general law betrays a lack of commitment to any principle -- principle demands general applicability and not favoritism. And don't tell me it was too much of an emergency for it to be possible to draft a generally applicable law. Terri Schiavo's case has been around for years."[/i]
As a practical matter Reynolds was right. The Congressional action was rejected by the courts within two days and ongoing appeals before the Supreme Court are likely to be rejected as well. The 11th hour atmosphere was further heightened by developments challenging the factual underpinnings of the lower court’s decision to stop feeding Ms. Schiavo. CNN reports:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/03/24/schiavo/
In addition, in a petition by the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF), a neurologist who examined Schiavo’s medical records found she was “most likely in a state of minimal consciousness,” rather than the persistent vegetative state previous doctors have diagnosed. According to the petition, the agency’s board-certified neurologist, Dr. William Polk Cheshire, has information “that seriously challenges the diagnosis that Mrs. Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state,” as courts have upheld.
Whether that will have any legal bearing on things remains to be seen. Andrew McCarthy at the National Review argues that none of the appeals have revisited the condition of Ms. Schiavo because they believed there was no need to ( http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200503231015.asp ). Since the appellate courts merely examined to the procedural fairness of the lower Court’s rulings and refused to reconsider the facts on which they were based, it is not clear that Dr. Chesire’s statements will have much bearing. They are out of the reckoning.
[i]The majority ... was exceedingly deferential to District Judge James D. Whittemore, who, in turn, had been exceedingly deferential to state Circuit Court Judge George Greer of Florida. ... Whittemore had rejected a request for a preliminary injunction that would have reinserted Terri?s feeding tube while the case was heard on the merits on the ground that the Schindlers (Terri?s parents and the plaintiffs in her name) had not demonstrated a likelihood of success. To sustain that holding, the Eleventh Circuit majority did not need to find that Whittemore had been wrong but merely that he had not been so careless as to have ?abused his discretion.?[/i]
The sole dissenter, Judge Wilson argued otherwise.
[i]Judge Wilson also disputed his colleagues? conclusion that the Schindlers could not succeed on the merits ? the finding on which the refusal to grant the injunction on ordinary grounds was based. Particularly when the irreparable finality of death looms, he argued, a party seeking an injunction need not ?establish that he can hit a home run, only that he can get on base, with a possibility of scoring later.?[/i]
We’ll leave the legal matter there and turn instead to the politics. If Terry Schiavo the issue long outlives Terry Schiavo the person it will be primarily due to a failure to establish the factuality of her vegetative state – if that is what it is – to the general public. A case might be legally dead yet politically live; the juries are different. The Courts did not think it necessary to inquire further into Terri’s condition. Whatever the legal merits of that position, it left the field open to Bob and Mary Schindler (Terri Schiavo’s parents) to assert that their daughter was in some meaningful sense still alive. And if Ms. Schiavo stops breathing in the next few days the statement of Dr. William Polk Cheshire suggesting Terri Schiavo might have been non-vegetative will acquire the kind of authority that only comes to assertions beyond proof or disproof.
It is that ambiguity which makes Terri Schiavo the symbol so powerful. In her is the temptation to see what we want to see.
http://images.t-nation.com/forum_images/./1/.1111770482608.1asp021.gif
I hear a lot of talk about saving Terri from politicians, people on radio and TV, on the streets, all over the place. But I don’t see any action. Why doesn’t Gov. Bush, Terri’s self-appointed savior, summon more people to gather at the hospice? Why not call for a “million persons march” on the hospice to take it over? All these doctors advocating for her would not have a problem re-inserting the tube. There is no police force in the nation that could move a million people. But all I see is a handful of people at the hospice and talk talk no action from the rest. It makes me wonder how strong the people feel about this issue.
we’re a nation primarily of people who respect laws.
And you’ll find that most of the people who feel for Terri are the same type that are less given to big marches and stuff, let alone breaking the law by storming the hospice.
It’s one of the weaknesses of this side, I think.
B.B.,
What do you think about the possibility of an autopsy confirming or not what doctors thought or didn’t.
Could be a whole new chapter?
I felt like the schindler family was vaguely hinting at a murder case against the husband on Hannity last night, an autopsy might be a strong possibility.