Schiavo issue haunts Crist

St. Petersburg Times ^ | November 1, 2006 | ADAM C. SMITH

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Republican gubernatorial front-runner Charlie Crist says he was perfectly clear in opposing governmental intervention in the Terri Schiavo case.

He spoke out loudly.

And he was silent.

Loudly silent.

The day after limping through a tough nationally televised debate, the Republican attorney general wanted to talk about his plans to slash taxes. Instead reporters questioned him about his debate assertion that, “Yes, I did’’ speak out against Congress trying to force the reinsertion of the severely brain-damaged woman’s feeding tube in 2005.

Crist did not publicly express his opposition to the Schiavo intervention until April 2006, more than a year after the Pinellas woman’s death. But he maintained on Tuesday that he forcefully expressed his opposition from the start.

“I spoke loudly,” Crist said in Tallahassee. “I think it’s important that when issues like that come up and you believe that government is the appropriate place for it that you act that out, and you walk the walk, and don’t just talk the talk.’’

The attorney general noted that his office “by not going to court and pushing the agenda on that issue, that was speaking out louder than anybody else did in Florida.”

This is one of many issues — from insurance reform to abortion and civil unions — where Crist has been accused of ambiguity or trying please all sides.

Contrary to his comments Tuesday, during the Republican gubernatorial primary in August he stressed to the weekly newspaper of the Florida Baptist Convention that his office helped the governor’s office with legal work to keep Schiavo alive, even though he personally had qualms.

“I don’t remember that, but I’ll check on it and see,” Crist said when asked about that interview with the Florida Baptist Witness.

Gov. Jeb Bush came to his would-be successor’s defense. “He spoke out to me,” Bush told reporters. Crist, however, said he never directly talked to Bush.

There are few issues in the political realm so black and white as the Terri Schiavo case. People either supported the state and federal government intervening to keep her alive or they didn’t.

But Crist is the second statewide candidate recently to face questions about how he acted during the Schiavo end-of-life controversies that erupted in 2003 in the Legislature and in 2005 in both the Legislature and Congress.

Democratic Attorney General candidate Walter “Skip” Campbell, a state senator from Broward County, has been on the defensive this week for having voted to keep Schiavo alive and later criticizing the governmental intervention. Crist’s involvement in the Schiavo case may be the only common ground between the Schindler family, Terri

Schiavo’s parents and siblings who fought to keep her alive, and her husband, Michael Schiavo, who insisted his wife did not want to be kept alive in a persistent vegetative state. Both sides have criticized Crist.

“When he said in that debate that he’s going to be a leader, my heart dropped. He’s not a leader, he’s a follower,’’ Michael Schiavo said Tuesday. “If he really wanted to stand up he would have said, 'No, this is wrong. The government should stay out of this.’ ... Charlie Crist did not say a word, he was nowhere to be found. He’s a coward.’’

Terri Schiavo’s father, Bob Schindler, wrote an essay in August accusing Crist of snubbing the family’s pleas for him to help their efforts. “Florida Atty. Gen. Charlie Crist let my daughter die. He had it within his authority to save her life, but he turned a blind eye to her suffering,’’ Schindler wrote.

The Florida Democratic Party issued a release saying Crist “lied” about his role in the Schiavo case, but at a brief campaign stop at Arco-Iris restaurant in Tampa on Tuesday, Davis would only say that Crist “misrepresented his position.”

“I was up fighting George Bush and the entire United States Congress, both political parties, and Charlie Crist was unwilling to take a position,” Davis said.

Davis, trailing in polls and campaign money, is hoping his debate performance Monday night will cut Crist’s advantages. No statewide viewership numbers were available Tuesday, but in the Tampa Bay area about 152,000 households tuned in — a ratings jump for that time slot on WFLA — and that doesn’t include those who watched on MSNBC.

- Tallahassee bureau chief Steve Bousquet and staff writer Alex Leary contributed to this report. Adam C. Smith can be reached at asmith@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8241.\

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Both of the Bush brothers are not fighters.

I hope we get some strong leaders SOON!

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He knew they wouldn't understand him and never worried his head about it. He wrote for himself and for anyone who cared to listen. I recall him reflecting that it was like speaking into the void; but every now and then you hear your own words and thoughts come echoing back to you, and know that you've been heard. It's a very pleasing feeling.

That sometimes happens here. Sometimes we post as if into a void, and are happily surprised with the feedback or with a repetition elsewhere.

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I have been checking daily for updates on the situation of Haleigh Poutre but have found nothing at all. Am hoping no news is good news, but in this world, no news is jeopardy.

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The source I use for this article is in Australia, indication how widely disseminated the topic is today.

SAVANNAH, Mo. - Three years after she was fired for refusing to work on Sundays, Connie Rehm has won back her job on the staff of this small town‘s public library, and her employers have received a costly education in employment rights law.

No less a legal team than the same Florida attorneys who represented the parents of Terri Schiavo — the brain-damaged woman at the center of last year‘s right-to-die case — took up Rehm‘s cause, suing Rolling Hills Consolidated Library on a claim of religious discrimination.

Snip...

The library‘s position in settlement negotiations was "to deal with it as a financial matter," essentially paying to make Rehm and her claim go away, he said.

"What price is my religious freedom? What is it worth?" Rehm said. "It‘s not a matter of displaying the Ten Commandments. It‘s being able to live the Ten Commandments, and that‘s what my employer was asking me not to do."

Woman wins religious discrimination case

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Manifesto...It has such a stirring ring to it, especially oozing from the Puffington Host. Karl (and not Groucho) would be proud.

And, of course, the buzzword, "intervention":

My support of less-conservative social positions didn't win such decided support, but I wasn't in a lopsided minority, either. On embracing embryonic stem-cell research, half of the respondents agreed. The same result greeted my arguing for a party that has room for both pro-life and pro-choice folks, makes Plan B available over the counter and rejects federal intervention in end-of-life cases like Terri Schiavo's. Even when I said marriage between a man and woman is not threatened by same-sex unions, half agreed.

So, when the GOP leadership is decidedly pro-life, against Plan B dissemination and for federal intervention a la Schiavo, or opposes gay rights on the grounds that it has an effect on heterosexual marriage, we are turning off 50 percent of the suburban base.

A Suburban GOP Manifesto

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From NRO...

.........................

Second, nobody’s saying it’s unreasonable to have a Hispanic senator as the public face of the party, so stop putting words in people’ mouths. The problem is that that the case for Martinez is basically, “he’s a Hispanic senator.” If his name was John Smith, he would be just another senator from an important state in the Electoral College. I don’t think there are too many conservative bloggers who dislike the guy, it’s that he’s been in the Senate for two years and is perhaps best known for giving a memo about the political impact of the Schiavo controversy to Democratic Senator Tom Harkin. He was a perfectly fine Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. But in terms of filling a high-profile position to make the case for Republican policies, would he be on many people’s lists of the top ten candidates? Top twenty? Fifty?

Snip....

 

Of course, our friends on the other side of the aisle may be about to elect House Majority Leader Murtha (Fund's article is a must-read) and House Select Intelligence Committee Chair Alcee Hastings, who was impeached as a judge and convicted for bribery. So our great nation is getting the worst of both worlds.

 

The cranky, turning-the-guns-on-my-allies edition

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Time to gift wrap the newest living will for loved ones. If only Mikey would have realized Terri's real wishes, it would have turned out so, so differently.... I can just imagine a spouse handing over her "Seasons Greetings" package to loving hubby, package all decorated with Santa Claus or a pumpkin maybe, as a stocking stuffer, reading: "Honeypoo, I would just love to be dehydrated to death."

To understand the impact this dialogue can have, one need only think back to the case of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman at the center of a legal battle between her husband and her family over her future medical care. Had she made her feelings known to her husband, parents and brother, the entire tragic episode might have been avoided.

Planning care is new holiday tradition

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What wacky wefties!

Though the post-victory haze, I perceived a final pathetic spin, based in the fiction that the people still respond to Bush’s supposed charisma: that to lay a Democrat glove-of-impeachment on the president would alienate the electorate big-time. We were being urged to forgive, forget, and all get along. As in forget the lies and the spies, the Constitution and Geneva Conventions, the war profiteering and the body count. Forget that New Orleans’s 9th Ward is still in ruins, forget the inflated homophobia, the decimated middle class, for-profit health care, reproductive rights and embryonic stem cells, and all the small-time insanity, like the Terri Schiavo debacle. Forget My Pet Goat and the War on Christmas? And the accusations of everything from treason to dementia leveled at most of my friends?

The Wailing of Whipped Weasels

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Appellate judges unanimously upheld a verdict of $26.8 million against the Florida Department of Children and Families for failing to protect a toddler from a near-fatal beating.

In a ruling issued Wednesday, a panel of judges from the 4th District Court of Appeal said there was enough evidence to support a Palm Beach County jury's ruling that DCF was negligent in its handling of Marissa Amora's case.

Snip...

Appellate judges unanimously upheld a verdict of $26.8 million against the Florida Department of Children and Families for failing to protect a toddler from a near-fatal beating.

In a ruling issued Wednesday, a panel of judges from the 4th District Court of Appeal said there was enough evidence to support a Palm Beach County jury's ruling that DCF was negligent in its handling of Marissa Amora's case.

Judges uphold verdict of millions

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People can claim to be anything they want to be, but it defies reality to claim that Sullivan, an HIV-positive homosexual who embraces and celebrates the homosexual lifestyle, is a conservative. Sullivan told Howard Kurtz on the October 15 edition of his Reliable Sources show that he is engaged to be married to another man.

Snip...

On Reliable Sources, as well as in his book, Sullivan also faulted Republicans for coming to the defense of Terri Schiavo, the disabled woman whose life ended when her estranged husband ordered her life-support withdrawn. The case, Sullivan claimed, "showed that they [the Republicans] had no restraint, no moderation, no respect for the states."

In that case, the conservative proposition was that she had a right to life that should not be taken away on suspicious grounds without the federal courts being given the chance to review her circumstances. Her own wishes on the subject of the end of life were in dispute but some members of her family wanted to continue taking care of her.

A Gay Conservative?

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Another way to not have a problem like Terri had is to have concealed carry.

Stories about the practical impact of legislation or court rulings are popular. During the Terri Schiavo living-will controversy, Orlowsky proposed stories on how to avoid the Schiavo problem with a health-care power of attorney.

How to Get Noticed by the Media... To get press coverage, build relationships with outlets, provide story ideas and be persistent

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How they think (in Seattle?)

Inside the bubble of Karl Rove's base-oriented politics, it made sense that one comatose woman, Terri Schiavo, should warrant days of Senate-floor theatrics, while 46 million uninsured Americans trigger a collective yawn.

It's (More Than) Iraq, Stupid... Last Week's Elections Demonstrated that the Urban Archipelago Is Not Just Growing—It's Winning Elections Now. Welcome (Back) to the Progressive Future.

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Ping to kerretarded thread on the Glenn Beck show on exposing extremists last night. Thanks, FV.

Glenn Beck Live Thread - 11/15/06 (ON TV TONIGHT - EXPOSED: THE EXTREMIST AGENDA!)

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Ping to presidio9 thread on which babies do not warrant intensive care. Thanks, wagglebee.

Premature babies born before 22 weeks gestation should not be given intensive care treatment to keep them alive, according to a report released on Wednesday.

Despite medical advances in prolonging life, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics said the chances of an infant surviving after less than 22 weeks in the womb are very slim and that they often develop severe disabilities.

Pre-22-week babies "should not have intensive care"

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Followup thread on Glenn Beck show...

Glenn Beck rocked`em tonight or Lookin 4 da fatwa

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>> That sometimes happens here.

It does, it does! Conservatives offer a whole political philosophy. It is good to restate the ideas and principles of the "founders," be it Burke or Jefferson or Adam Smith or Locke or -- there are so many more. Russell Kirk used to say, "We stand on the shoulders of giants." We should always be learning from them. I don't think Russell meant it this way, but you also have a better view of the world when you're on a giant's shoulders :-) Tell those below what you see.

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I tried to tune in, can't get that channel. Oh well, I can listen to him on the radio and hope to get a recap :-)

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>> I have been checking daily for updates on the situation of Haleigh Poutre but have found nothing at all. Am hoping no news is good news...

I'd like to believe that the DSS cannot get away with harming Haleigh without it first coming to the attention her mother's (Allison Avrett's) experienced lawyers. I'd also like to believe that if that child is abused again, this time by state bureaucrats, there would be such an outcry that Gov. Romney would be shamed out of office. He would have no political future, ever.

Pay attention, Mitt.

Haleigh's mom, Allison Avrett, with daughter Hannah, holds photo of Haleigh.

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Suburban GOP!! I'm nearly certain that this very fellow was at the UPenn Death Cult Snuff Festival a few months ago along with Greer, Cranford, Wolfson, Caplan and wife-snuffing superstar, Michael Schiavo.

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Ping to IrishMike thread (NRO, Wesley J. Smith) on what is becoming respectable if we let it. Thanks, wagglebee.

The push to permit infanticide has entered the mainstream. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology has recommended that a debate be had about whether to permit “deliberate interventions to kill infants.” The recommendation, which was widely reported in the media, was in response to a query from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics concerning ethical issues pertaining to health care which prolongs the life of newborns. It was at the urging of the RCOG that euthanasia of infants was added to the topics that the council would consider. As reported by the London Times, the RCOG’s recommendation states:

Respectable Baby Killing.....legalizing euthanasia for ill and disabled newborns.

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