Do you recall if anybody seen Vince on Monday, other than Clinton bots?
Posted on 11/02/2006 5:23:50 AM PST by 8mmMauser
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.\
Nothing on Haleigh? Well, it's silly season. Has Mitt Romney announced for prez yet? I hope Haleigh's mom is being treated with respect these days. You know who luved to separate families? Earlier it was the nazi's. Nowadays, it's cults and the bioethickers.
http://www.renewamerica.us/
to cc: "BOO!"
I'd like to see OJ and Mikey on the same tv show like hollywood squares. Other squares for Judge Greer, Judge Ito, Judge Whittemore, George Felos, Atty Deathknell, Jeb Bush and Ken Connor. Center square for Jeb (the end of a promising career).
TR, even exit pollings are FALSE. The latest is that 80 per cent polled were for amnesty. That's b.s. Most Americans are flat out against amnesty and pathway nonsense.
Do you recall if anybody seen Vince on Monday, other than Clinton bots?
The Arkansas gang was working him over all weekend, full court press, as if trying desperately to stop him from doing something he was determined to do. I believe he had made up his mind to go public about something. In their eyes he had to be stopped. That Monday night he was invited to the White House, ostensibly for watching a movie with Slick and the gang. The real purpose, however would have been to pressure him into calling off whatever he was threatening to do or to reveal. Foster declined to come and I suspect it doomed him.
That is why the survalance tapes for Tuesday disappeard ---there was no Vince on them.
I did notice the court rulings that declared her as "incompetent" as opposed to "incapacitated" as they usually do.
To the Felos/Bushnell team, this must of seemed like a reconnaissance flight over Auschwitz.
How could Hastings ever hope to get a security clearance? He is for sale. That's the last thing you can tolerate in the intelligence business. He'll sell out the country.
The two names don't look much alike, but "Auschwitz" is a reasonably good German phonetic rendering of "Oswiecim" [OSH-VyECH-eem], the Polish town where the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps were located.
Don't miss this Drudge Report, Judith Regan's amazing statement about OJ
When Michael Schiavo is ready to write HIS "If I did it," this is the publisher he should go to. She understands.
Here's an FR link. Full text is given at post #5, in case Drudge pulls it before you have a chance to read it there.
......................
I can think of only two occasions on which I agreed with George Bush. Both involved the upholding of the people's negative, or leave-me-alone, rights.
The first was his refusal to capitulate to the Kyoto-protocol crazies. Not surprisingly, some conservatives denounced this rare flicker of good judgment. And I'm not talking a "Crunchy Con" of Andrew Sullivan's caliber – he does proud to Greenpeace and the Sierra Club combined. No less a conservative than Joe Scarborough commiserated with actor Robert Redford over the president's "blind spot on the environment" (ditto Bill O'Reilly).
The other Bush initiative I endorsed was the attempt by Congress to uphold Terri Schiavo's inalienable right to life – a decision very many conservatives now rue.
Snip...
On one thing we can all agree, Schiavo, a human being who was neither dead nor dying, was treated like horsemeat. As I wrote in "As She Lay Dying," her medical condition, clearly vegetative, was an artifact, an irrelevancy to the main issue: the absence of a living will or a clear directive from the woman herself. Her husband's hearsay or a court's decision was not to be equated with her will. Since natural rights antedate the state apparatus, nobody, other than Terri herself, had the authority to extinguish her life. By logical extension, it mattered not who upheld her negative right to life – state or federal official – just so long as someone did.
Conservatives for killing Terri
8mm
...Like the infamous Terri Schiavo intervention by Congress, opposition to stem-cell research is an extreme extension of the "pro-life" position--an extension too far, in the view of many Christian voters. As former Senator John Danforth wrote in spring 2005, "It is not evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to identifiable people suffering from terrible diseases." Danforth's blast spread through Missouri faster than kudzu. So did his warning that the religious right had become a dangerously divisive force.
8mm
Besides, when Americans think of isms, they think -- at least they think first -- of how liberals and conservatives stand on social issues. A liberal backs abortion rights and gun regulations; a conservative wants to ban abortions and legalize all guns. By that measure, what has defined conservatism in the popular mind over the past couple of years has been its willingness to enlist government to block stem cell research, stop the teaching of evolution, and supersede the duties of Terri Schiavo's husband.
8mm
.............................
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Members of the Democratic caucus in the House sealed their plan to promote abortion and embryonic stem cell research in the next session of Congress as they picked staunch abortion advocates to lead their party. That means pro-abortion lawmakers will set the agenda of the House for the next two years.
Democrats unanimously named pro-abortion California Rep. Nancy Pelosi as the first female Speaker of the House.
Pelosi is a staunch abortion advocate. In the last Congressional session alone, Pelosi compiled a 0 percent pro-life voting record on 10 votes NRLC recorded.
She voted four times against a bill that would help support parental notification laws in over two dozen states, she voted twice to force taxpayers to fund embryonic stem cell research and voted three times to spend tax money on abortions in the United States and overseas.
Pelosi also refused to support a bipartisan effort to allow Terri Schiavo's parents to take their case to prevent her former husband from killing her to federal courts for a review.
Her career-long effort to keep abortion legal throughout pregnancy and paid for with tax money led to Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion business, finding its newest president.
House Democrats Pick Abortion Advocates Pelosi, Hoyer as Leaders
8mm
...That quote is the opening salvo in Pat Buchanan’s column this morning at Townhall.com and, as it should be, the choice of Mel Martinez is also a top story all over the media. Mel Martinez is a Cuban-American, first-term Senator from the state of Florida. Martinez served in President Bush’s cabinet for a while as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he wrote the legal opinion that got the U.S. Government involved in the Terry Schiavo case, and he is thoroughly checked-out on the key far-right-wing agendas: pro-life, anti-gay rights, anti-stem cell research and the agenda item that sits in the shadows, cloaked in rhetoric — amnesty for illegal aliens.
Bush Renews His Dedication to Amnesty for Illegals
8mm
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