Still Waiting

Dakota Voice ^ | 1/29/2007 | Carrie K. Hutchens

[8mmMauser]

I don't know about anyone else, but I am still waiting for Michael Schiavo to make a correction on his blog about what "actually" took place in Colorado when he went there (to the debate) to supposedly ask Congresswoman Musgrave one question and she and her staff supposedly tried to have him removed. He called it, "My unreal night in Colorado - with radio link" (Thu Oct 26, 2006 at 08:05:14 PM PST). I'll say (from what I read) that it was his "unreal night".

As I said before in "Standing up and Admitting a Mistake: Not Schiavo's Style?",  if four uniformed officers were around my seat, I would have some idea of what was going on. I certainly wouldn't be sitting in "duh mode" to only be told later of what took place right there around me, as Michael suggests he was. If Michael's account is realistic -- his response and reaction is not. Nor is his response appropriate now that he has "learned" what he was "allegedly told" is not what took place. One would think if he can't get the words out that he was mistaken, he could at least have removed the inaccurate entry from his blog.

He has done neither.

I'm also still waiting to read about, "Also, maybe tomorrow I'll post about my election-eve rally with Bill Clinton in Florida." (A real election impact by Michael Schiavo, Thu Nov 09, 2006 at 10:40:34 AM PST).  Indeed, I would love to read that story by Michael, since I read it was not possible. Not if he was implying it was the Bill Clinton that is the former President of the United States. Will be interesting to see what he says about that if he ever does.

If Michael couldn't get it straight what happened at the Musgrave debate or even if he spent election-eve with former President Bill Clinton -- do you suppose he might have gotten Terri Schiavo's wishes mixed-up as well? (He does claim to have a bad memory from what I read.) Makes one wonder. At least makes me wonder. Whatever...

I'm still waiting for the corrections if not the explanations!

 

Carrie Hutchens is a former law enforcement officer and a freelance writer who is active in fighting against the death culture movement and the injustices within the judicial and law enforcement systems.

[T'wit]

This story is really weird. There is NOTHING about the victim being sick, disabled, terminal, in a wheel chair, suffering. She could have been perfectly healthy, lying in bed, for all one knows. This reporter says the order is "no life support" in one place, then says it's DNR in another. What is going on here?

[T'wit]

>> ... yet Malkin in her writings had made it clear she despises the mainstream media and holds the Post in contempt.

Well, knock me over with a feather! So do I!

[T'wit]

>> Broken record? I'm proud to be. What happened wrongly to Terri cannot be said too often. We can't let her, or what happened to her, be forgotten, lest it become the norm in this world we live in.

A sentiment surely shared by all who labor for justice for Terri Schiavo.

[T'wit]

>> ...or if the judge decides the girl is mature enough to decide on her own.

How on earth would a judge decide that? And where does the Constitution of the United States give judges authority to issue murder licenses to teenage girls?

[8mmMauser]

I am glad for all like Carrie who keep up the fight for Terri's legacy, no matter how "broken record" it may sound.

Thank you, Lord, for all who continue to tell the tale and expose the the injustice heaped upon us all with Terri as the symbol.

[8mmMauser]

I am still puzzled about this passage:

A provision that requires a court-appointed guardian to report any crimes related to the pregnancy _ including sex between unmarried adults, which is illegal in Idaho _ and another that required a doctor to tell a girls' parents after performing a medical emergency abortion have been dropped from the bill. A judge in 2005 ruled both provisions to be unconstitutional.

What puzzles me is just what constitutes a medical emergency abortion, (supposing it is extremely rare anyway...) I wonder if we are permitted to commit medical emergency murders from time to time. Maybe some judge has written guidelines on when and how we can commit these murders. This would be above and beyond the ordinary murders we are permitted by Judge Greer and company. Maybe Judge Larry can write some up.

[BykrBayb]

What puzzles me is just what constitutes a medical emergency abortion,

Every abortion is a medical emergency, for the babies being killed.

[8mmMauser]

WWRD, What would Rudy Do?

...as opposed to what would Rudy say he would do?

This comes from a publication that has earned my distrust for decades, The New Republic, nevertheless...

Rudy, Don't Take Your Love To Town.

This episode--using the most (in)famous right-wing, direct-mail expert in the country to put out a message completely at odds with his actual record to that point--said to me that his previous independent stances were matters of expediency, and that he'd flip on a dime on practically any matter if he felt the situation demanded it. And, for those who think one fund-raising pitch isn't evidence enough, consider this: The 2005 Giuliani said that he supported President Bush on the Terri Schiavo affair and would have signed legislation to leave her feeding tube in. What's the chance, Fred, that the 1995 Giuliani would have taken that position? The title of one of my favorite Elvis Costello songs answers the question.

Should we take comfort in Giuliani's "independence"?

8mm

[8mmMauser]

Getting hooked on Court TV is NOT life support. Once again Living Will = Death Wish, as BykrBayb terms it.

I am not sure what they mean about "life support machines". Could it be food they were giving? Or water? But these days, killing or murder are not harmful, if a judge gives permission. Maybe doctors will get licenses to kill, like James Bond.

In this case grandma was denied the joys and euphoria promised by the Felos fellows and just had to lay there and live, darn it.

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

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Did doctors resuscitate 92-year-old Madeline Neumann against her wishes, or did they perform life-saving treatment after she was found unconscious at a nursing home in October 1995?

~Snip~

Attorney Marnie Poncy, who represents Neumann's estate and filed the suit against the Morse Geriatric Center and Dr. Jaimy Bensimon, told the jury that the doctor broke the Hippocratic Oath — the tenet that all certified physicians are bound to keep.

"The first principle of that oath is, above all, 'Do no harm,' and this case is about the violation of that oath," Poncy said.

Poncy said Bensimon and the nursing home trampled over Neumann's wish that she avoid a painful death like those she watched her husband and two daughters suffer as a result of cancer.

~Snip~

Studley said a close reading of the living will and advance directives will show that all of the grandmother's desires were only to be followed if she had a terminal condition — and no known treatment could bring her back to her normal state.

"No one during her entire admission said that she was terminal," Studley said.

She told jurors Neumann also included language in both documents that stated antibiotics should be administered if she were found unresponsive.

Plaintiffs: Grandmother was kept alive for six days, despite her wish for peaceful death

8mm

[8mmMauser]

BB I should have pinged you since I quoted you wantonly in the post above.

;-)

[8mmMauser]

Honk if you think it would have helped...

EUREKA -- More than 15 years before she would become a household name, while still a vibrant, healthy 27-year-old, Terri Schiavo had yet to think of end-of-life planning, but perhaps she should have.

Had Schiavo planned ahead for the end of her life, as she had planned her wedding or her college career, chances are her name wouldn't have been in headlines across the nation, the governor of Florida and the United States Congress would never have intervened in her case and she would have died, or continued to live, in the way that she wanted and planned for.

But Schiavo didn't have a written plan, and by the time of her March 2005 death, the battle over her end-of-life wishes, which spread over seven years and included a plethora of motions, appeals, petitions and hearings, was well-documented and well-publicized.

Planning ahead: It's never too early to talk about end-of-life health care wishes

8mm

[8mmMauser]

Who would have thought???

Thread from markomalley, thanks, narses. EU (pronounced Ewweeeeeeeuuuu) seeks to market its pro-abort agenda.

Pro-lifers are claiming that the EU is putting pressure on countries to abandon their pro-life laws and to comply with a pro-abortion agenda.

Biblical Family Advocates said it learned recently that the EU is putting pressure on countries to abandon their pro life laws. The group cites the article, “EU Threatens to Withdraw Aid to Nicaragua if Pro-Life Law Remains,” to claim that the EU is putting pressure on a country that receives aid from it.

“I was also amazed recently that the country of Malta, an EU member country, was feeling pressure from the EU and the UN to abandon their pro life laws,” said Phil Magnan of Biblical Family Advocates.

EU pressures countries to pass pro-abortion laws

8mm

[T'wit]

Your instinct never to trust New Republic are borne out by decades of solid experience. And here we go again. Any publication that puts out a teaser and then makes you subscribe to read the meat of the story is -- not to be trusted. And a complete waste of time.

Who's the fundraiser, Richard Viguerie?

[T'wit]

>> ...the doctor broke the Hippocratic Oath — the tenet that all certified physicians are bound to keep.

Nice melodrama, but doctors have long since abandoned the Hippocratic Oath. It was never legally binding anyway.

[T'wit]

>> Plaintiffs: Grandmother was kept alive for six days, despite her wish for peaceful death

Actually, she had a peaceful death. This lawsuit is really about a greedy heir and trial lawyers on steroids.

[8mmMauser]

Haw, they closed it! The first peek got me the whole enchalada. And yes, it was Viguerie.

I went back to Google afresh and grabbed it, same link as above.

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

Dear Fred,

You make some strong points. I certainly hope you're right that we're "likely at the end of the long swing to the Republicans that began 40 years ago"; I've sometimes argued similarly (such as the current New York Review of Books), although I'm careful to do so in a very hedged way. If you're right, it improves Giuliani's odds of getting the nomination, because he represents a cleaner break with contemporary conservatism than the other GOP candidates. It's also true that, as the nominee, Rudy puts the states you mentioned into play, although I think New Jersey (the smallest prize of the three) more than California or even New York. The latter two have been so heavily and reliably Democratic at the presidential level--the Schwarzenegger experience tells us little about presidential voting, in my view--that they're heavier lifts for any Republican.

In sum, I do think Giuliani could win a general election; I just don't think he'll make it that far. But let's now assume that he takes the whole tamale. What sort of president would he be?

On the plus side, from the land of compliments so tiny that they're scarcely compliments at all, he'd obviously be an improvement upon the incumbent. You and I know him to be a policy wonk: While I'm not sure, as I said in my first entry, that he can go toe-to-toe with sitting senators on certain national policy questions in a campaign context, I am sure that, if he became president, he'd educate himself quickly. He's also not so disdainful of government that he'd place agencies in the hands of contemptible hacks and ideologues. A Giuliani FDA, for example, would probably return to doing the actual work of the FDA.

 

o that's something. But it's a comparatively small matter, and the big question to me has to do with the quality that is at the very heart of Giuliani's appeal: his supposed independence. This, as you know, is what made him attractive to New Yorkers in the first place. He was independent of the ossified political culture of New York. He was independent of the national Republican Party--a point he made, when he needed to, on the campaign trail in 1993, the year he first won the mayoralty. He took a further step away from the national GOP once in office, when he visited the White House to endorse Bill Clinton's crime bill. He was independent even of the state Republican Party, as evidenced most dramatically by his support of Mario Cuomo over George Pataki in 1994.

What's interesting about these volitional acts of independence, however, is that they all helped him politically in a city with a five-to-one Democratic voter registration. The same can be said of his support for abortion rights and gay rights.

In other words, what he successfully sold to New Yorkers as "independence" may have been nothing more than a series of political calculations based on the realization that he couldn't survive as a Republican mayor of a liberal city without taking those positions (in the case of the Cuomo endorsement, he was also engaged in a power struggle with Al D'Amato, Pataki's sponsor, over control of the state GOP). So what looked like admirable independence may have been mere positioning.

This came home to me in early 2000, when Giuliani was running (however half-heartedly) against Hillary Clinton for Senate. I'm sure you remember the incident of the provocative, eight-page, fund-raising letter sent out that February to conservatives on the mayor's behalf by Richard Viguerie, which invoked the left's "relentless thirty-year war" on "America's religious heritage" and scorned "liberal judges" who wouldn't allow the posting of the Ten Commandments in the schools. This was a significant and telling event. Giuliani, as mayor, had never talked about religious values. He had also had six years by then to say, as mayor, that he thought the schools ought to be posting the Ten Commandments (the mayor didn't control the school system then, but, as we both know, this didn't prevent him from expressing his strong and numerous opinions on the schools). But he had somehow forgotten to do so.

This episode--using the most (in)famous right-wing, direct-mail expert in the country to put out a message completely at odds with his actual record to that point--said to me that his previous independent stances were matters of expediency, and that he'd flip on a dime on practically any matter if he felt the situation demanded it. And, for those who think one fund-raising pitch isn't evidence enough, consider this: The 2005 Giuliani said that he supported President Bush on the Terri Schiavo affair and would have signed legislation to leave her feeding tube in. What's the chance, Fred, that the 1995 Giuliani would have taken that position? The title of one of my favorite Elvis Costello songs answers the question.

 

o, back to the question of a Giuliani presidency: How independent would he actually be from the various right-wing elements of his party? The answer depends, to some extent, obviously, on how he will have gotten to the White House. But, if you assume that getting the nomination means making deals with leaders on the right to win their general-election support, I think the answer is "not very."

Where this would leave us on a host of questions is anybody's guess. He would restore a modicum of sanity to Republican politics; he'd probably favor, for example, some form of stem-cell research, and, as I said, he'd let the FDA and other second-level agencies more or less go about their business. But, on the big questions--tax policy, foreign policy, war--I suspect he'd do whatever he felt he needed to do to maintain political power and support. If the right wing is a strong and effective pressure group, that means he'll be as right-wing as he needs to be.

As mayor, he identified a center that was acceptable to New York's white liberals, whose votes and support he needed. But there was no right wing in New York. Well, in America, there is. He'll need the right's support to function as president, and I believe his track record shows us that he'll act accordingly far more often than most people think he will.

All best,
Mike

[T'wit]

>> ...Terri Schiavo had yet to think of end-of-life planning, but perhaps she should have.

She wasn't expecting to be murdered.

[8mmMauser]

I was trying to imagine the outcome. Terri says, "Michael, I just had a Living Will recorded and do not want to be starved or dehydrated ever." And Mike would have responded, "Golly, gee, rats, darn, I guess you are safe."

[T'wit]

And after reading the whole thing, I don't know what this guy is trying to say, or rather, recommend. That's mainly because the piece is a reply to something earlier.

Meanwhile, it's really scandalous that Rudy would side with the President, the Pope, both houses of Congress and a great majority of Americans in thinking it was wrong the put Terri Schiavo to death.

[T'wit]

:-)

I think his reply would be to get half drunk, drag her out of bed at 4:00 in the morning, wrestle her down in the hall, get on her back, pin her down with his knees, push her head into the floor with his left hand, and say angrily, "I TOLD YOU NOT TO SPEND THAT MONEY GETTING YOUR HAIR DONE! Now, are you going to obey me next time?"