Primitive
Some times we forget the world is full of people who are neither as advanced as us or as cynical as us. See here.
Not Just A Lawyer, An Author
George Felos has written a book. Here is one of the reviews on Amazon.com.
This book contains bizarre stories about the author’s fervent desire to end the lives of severely disabled or gravely sick patients. Estelle Browning’s case set a precedent whereby Felos advances his “right to kill” agenda while making a tidy profit for himself as an author. In this book, Felos claims he has the ability to psychically communicate with the souls of people in comas by SHOUTING at them, “DO YOU WANT TO DIE?? DO YOU WANT TO DIE??”. In response, he hears voices in his head that he claims to be emmanating from the soul of the patient. Predictably, the answer Felos hears is “yes”, which inspires him to take aggressive legal actions to dehydrate and starve a patient who has left no advance healtchare directives.
Felos, remember, is Michael Schiavo’s attorney.
What a creepy little man.
Agreement With the Left
Lest it ever be said that I never agree with the left, that is wrong and here is proof. In addition to actually being, for the first time in memory, in agreement with Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader, I am also in agreement with athiest lefty Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice.
In February, Florida’s Department of Children and Families presented Judge Greer with a 34-page document listing charges of neglect, abuse, and exploitation of Terri by her husband, with a request for 60 days to fully investigate the charges. Judge Greer, soon to remove Terri’s feeding tube for the third time, rejected the 60-day extension. (The media have ignored these charges, and much of what follows in this article.) …. Terri Schiavo has never had an MRI or a PET scan, nor a thorough neurological examination. Republican Senate leader Bill Frist, a specialist in heart-lung transplant surgery, has, as The New York Times reported on March 23, “certified [in his practice] that patients were brain dead so that their organs could be transplanted.” He is not just “playing doctor” on this case. …. What kind of a nation are we becoming? The CIA outsources torture—in violation of American and international law—in the name of the freedoms we are fighting to protect against terrorism. And we have watched as this woman, whose only crime is that she is disabled, is tortured to death by judges, all the way to the Supreme Court. And keep in mind from the Ralph Nader-Wesley Smith report: “The courts . . . have [also] ordered that no attempts be made to provide her water or food by mouth. Terri swallows her own saliva. Spoon feeding is not medical treatment. This outrageous order proves that the courts are not merely permitting medical treatment to be withheld, they have ordered her to be made dead.”
Sweet!
Apparently Senator Vincent Fort, a professor from Atlanta, bashed this site on the floor of the State Senate today. Thanks Senator. Senator Fort is a black senator representing the Atlanta area who is convinced that having voters show their photographic identification would be racist and deny people the right to vote.
Unfortunately, being a liberal professor and race baiter, the Senator is unable to talk logically about the debate. He’s so concerned about what happened years ago — a proper concern given Georgia’s history — he has no concern for tomorrow.
Senator, we live in the present, not the past. Recent elections show we should take every proper step to make sure fraud is eradicated from the polls. The legislation is common sense.
Lefty Guilt
This just made my day.
Guiltily, but there I was. I am often dragged in there. Each time I protest and repeat the usual litany of reasons to boycott, and each time I end up allowing myself to be worn down. On some level I must want to be worn down because the prices are low and the selection is wide – and the alternative is shopping at several different stores while dealing with familial stress because I made everybody’s life so much harder. So…I tag along. Reluctantly I put a few things in the cart of my own, always being careful to come up with some moral justification for doing so.
What a laugh! Read the whole thing.
Selling Out Terri
I think this is a terribly bad idea.
The parents of Terri Schiavo have authorized a conservative direct-mailing firm to sell a list of their financial supporters, making it likely that thousands of strangers moved by her plight will receive a steady stream of solicitations from anti-abortion and conservative groups. “These compassionate pro-lifers donated toward Bob Schindler’s legal battle to keep Terri’s estranged husband from removing the feeding tube from Terri,” says a description of the list on the Web site of the firm, Response Unlimited, which is asking $150 a month for 6,000 names and $500 a month for 4,000 e-mail addresses of people who responded last month to an e-mail plea from Ms. Schiavo’s father. “These individuals are passionate about the way they value human life, adamantly oppose euthanasia and are pro-life in every sense of the word!” Privacy experts said the sale of the list was legal and even predictable, if ghoulish.
People gave their money to help Terri. That the Schiavos would authorize the solicitation of money from these donors for causes other than Terri sells out their trust.
Let me put one caveat — if they donors were told the information could be sold, that’s a different matter. But the default option in a case like this (without notice otherwise) should be the presumption that the money is going to help Terri, not for activist causes.
The Trouble With Tom DeLay
Originally posted at RedState
Today, the Wall Street Journal opines that Tom DeLay, the House Majority Leader, is in danger of smelling like the Beltway.
We will leave it to the WSJ to recount the reasons why, but we concur in the conclusion. It takes only a casual observer of congressional politics to understand that the Democrats have adopted a “Gingrich” strategy of tarring and feathering every opposition leader with charges of impropriety and arrogance while stymieing all of the majority’s legislative efforts. With DeLay, the Democrats have largely succeeded in the eyes of the media. Once DeLay becomes involved in any issue, he is treated by the Democrats and many in the media, no matter how casually he might be involved, as a congressional bogie man on the issue — if DeLay is for it, it must be bad.
Newt Gingrich succeeded in discrediting Jim Wright, the former Speaker of the House, as corrupt. Wright became involved in several questionable deals and ultimately resigned from Congress before being convicted of anything. The Democrats succeeded in portraying Gingrich is out of touch and arrogant, a useful caricature with which to shift public opinion away from the GOP. Sadly, DeLay has been an accomplice in allowing Democrats to portray him as both corrupt and arrogant.
It is bad enough that DeLay supposedly pressured one Member of Congress into voting for the medicare reform bill by offering support or opposition to the Member’s son, who had dynastic aspirations of taking over his dad’s spot. What’s worse is that DeLay actually acted like an unethical man. DeLay knew or should have known that the Democrats would be out to tar and feather him as a power hungry, corrupt politician. Notwithstanding that, DeLay willingly participated in junkets arranged by scandal plagued lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Tom DeLay, as far as anyone can tell, has not broken any law. DeLay’s problems stem from the fact that he acted like an ordinary Member of Congress, i.e. he followed the ethics rules mostly to the letter, but did nothing more to overcome appearances of impropriety. Being in his position, he should have done more and been more careful. Instead, DeLay changed Gingrich-era House ethics rules to his liking, an action that even someone not absorbed into politics would easily view with suspicion. Some of which the GOP spent an extraordinary amount of political capital defending, only to later go back to original rules.
Republicans are not yet about to revolt against Tom DeLay, despite the wishes of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. There is a lot of loyalty within the GOP for what DeLay has done. But, if DeLay does not work harder and fight harder against the left, which is out to get him, and the media, which wants out of a scandal drought, he will cause more harm than good for the party. DeLay has a window of opportunity. Right now the public sees the man at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as the face of the GOP, not one Congressman from Texas. Should the White House change hands, however, all eyes will focus on DeLay and the loyalty he now has will be tested. In the end, it would be better for the party to take DeLay to task than for the courts to do so or for the voters to take the GOP to task.
Fighting the Courts
Let’s pretend Terry Schiavo never existed. At some point, I’d be writing this whether Terry existed or not, died or not. Let’s instead use the case of Christopher Simmons.
To quote Bill Kristol
Thank God for our robed masters. If it weren’t for them, Christopher Simmons might soon be executed. In September 1993, seven months shy of his 18th birthday, Simmons decided it would be interesting to kill someone. He told his buddies they could get away with it because they were still minors. He broke into the house of Shirley Crook in Jefferson County, Missouri, bound her hands and feet, drove her to a bridge, covered her face with tape, and threw her into the Meramec River, where she drowned. He confessed to the crime, and was sentenced to death according to the laws of Missouri. Last month the Supreme Court saved Simmons’s life. The citizens, legislators, and governor of Missouri (and those of 19 other states) had, it turned out, fallen grievously and unconstitutionally behind “the evolving standards of decency that mark a maturing society.” Five justices decided that the Constitution prevented anyone under the age of 18 from being sentenced to death. So Christopher Simmons will live.
Many of the same people who were outraged that Congress would intervene in a decision the courts had already weighed in on, will probably not like my suggestions, but again, let’s pretend Terry did not exist.
What do we do. First, let’s recognize that there is a difference between what we can do and what we will do. The obvious choice is to appoint conservative jurists to the courts who will actually decide on existing laws, not make up new laws and substitute their standards of decency for our own. I frankly doubt that any Republican in Washington will really do what should and can be done.
So, what can we do?
The first thing we can do is stop thinking of the courts as some holier than thou branch of government. They too are politicians. They just happen to be unelected politicians on the federal level. Once they get to the court and no longer feel beholden to political interests they tend to develop a “to heck with you” attitude, but they are politicians nonetheless. So, first we should abandon our ingrained reverence for the court system.
Second, in so recognizing the courts as made of politicians, we should also recognize the courts as a branch of government. Though some federal judges do not like it, the power of the purse is kept with the legislature, not the court system. I’m always fascinated by court decisions that order the legislature to spend money. They really have no power to do that — yet legislatures so often give in. Though the power of the purse was removed from the executive to prevent a dictatorial executive, we also need to recognize that the power of the purse must be kept from judges so they too do not become even greater dictators than they have already become.
Congress could, and should, cut the budget of the courts. Yes, it is not popular and we know lots of groups will cry about justice being denied for lack of funding. But it would send an extraordinary message to the courts — if they keep substituting their standards for our democratic standards, they will need to do so on their own dime and not the taxpayer’s dime.
Third, Congress should pick on a few judges and impeach them. Remind the judges that their tenure is only for a period of good behavior, not really for life. There are certainly federal judges out there that deserve impeachment. Congress, however, has relinquished its oversight role to the administrative wing of the federal judiciary. It is time to take it back.
Fourth, the Executive Branch, having waged a war of power with the Legislative Branch, should go on to war with the courts. The courts have, for some reason, gotten under some misguided notion that they are final arbiters and enforcers of laws. It is actually the Executive Branch that enforces the law and the Executive Branch should publically decline to enforce those decisions it disagrees with.
All of these notions might be repugnant to some. I venture to say, however, that the ideas are only repugnant when we continue to treat the third branch of government as greater than it is. After all, it is the third branch of government.
Think of that in larger terms. The founding fathers put the legislative branch first because power came from the people. The executive was the second branch because the people then needed someone to execute the actions of the legislature. The judiciary was not an afterthought, but it was certainly third in thinking.
The federal bench has become arrogant and increasingly views itself as the first branch of government — capable of passing and enforcing laws without the other two branched. The other two branches, through budget, appointment, impeachment, and ignoring the third branch, have powers that are not effectively being used against the third.
Republicans everywhere like to say they are for small government. Recent actions tend to dispute that. If Republicans are serious about being for small government, they should not just focus on reducing the budget of the government, but also on reducing the power of the federal judiciary — a power not given, but taken by judicial order.
Evolving Standards of Decency
On this Easter Sunday when we should all again be reminded that there is such a thing as truth and truth is more than something in the eye of the beholder, we should rededicate ourselves to fighting for conservative judges who put aside their beliefs in favor of constitutional standards.
On that note, see Bill Kristol.
So our judges deserve some criticism. But we should not be too harsh. For example, it would be wrong to suggest, as some conservatives have, that our judicial elite is systematically biased against “life.” After all, they have saved the life of Christopher Simmons. It would be wrong to argue, as some critics have, that our judges systematically give too much weight to the husband’s wishes in situations like Terri Schiavo’s. After all, our judges have for three decades given husbands (or fathers) no standing at all to participate in the decision whether to kill their unborn children. It would be wrong to claim that our judges don’t take seriously legislation passed by the elected representatives of the people. After all, our judges are committed to upholding the “rule of law”–though not, perhaps, the rule of actual laws passed by actual lawmakers. And it would be wrong to accuse our judges of being heartless. After all, Judges Carnes and Hull of the 11th U.S. Circuit told us, “We all have our own family, our own loved ones, and our own children.”
You really should read the whole thing. While you and I might disagree on Terry Schiavo, surely we can agree on this.
Thank God for our robed masters. If it weren’t for them, Christopher Simmons might soon be executed. In September 1993, seven months shy of his 18th birthday, Simmons decided it would be interesting to kill someone. He told his buddies they could get away with it because they were still minors. He broke into the house of Shirley Crook in Jefferson County, Missouri, bound her hands and feet, drove her to a bridge, covered her face with tape, and threw her into the Meramec River, where she drowned. He confessed to the crime, and was sentenced to death according to the laws of Missouri. Last month the Supreme Court saved Simmons’s life. The citizens, legislators, and governor of Missouri (and those of 19 other states) had, it turned out, fallen grievously and unconstitutionally behind “the evolving standards of decency that mark a maturing society.” Five justices decided that the Constitution prevented anyone under the age of 18 from being sentenced to death. So Christopher Simmons will live.
The conduct of the federal judiciary is appalling. They have chosen to substitute their ideas of decency over the standards of decency of the American people. Some might argue that they are saving us from ourselves. I disagree. They are forcing down a path we did not democratically choose to go.
Always the Disgruntled
In my humble opinion, those people who were active in either party only to decide that they are ignored and drop out of party activity are generally the most bitter of people.
It is, therefore, no surprise that bitter Sam Kimery invented the Fox Blocker. How silly.