Schaivo Case

You might notice on the right that I have a new sponsor, TerriPAC. The ad will be there for two weeks. Unlike the last ad, pushing the profoundly silly idea that 9/11 was staged, this is one I can really get behind. It's a political action committee set up by Michael Schiavo to fight against the manipulative and highly dishonest tactics of those who turned Terri Schiavo into a national political issue and to help make sure the same thing doesn't happen to someone else. I'm all for that. What the religious right did to both Michael and Terri Schiavo was an unconscionably cruel and disgusting…

Florida State Attorney Bernie McCabe, the prosecutor that Gov. Jeb Bush urged to do an investigation of possible criminal wrongdoing by Michael Schiavo the night Terri collapsed, has concluded that there is no evidence of anything criminal. Even Jeb Bush says that's the end of the matter now, by which he probably means "please, please, make this go away so I don't have to make myself look even worse by pandering to the delusional."

Predictably, the Worldnutdaily has trotted out "experts" - including the uber-fraud Dr. Hammesfahr - to claim that the autopsy didn't show that she was in PVS. I was going to fisk the articles they've had on it myself, but instead I asked Adam Tierney, one of my fellow In the Agora contributors, to do so. You can find his response here. Adam is a grad student in cognitive neuroscience at UCSD, so this really is his field of study. He does an excellent job of cutting through the nonsense, writing in part: Finally, Hammesfahr claimed that "the relay areas from the frontal and front temporal…

Majikthise has an excellent fisking of Joan Didion's article in the New York Review of Books about the Schiavo case. In particular, she points out the absurdity of those who are saying that since the autopsy said there's no evidence of bulimia or a "heart attack" in the autopsy, Michael must have done something abusive.

In response to my post about the Schiavo autopsy on In the Agora, an anonymous poster that everyone there refers to as "Leon" left a typically amusing comment. He wrote: I note also that Mark Furman, author and criminal investigator, has spent a number of weeks going over the totality of the records and will shortly deliver a book to the public. I suggested that he should replace "author and criminal investigator" with "disgraced former cop and infamous racist who was last seen on television committing perjury in the OJ trial." But alas, it's true. Fuhrman does have a book coming out about…

The Schiavo exploitation continues. Jeb Bush has pushed a prosecutor in Florida to open an investigation of the circumstances involving Michael Schiavo's 911 call the morning that Terri collapsed - an investigation he admits is highly unlikely to find anything: Gov. Jeb Bush said Friday that a prosecutor has agreed to investigate why Terri Schiavo collapsed 15 years ago, citing an alleged time gap between when her husband found her and when he called 911. Bush said his request for the probe was not meant to suggest wrongdoing by Michael Schiavo. "It's a significant question that during this…

If you're looking for the folks for whom the Worldnutdaily exists, look no further than Free Republic. It's basically a central online gathering place for every deluded and ignorant pedestrian right winger in the country. And you just gotta see the total meltdown they're having over the autopsy of Terri Schiavo. Some of these people actually believe that Terri had broken legs and even a broken back when she was admitted to the hospital 15 years ago. Never mind that the medical reports from the hospital staff don't say anything like that, and they checked for any signs of abuse or…

The autopsy done on Terri Schiavo has been released and to the surprise only of those who listened to the steady stream of nonsense coming from her family and amplified by the media, it confirmed exacly what Michael Schiavo, Judge Greer and the medical experts who examined her had said all along: Thogmartin said that Schiavo's brain was about half of its expected size when she died March 31 in a Pinellas Park hospice, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed. "The brain weighed 615 grams, roughly half of the expected weight of a human brain...This damage was irreversible, and no amount of…

The Worldnutdaily has a headline, Judge in Terri's Case Had Conflict of Interest, which links to this story about Federal District Court Judge Whittemore from a hilariously biased website about Terri Schiavo. The article claims that Whittemore had an "overwhelming conflict of interest in the matter that ethically prohibited him from sitting on the case." What is that overwhelming conflict of interest? Hold on to your hat. The overwhelming conflict of interest is that back in 1989, Whittemore was recommended to the Governor of Florida as a potential state judge by a 9-member judicial…

Joseph Farah is always good for a laugh or two, and this morning's ridiculous screed is no exception. The column is titled Republican Judges Killed Terri, and he points to conservative judges like William Pryor who "ignored the will of the people and the U.S. Congress and the president of the United States." There's just one little problem with that: the "will of the people" was squarely against Congress and the President on this one. Even a majority of Tom DeLay's conservative district believed that they should have stayed out of it and that their involvement was politically motivated and…

The right wing media has been awash in the story of Mae Magouirk, an 81 year old woman who was checked into a hospice by her granddaughter, Beth Gaddy, who claimed she had power of attorney and requested for her not to receive any nourishment or treatment. This followed a recent heart problem which had Magouirk in intensive care. Other family members intervened and went to court to insure that the woman would receive nourishment and treatment, arguing that she was not terminally ill, not in a coma, and that her own living will specified that nourishment was only to be withheld if she was…

A commenter left this on a thread below and it deserves its own thread. Media Matters has an amusing report on Pat Robertson's appearance on Fox News a few days ago talking about Terri Schiavo. He says: You know, on my program today, I read in detail the finding of a noted Nobel Prize-winning neurologist named Dr. Himmelfarb. Not only is he confusing William Hammesfahr with, presumably, Gertrude Himmelfarb, but he's taken the man's utterly fraudulent claim of a Nobel Prize nomination and turned it into an actual Nobel Prize! He's also predictably using this situation to promote the right…

One of the more amusing displays in this whole circus sideshow has been watching the right suddenly embracing Jesse Jackson, a man they've savaged for years. NewsMax, one of the Worldnutdaily's primary imitators, suddenly calls him "the man regarded by many as the Democratic Party's conscience." How did NewsMax refer to Jackson before this? Well there's this story, headlined Jesse Jackson: Friend of Terrorists, Communist Stooge. And there's this one, wherein he is referred to as "nothing more than a slimy shakedown artist." The Worldnutdaily, not one to be outdone, has actually promoted a…

Nat Hentoff has long been one of my favorite writers. He is a consistent civil libertarian with a love for and long history with jazz, so there is much to admire. But on the Terri Schiavo case, he has swallowed the nonsense coming from the right hook, line and sinker. In his latest column, he writes: She is not brain-dead or comatose, and breathes naturally on her own. Although brain-damaged, she is not in a persistent vegetative state, according to an increasing number of radiologists and neurologists. Utter nonsense. There are two who claim she is not in a PVS, Hammesfahr and Cheshire.…

Timothy Sandefur sent me a link to this essay by Cathy Young about the appalling rhetoric being thrown around in the Terri Schiavo case. She writes: No doubt, some people trying to keep Schiavo, or her body, alive are driven by sincere humanitarian passion. But, mostly, this spectacle has been a sickening display of cynicism and fanaticism. Hard to argue with that. It's an excellent essay, well worth reading.

One of my readers left a comment on my post about Alan Keyes with links to two articles on Keyes' Renew America website. Holy cow, you gotta see these. The first is from David Quackenbush about the Schiavo case and the second is an interview with Alan Keyes, wherein we see that the religious right has now gone from criticizing the courts to believing that they may simply be ignored whenever the executive (meaning President or Governor) thinks they're wrong - and they do so in the exact same words in both: And in this particular case, with the other branches ranged against them, the judges…

You knew it had to happen, didn't you? You knew that Alan Keyes, the undisputed champion of self-righteous moralizing, couldn't keep his mouth shut about Terri Schiavo. You also knew that when he did see fit to fire up that heavily emotionalizing cannon that constitutes his brain, the output would be published in the Worldnutdaily. Anywhere else would be a travesty of justice worse than...well, worse than the "murder" of Terri Schiavo by the "liberal culture of death". When last we saw ol' Alan, he was licking his wounds after prostituting himself in Illinois for a desperate shot at the big…

One of the stories that Terri's family has been busily trying to push is that Michael may have abused Terri the night of her collapse, leading to her current problems. Bobby Schindler has been on TV repeatedly saying that they have "uncovered evidence" that "seems to suggest" that he may have abused her. But as usual, it's one thing to make such accusations on TV and quite another to prove them in court. And as it turns out, this too has been adjudicated and dismissed for lack of evidence. According to the Guardian Ad Litem's 2003 report, the family first began making accusations of abuse…

In reading the full report from Jay Wolfson, the Guardian Ad Litem appointed by Jeb Bush to review the entire history of the case and make recommendations, I came across this very disturbing passage. It concerns testimony from Terri's family in 2000 in one of the many appeals they've filed to reverse the court's decision: Testimony provided by members of the Schindler family included very personal statements about their desire and intention to ensure that Theresa remain alive. Throughout the course of the litigation, deposition and trial testimony by members of the Schindler family voiced…

The state trial judge in the Terry Schiavo case, George Greer, has shown incredible fortitude in the face of villification and even death threats. The FBI has arrested a man for putting out a $250,000 bounty on the head of Michael Schiavo and a $50,000 bounty on the head of Judge Greer. It's not the only threat he has received, and Greer and his family must now be under constant armed guard. This is a perfect example of how religious extremists will eat their own in the cause of their own extremism. Greer is a conservative Republican and a devout Southern Baptist. And he is doing exactly what…