Everyone in Florida has been scratching their heads since last summer’s hurricanes at the news that Miami-Dade was getting such a large share of FEMA recovery funds. All four hurricanes pretty much missed that area by miles.
A story in the South Florida Sun Sentinel, headlined, “State records show Bush re-election concerns played part in FEMA aid” sheds some light on the subject.
Like other Republican lawmakers championing Schiavo’s bill, DeLay often suggests she is alert and potentially treatable.
“She talks and she laughs and she expresses likes and discomforts,” he said Sunday evening. “It won’t take a miracle to help Terri Schiavo. It will only take the medical care and therapy that patients require.”
After years of review, a Florida circuit court judge found that Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state, and any emotions she appears to express are simply reflexive. Based largely on the testimony of her husband and friends, a judge ruled she would not want to be kept alive, and ordered her feeding tube removed Friday.
Americablog has two related articles on the Schiavo travesty. For both horror and amusement, check out DC’s Inside Scoop, which has the GOP talking points on Schiavo that were leaked. The Scoop says rumor has it that these gem were the handiwork of folks at the office of Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA).
Here are three of the GOP message points:
* This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue.
* This is a great political issue, because Senator Nelson of Florida – has already refused to become a cosponsor and this is a tough issue for Democrats.
* This legislation ensures that individuals like Teri Schiavo are guaranteed the same legal protections as convicted murderers like Ted Bundy.
The second AmericaBlog article points to an ABC News poll that indicates that Americans support removing Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube 63-28.
The politics propelling this tragic tomfoolery are no surprise to anyone reading this, I’m sure. Nor are the Gops’ syrupy denials of political motivation. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” I heard one of them purr, on CNN.
If there’s anything to the ABC poll, it would seem to indicate that the Gops may have gotten ahead of the public on this. Amazingly, Tom DeLay and crew even got Bush involved, meaning Karl and Karen approved it. It’s hard to believe those geniuses didn’t know they only had 28 percent of the public – basically their base – in their pockets when they flew George in early from his weekend in Crawford to sign the bill. Talk about believing your own press!
Unlike with the Gannon scandal, the media has all guns trained on this one. We’d like to think that such brazen political trampling into a woman’s tragic life – not to mention the sanctity of her heterosexual marriage – would raise a stink among the voters, but Americans seems to have endless tolerance for the shenanigans of George Bush and his crowd of Republicans in the Capitol these days.
Still, if the wind shifts in the way the ABC poll indicates, the Gops are going to have trouble blaming this one on 9/11 – or even the Democrats.
In this article in today’s New York Times, Carol Murray, director of marketing for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, which operates the local Imax theatre, explains why she decided not to show the documentary film, “Volcanoes.”
“If it’s not going to draw a crowd and it is going to create controversy,” Murray said, “from a marketing standpoint I cannot make a recommendation” to show it.
This is just flat wrong. Controversy sells movie tickets. If you want to put butts in the seats at local cineplex, there really is no such thing as bad publicity. Just ask Mel Gibson or Michael Moore.
Amazingly, the Fort Worth science theatre is not the only Imax operator to self-censor this science film because it presents science. The Times says, “‘Volcanoes,’ released in 2003 and sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation and Rutgers University, has been turned down at about a dozen science centers, mostly in the South … because of its brief references to evolution, in particular to the possibility that life on Earth originated at the undersea vents.”
Apparently, panic erupted in the museum’s marketing department after a test screening of “Volcanoes” for 134 local residents. Reading through the viewer comments, a whiff of controversy arose – and it seems to have set Murray’s hair on fire. She told the Times that “while some thought [the film] was well done, ‘some people said it was blasphemous.’ In their written comments, she explained, they made statements like ‘I really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact,’ or ‘I don’t agree with their presentation of human existence.'”
That this happened in a museum dedicated to science is as scary as it is sad. I suppose you could argue that avoiding controversy is mission-critical in marketing departments at a public institutions. But when avoidance of controversy leads to censorship, a line has been crossed.
Apparently someone reported Nashville Christian radio personality Chris Ruleman to the authorities, claiming he possessed child porn. According to WSMV- Nashville Channel 4 News, Ruleman was arrested after the FBI received information that he was in possession of the contraband materials.
Ironically, the station where Ruleman works – 94FM The Fish – bills itself as ” Safe for the Whole Family.”
Right-to-life wingers in Florida have gone over the edge this time. In their battle to keep Terri Schiavo dying a little longer (and my heart really does go out to Terri and her husband), they entered a new bill in the Florida legislature.
If passed as expected, the bill will ensure that unless you had the foresight to specifically define all the conditions under which you would not want to prolong your death via feeding tube, hydration tube, excretion tube, etc. you would automatically be forced on to all of the above. I’m not kidding. A story in the Miami Herald explains it all.
“In an effort to get around another legal challenge, legislators have crafted a much broader bill. It says that no patients in a persistent vegetative state — Schiavo’s diagnosis — can have their feeding tubes removed unless they meet one of several conditions, including:
€ They have left written instructions approving the denial of food and water.
€ There is ”clear and convincing evidence” that before becoming incapacitated, they ”expressly” directed the withholding of food and water.
€ Death is imminent and a feeding tube would not help.
The state will merrily intrude over the wishes of the family if the new legislation goes through.
“Gelber said he fears the bill would deny the rights of parents to decide what to do with incapacitated children, since it would be hard to decide if a child made an informed decision on end-of-life issues.
Some Floridians, the story said, have already given up protesting:
“‘I don’t think I want the government in my bedroom and I certainly don’t want them on my deathbed,” said Jean Harden, a Lakeland resident who initially planned to speak in opposition to the bill but decided against it when she realized the committee planned to vote in favor of it.
My flamboyant 50-something South Florida friend Will actually made out a new living will in reaction to all this. It contains a provision outlining precisely what Jeb Bush is to do with his bad self in the event of Will’s near-death.
Deploying propaganda through paid surrogates, fake news reporters and tricked out video reports that are passed off as news is a de facto admission that the policies of the Bush Administration – and now the Schwarzenegger crew in Sacramento – can’t stand on their own.
Adding salt to the wound in the body politic is the fact that all this GOP chicanery is paid out of the public dole. (Now there’s a place to cut the budget.)
On the federal level, it is illegal to produce propaganda using taxpayer money. Fortunately for President Bush, the corrupt conservatives who control the US Congress will never investigate anything this Administration does.
On the other hand, Governor Schwarzenegger faces a legislature controlled by Democrats. And while the Pravdazation of government news reporting needs to be exposed to the antiseptic of endless committee hearings, it would be uncharacteristic of the Dems in Sacramento to make a fuss. More likely the fake news tapes will resurface as an issue in the governor’s race next year.
What attic does Jeb go to to find these wingnut freaks he populates Florida government with? I mean, when you pull back the layer of insulation and hear the scurrying scratches and see the droppings, you just know there¹s a Jeb appointee in there somewhere.
Latest case: one Cecilia Burke, whom the world’s most cynical and swarmy governor placed on the Pinellas County (St. Petersburg) Juvenile Welfare Board. Her remarks, equating homosexuals to pedophiles, offended everyone who isn’t a like-minded nut case. According to AP in the Miami Herald,
Cecilia Burke, who was appointed to the children’s advocacy board of directors by Gov. Jeb Bush, made her statements in a memo Feb. 7 asking the board to sever ties with the support groups Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education NetworkŠ Burke’s memo also said the groups support “unhealthy sexual practices among youth.” She cited maintaining relationships with these groups as a reason to deny the juvenile welfare board’s director, Jim Mills, a raise. That move failed.
St. Petersburg Times columnist Howard Troxler represents the rest of us:
But as for this constant attempt to equate all gay people with child molesters: At the very best, it is based in lack of knowledge; at the worst, something much darker.”
“And yet, some (not all, but some) gay-rights opponents try to work “homosexual” and “pedophile” into the same sentence.
Hence a 2002 speech by the then-president of the Southern Baptists condemning “the pornographer, the adulterer, the homosexual, the pedophile, the abortionist.”
Among the groups calling for an apology from Burke are Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), and Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). I’m not holding my breath.
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
