Get Out of My Death Bed

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.

Schwarzenegger Tries Bush-Style Media Manipulation

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.

[…]

The White House Hopes You Won’t Read This

As is its habit, late yesterday, after the million-dollar babies in the Washington press had adjourned for the weekend, the White House released details of the programs it plans to cut in education, children’s health and small business support. The AP gives us a skim:

In the new list, Bush asked lawmakers to eliminate programs worth $4.3 billion from education, $1 billion from health and $1.5 billion from law enforcement.Reductions include cuts totaling $2.5 billion from agriculture, $690 million from health and $470 million from housing.

What? No corporate welfare programs are being eliminated? I’m shocked. But there’s more:

In all, the targeted programs include 99 that the White House wants to eliminate, for a total of $8.8 billion in savings. The president wants to save an additional $6.5 billion by cutting spending on 55 programs, including:
– End the Small Business Administration’s $15 million micro-loan program because it costs taxpayers yearly $1 for each $1 lent.
– Eliminate $496 million in educational technology state grants to free more money for higher priority programs that focus on student achievement and show clearer results.
– Cut half of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership and move the program closer to self-reliance.
– Cut one-third of the Children’s Hospitals Graduate Medical Education Payment Program because an assessment determined there was no demonstrated need for the program.
– Eliminate the National Drug Intelligence Center because it duplicates programs run by a new, multi-agency Drug Intelligence Fusion Center.

Plight of the Swingsters

On Monday, in the afterglow of the media’s positive reports about the Iraqi elections, the February 7 Gallup Poll/CNN poll gave Bush a 57 percent approval rating – his highest rating since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Now, just four days later, the glow has apparently faded completely. According to the Associated Press, Bush’s approval in their latest poll is 45 percent.

Could be a polling fluke, God knows, but it’s more likely a reminder that the swing voters are still out there – and they still haven’t made up their minds about George Bush. The media says we’re a divided nation, like it’s 50/50. But it’s really more like 40/40/20, with 40 percent who love Bush no matter what, and 40 percent who absolutely do not. The remaining 20 percent – a group I like to call the “Swingsters” – are still on the fence.

Swingsters think of themselves as “independents” whose opinions aren’t captive to either party. Their judgments are not sullied by ideology, they say, but rather are based on objective analysis of the character of the candidate and his policies. The rest of us are a lot less charitable. We tend to think of them as wishy-washy and, well, dim. The central irony of the debacle of the elections last November is that this group of voters who bend with whatever breeze comes down the pike finally couldn’t bring themselves to vote for John Kerry because they believed he was a flip-flopper.

One bit of analysis we could take away from this drop in the polls (assuming its real) is that the Swingsters have very low expectations of President Bush. So it only takes one or two good press reports to get them singing his Hosannnas. During the Iraqi elections, the massive suicide attacks that had been threatened never transpired and just a few dozen voters were killed – so the elections were deemed a big success. At the State of the Union, on February 2, Bush read his speech without a noteworthy gaffe, and it was filled with even more flowery, upbeat rhetoric than most, perhaps to counter his natural, involuntary snarkiness. Plus, he did not appear to have electronic devices hidden in his coat. Another triumph. Bush also did a round of television interviews, including one with Brian Lamb at C-SPAN in which he discussed a book a book he’d read, “The Case for Democracy,” by Natan Sharansky. He’d have to be smart to read something like that. Right?

As a result, good buzz emanated from water coolers across the land and over the weekend, when the polls were taken, the poor Swingsters – who want to like Bush, they really, really do – were swept up in the euphoria. But as the week wore on, them ol’ devilish details about the SOTU speech came out. Turns out the Preznint’s flowery rhetoric hid the fact that what he really plans to do is phase out Social Security and cut education funding and veterans benefits, among other things. Disappointed again, by Friday the Swingsters had turned on Bush again, slapping him with a 12 point drop in popularity.

The Swingsters aren’t bad people. They’re just looking for a leader. Maybe they gravitate to Bush because he fulfills a familiar idea of a modern leader: the corporate division manager at the company where they work. But if the poll drop is as real, maybe he’s looking less like that guy every day.

Two-thirds of SOTU Watchers Were Idiots

Guardian UK:

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 66 percent of people who watched his State of the Union speech said his Social Security proposals will move the country in the right direction. That’s up from 51 percent of Americans surveyed before the speech. Three in four said Bush made a “convincing case” that the government needs to take action in the next couple of years to change the system.

The telephone survey of 485 speech watchers, conducted Wednesday, had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

CIA Admits Iraq Had No Chemical Weapons

So now will all the wingnuts apologize for lambasting folks like former weapons inspector Scott Ritter and others who dared contract the Bush Administration’s bogus claims in the run-up to the war? Not bloody likely.

Concord Monitor:

In a formal acknowledgment of the obvious, the CIA has issued a classified report revising its prewar assessments on Iraq and concluding that Baghdad abandoned its chemical weapons programs in 1991, according to intelligence officials familiar with the document.

The report marks the first time the CIA officially has disavowed its prewar judgments, and is one in a “series” of updated assessments the agency is producing as part of a belated effort to correct its record on Iraq’s alleged weapons programs, officials said.

For an agency that prides itself on providing the latest intelligence to policymakers, even the title of the new report reads like a year-old headline: “Iraq: No Large-Scale Chemical Warfare Efforts Since Early 1990s.”

Olbermann vs. the Wingnuts

Glad to see this highlighted over at AmericaBlog. If you really hate Bill O’Reilly there is actually something you can do: Watch “The Countdown” with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, which comes on at the same time as “The Factor.” I won’t besmirch Keith’s journalistic integrity by calling him a “liberal” but as a regular viewer of his show I can tell you that he comes closest to Jon Stewart in calling the Bushies on the bushit.

From Keith’s blog, Bloggermann:

…The Three-Card Monte Players at Dr. James Dobson’s “Focus On The Family” have reopened the can of worms that is SpongeBobGate, and have focused not on the family but on me, and in so doing embarrassed themselves and undermined the validity of their own concerns.

Dobson, you will recall, joined the singularly inoffensive animated character “SpongeBob SquarePants” to his conspiracy theories of a “pro-homosexual” agenda, in order to get headlines. When he got those headlines, he promptly complained about getting them. Dobson, like many other exploiters of Amoral Values, ran immediately to the easiest way out of a stupid fix of his own creation: he blamed the big old ugly media.

His website asked readers to send emails of protest to me and four other reporters who had covered this foofery – it even provided them with an email-generator with which to do so. But because I responded to nearly all of those missives with something other than “I’m sorry, please don’t send me to hell,” Dobson has determined I need more exposure.

So Keith gets what he deems a rather underwhelming amount of emails from the wingnuts – a very small amount of mail compared to the response after he dared to report on questions about the validity of the vote count in Ohio in November.

[…]

Ted Turner Compares Fox News to Nazis

Thank God for Ted Turner, the Mouth of the South. Maybe he should be chairman of the DNC! From North County News/AP:

Cable news pioneer Ted Turner used an appearance before a group of television executives to criticize the Fox network as a “propaganda voice” of the Bush administration and to compare Fox News Channel’s popularity to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany before World War II.

Turner, 66, in a speech Tuesday before about 1,000 people at the National Association of Television Programming Executives targeted “gigantic companies whose agenda goes beyond broadcasting” for timidity in challenging the Bush White House.

“There’s one network, Fox, that’s a propaganda voice for them,” Turner said. “It’s certainly legal. But it does pose problems for our democracy when the news is ‘dumbed-down.”‘

Fox News in New York issued a statement Tuesday saying, “Ted is understandably bitter having lost his ratings, his network and now his mind — we wish him well.”

Turner stepped down as vice chairman of AOL Time Warner in May 2003.

During a wide-ranging hour-long question-and-answer session moderated by former CNN anchorman Bernard Shaw, Turner called it “not necessarily a bad thing” that Fox ratings top CNN and other cable news networks.

“Adolf Hitler was more popular in Germany in the early 30s than … people that were running against him,” Turner said in remarks videotaped by conference administrators. “So, just because you’re bigger doesn’t mean you’re right.”

Convention spokeswoman Michelle Mikoljak said the association had no comment about Turner’s comments and that Turner was no longer in Las Vegas at the conference that continued Wednesday at the Mandalay Bay Event Center.

Turner heads an Atlanta-based philanthropic and business empire that includes restaurants serving buffalo steaks and other American dishes.

He wrote an article published last summer in the Washington Monthly magazine titled “My Beef With Big Media” in which he focused on what he called a loss of quality, localism and democratic debate.

Christian Coalition sued for welching on debt

It’s not like they don’t have the money!

From the Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

The nonprofit Christian Coalition of America is being sued in Tarrant County in an $87,000 dispute with an Oklahoma direct mail company.

Global Direct of Tulsa, Okla., filed the lawsuit in Tarrant County civil court recently, saying the coalition failed to provide a mailing list to the company to conduct a mass mailing solicitation program.

Global Direct said in court documents that the coalition had promised to use as much of the proceeds as necessary to pay off an $87,000 debt outstanding with the Oklahoma company.

The suit says the debt has not yet been paid.