We have a winner!!!

In the Balls of Steel competition, it's these guys, hands down.

Please, release them.

Whew. Lord knows I'll sleep better after reading
this

Laura Bush said on Tuesday that she and her husband have living wills that would guide medical decisions if either of them became incapacitated like the Florida woman whose case has dominated public debate for weeks.

Mrs. Bush, speaking to reporters on a flight to Afghanistan, called it a "very, very difficult time" for the family of the woman, Terri Schiavo, but said she was "encouraged" to hear that the case had spurred others to create living wills.

"I hear the numbers of people inquiring about living wills or writing living wills increased dramatically, and I think that is really good," Mrs. Bush said. "The president and I have living wills, and of course our parents do, and they wanted us always to be aware of it. I think that is important for families to have an opportunity to talk about these issues."

Oh I just bet Dubya’s ready to pull the plug the next time Bar has a case of the sniffles.

And I wonder which one has health power of attorney for the ‘rents?

Forked Tongue

From the Washington Post

Native Americans across the country -- including tribal leaders, academics and rank-and-file tribe members -- voiced anger and frustration Thursday that President Bush has responded to the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history with silence.

Three days after 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed nine members of his Red Lake tribe before taking his own life, grief-stricken American Indians complained that the White House has offered little in the way of sympathy for the tribe situated in the uppermost region of Minnesota.
…

The reaction to Bush's silence was particularly bitter given his high-profile, late-night intervention on behalf of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman caught in a legal battle over whether her feeding tube should be reinserted.

"The fact that Bush preempted his vacation to say something about Ms. Schiavo and here you have 10 native people gunned down and he can't take time to speak is very telling," said David Wilkins, interim chairman of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and a member of the North Carolina-based Lumbee tribe.

Well, it's not like you're killing white Christian women or anything important.

"Sellers other auctions' include ANWR, the EPA and a slightly used bong.

Oh sure, they let some maroon sell a Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese, but Ebay pulls this??????????

Politicize THIS!

From the NYTimes

Congressional leaders reached a compromise Saturday on legislation to force the case of Terri Schiavo into federal court, an extraordinary intervention intended to prolong the life of the brain-damaged woman whose condition has reignited a painful national debate over when medical treatment should be withdrawn.

...

Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas and the House majority leader at the center of the Congressional intervention, said on Saturday: "We should investigate every avenue before we take the life of a living human being.”

Like this life?




Or this one?



Or these?



Hypocritical bastards. Damn them to hell.

Damn them

That's what I keep saying, out loud and to myself, over and over as I read about Congressional intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

Damn them to hell.

What gives any politician the right to intervene in this case? How can they make one family's excrutiating ordeal into a political football?

And the latest atrocity?

Washington lawmakers continued the struggle this morning to prevent doctors in Florida from removing a feeding tube this afternoon from a severely brain-damaged woman.

Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee and the Senate majority leader, issued a statement saying that the woman, Terry Schiavo, and her husband, Michael, were being invited to testify in a Congressional inquiry into the matter later this month.


The statement pointed out that Federal law protects witnesses called before Congress "from anyone who may obstruct or impede a witness's attendance or testimony."

The maneuver is the latest step by lawmakers determined to keep Ms. Schiavo alive to prevent her feeding tube from being disconnected, scheduled for 1 p.m. today.

"The Senate and House remain dedicated to saving Terry Schiavo's life," Mr. Frist said in the statement. He said they were requesting the Schiavos' presence at a hearing on March 28. "The purpose of the hearing is to review health care policies and practices relevant to the care of nonambulatory persons such as Mrs. Schiavo."

Michael Schiavo is Terry's guardian. Her parents ceased to be responsible for her the day she got married. I am willing to bet that most people have told their partners/spouses/lovers more than they have ever told their own parents about the most intimate and important details of their lives. I will bet good money Michael Schiavo knew Terry better than her parents did.

The fact that there are now Congressional committees involved in this, along with the courts and state legislatures, is an abomination. For all the Republicans bitching about trial lawyers and activist judges, they sure salivate like Pavlov's dogs when they can use either to make a political point.

Damn them to hell.

You are my sunshine...

Finally, the media has decided that manufactured news and lack of access are worthy of exposing. Too bad they needed a cutesy promo like "Sunshine Week" to make their point, but we’ll take what we can get.

From today’s Washington Post

It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.

But since lazy editors are collaborating in passing off the pseudo-news, maybe it's more like "partly cloudy."

Even if agencies do disclose their role, those efforts can easily be undone in a broadcaster's editing room. Some news organizations, for example, simply identify the government's "reporter" as one of their own and then edit out any phrase suggesting the segment was not of their making.

So in a recent segment produced by the Agriculture Department, the agency's narrator ended the report by saying "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting for the U.S. Department of Agriculture." Yet AgDay, a syndicated farm news program that is shown on some 160 stations, simply introduced the segment as being by "AgDay's Pat O'Leary." The final sentence was then trimmed to "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting."

Brian Conrady, executive producer of AgDay, defended the changes. "We can clip 'Department of Agriculture' at our choosing," he said. "The material we get from the U.S.D.A., if we choose to air it and how we choose to air it is our choice."

And yes, this Administration is not the first to play make-believe with the news, but they seem to have taken the practice to new heights:

Under the Bush administration, federal agencies appear to be producing more releases, and on a broader array of topics.

A definitive accounting is nearly impossible. There is no comprehensive archive of local television news reports, as there is in print journalism, so there is no easy way to determine what has been broadcast, and when and where.

Still, several large agencies, including the Defense Department, the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, acknowledge expanded efforts to produce news segments. Many members of Mr. Bush's first-term cabinet appeared in such segments.

A recent study by Congressional Democrats offers another rough indicator: the Bush administration spent $254 million in its first term on public relations contracts, nearly double what the last Clinton administration spent.

$254 million, and they still can’t get it right

Render unto Caesar

I know there are real Christians out there, people who live the loving message of Jesus and work to make that message real in the world. Somehow I doubt these people would qualify.

Lyric Hassler talks about her Christian rock phase the way some of us talk about crushes on Sean Cassidy, or acid-wash jeans, or the hundreds of hours we wasted memorizing Pink Floyd lyrics. "Uchhhhhh, embarrassing," she says. The gaudy soundtrack of the "Christian ghetto" she lived in as a teenager. Lyric the high school "Jesus freak," chastising her church youth group for wasting time on frivolous pizza parties, ignoring any TV that wasn't "The 700 Club."

"It just makes me wince," she says now that her ghetto self is long gone, now that she's made it here, to Washington, to the languid Friday afternoon tea time in a congressional cafeteria, to her starched white blouse and a stint on the presidential campaign and a husband who works in the Senate, to a salon of what she calls "Christian intellectuals."

(Like Episcopalians, but without the frivolity.)

It's what Ralph Reed dreamed of, and now it's finally here. Christians in politics are ready to trade in their guerrilla fatigues for business suits and a day job. This year evangelicals in public office have finally become so numerous that they've blended in to the permanent Washington backdrop, a new establishment that has absorbed the local habits and mores.

Nearly every third congressional office stocks an ambitious Christian leader who calls himself "evangelical," according to Jim Guth, a political science professor at Furman University. They may believe everything they believed before, but they've learned to speak in ways that are more measured and cautious and designed not to attract attention.

(Or, like Moonies but without the openess.)

"This new generation has the same convictions but without the edge," says Michael Cromartie, an evangelical scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. "They may believe all the same things, but they are not going to go on 'Larry King Live' and say all homosexuals should die. They've learned how to present themselves."

(Or, like Nazis, but without the fashion sense.)

I'll get the news I need from the weather report...

This, I am proud to say, is how out of it I am.

I see this headline on the NYTimes front page:

Jackson's Aides Were Arranging Smear Campaign, Witness Testifies

And my first thought is “When was Jesse Jackson accused of campaign dirty tricks?”

Of course, it is the front page of the Paper of Record, The New York Times, so I guess I could be forgiven if I expected something a little more...oh I don’t know...newsworthy?????????