bookofdays

when PR falls on us like snow

Journalists say it over and over:  journalism is the opposite of public relations. We're supposed to be afflicting the comfortable, comforting the afflicted, puncturing holes in the smooth stories played out by politicians, corporations, churches. I came to journalism by way on nonprofit, good-cause PR, and try to remember that the hallmarks of good PR – super-clear stories with exact endings, data that all point the same way – and suggesting that they don't make good journalism.

But we're in an era where PR masking as journalism has defined our politics, with sometimes tragic results. So how do we interact with power, when they've learned how to do what we do?

and they see only their own shadows

The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our own history abundantly attest. The press in its connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion.
        -- Justice Charles Evans Hayes, Lovell v. Griffin, 1934

In the height of the Great Depression, someone had an idea about whether  bloggers should be considered journalists. Not that Justice Hayes, born in 1882, would ever have conceived of the Web, let alone a Web log, as he considered whether the First Amendment applied to broadsheets put out in the city of Lovell, California.

I've been watching elite journalists muse soulfully on the question, "Are bloggers journalists?" for what feels like a sickeningly long time, but is probably only since this past February, when the National Press Club convened its first panel on the question in the aftermath of the Jeff Gannon scandal.

John Aravosis, had investigated a fellow named James Guckert, who had been allowed into the White House press corps under the name Jeff Gannon. Aravosis found out, among other things, that Gannon had advertised his services as a male prostitute online and that his news service, Talon News, was funded directly by the Republican Party (rather like those 18th-century news broadsheets Andie Tucher spoke of in that August lecture).

So with worried faces, a panel that included Gannon,  Congress Daily's John Stanton, former Philadelphia Inquirer staffer Ana-Marie Cox, now running an online column, mused soulfully on whether people like Gannon, or even like Cox, should be taken seriously, or seriously marginalized. (Aravosis, whose work exposing Gannon was the kind of digging Sree likes to talk about, wasn't invited onto the panel, though he spoke from the audience.)

The well-paid journalists in the room were worried, perhaps justly, about this blending of fact and opinion, which depending on who you read (just as with print magazines) can be crude or well crafted, thoughtful or not, original or lazy. These conversations seemed, at that point, kind of theoretical.

Not any more, in the wake of a journalism scandal far more explosive than Jeff Gannon and the resulting talk of a federal shield law, including testimony before Congress on the part of the very journalist who's at the center of the scandal. And the Press Club was at it again, on the same day as some of its  members were asking: do bloggers deserve this shield?  And the panel, this time including  Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics at the University of Minnesota, and two TV journalists, agreed "probably not." All of it part of "National Free Speech Week, which may define irony, as noted by Roxanne .

Suddenly we're wondering what sort of writer gets First Amendment protection, and of what kind. And that brings me - briefly, I promise - back to the Supreme Court.

fight till the hurt stops

Like James Wolcott, whose brilliant analysis of the savaging of Cindy Sheehan is a must-read,  I've had a death  in the "family" of my Manhattan building -- in my case, in the family of our super, Ramon.

Ramon has been ill with cancer, this year: we've watched him grow skinny and lose his hair from chemo, worrying that we would lose him. He's seemed better lately, and we were a lttle shocked and scared when we saw crowds gathering in front of his entrance on Monday night. This is Washington Heights; it looked like half the neighborhood was gathered on our block, crossing themselves in front  of  makeshift shrine.

But it was no death watch, as we realized  Tuesday. It was an actual death - of Ramon's son-in-law, Pfc. Jose Ruiz.

Perhaps you saw the full-face photo on Newsday's front page, and the headline:     HE ONLY SAW HIS BABY ONCE. His wife, at tonight's memorial service, was clear about her husband's decency in his service.

all the president's secrets

I watched All the President's Men last night, for the first time in 20 years. What struck me was not just the less-obeisant Washington press, or a still-cute Dustin Hoffman: it was how relatively innocent the Nixon's administration's abuses seemed. to me -- even its abuse of counter-intelligence, when compared to how deeply these guys are working to embed such practices into the "normal" range of executive power.  And while Marvin Kalb's Financial Times piece What Watergate Can Teach the White House (via Talk Left) points to the danger of perjury charges in the WHIG scanda, he doesn't acknowledge that to these guys, when the law goes against them it's time to change the law.

Even "cover-up" has to go by a new name. In a New York courtroom, a judge is finally hearing Maher Arar's suit against the INS and Justice Department . The judge is  scratching his head at  the government's invocation of the "state secrets" privilege, rarely used before this administration's Etch-a-Sketch approach to the Constitution.

In addition to claiming that valuable state secrets would have to  be spilled in discovery -- precluding any discussion of whether Maher Arar should have been abducted and shipped to Syria, where he was tortured -- this privilege has been invoked in a range of cases.. Inter-Press Service reports: Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, told IPS, "Once rarely invoked, the state secrets privilege is now increasingly used by the government as a 'get out of jail free' card to block unwanted litigation."

Including employment discrimination:

Jeffrey Sterling, an operations officer with the CIA in its Near East and South Asia Division from 1993-2001, claimed he was told he was "too big and black" to receive certain CIA assignments, and that CIA management placed expectations on him "far above those required of non-African-American Operations Officers." He also contended he was retaliated against for using the CIA's internal equal employment opportunity process.

However, the court noted, "There is no way for Sterling to prove employment discrimination without exposing at least some classified details of the covert employment that gives context to his claim."

The IPS story (no link yet, sorry) also notes the use of this strategy in the cases of Sibel Edmonds and Wen Ho Lee.

moonbats v. starship troopers

Cindy Sheehan's vigil in Crawford, Texas,is finally beginning to gather steam  -- enough, as Salon's Tim Grieve reports with amazement, for the cable nets to portray her as a "stalker."

Sheehan's journey, her demand to speak to Bush about the death of her son in Iraq, inevitably echoes Lila Lipscomb's  desolate face at the White House in Fahrenheit 9/11, as well as Sue Niederer's arrest on "defiant trespass" after making a similar demand of Laura Bush last year. Watch carefully as the group supporting Sheehsn in Iraq grows: will the response echo  Kent  State,  in this 1960s acid-flashback of a war? (The post title reflects a  song from the Australian band The Herd: see why, and listen,  in the jump.)

I hope Sheehan asks him about the new effort to minimize the official number of troops coming home with PTSD,  as the sheer financial strain of all these broken bodies and minds begins to hit. I hope she  challenges any Bush promises about troops coming home soon, and will ask about  the upcoming increase in troop levels (for the next set of Iraqi elections). The number of "ifs" attached to any actual withdrawal sounds like someone trying to come up with excuses not to get married.

I wonder if Aidan Delgado is going to Crawford too.

Delgado's home in Florida now,  after touring the country sharing his slides and experiences from Iraq  (including Abu Ghraib). (You can see the slide show here; my revious posts on Aidan: here and here.) And the Sarasota paper offers a profile that paints him as just another college student, albeit one who enlisted in the military at a poetic moment:

looking for (a) justice

As I started writing a different post, the news came over the radio: a Supreme  Court retirement. But not Rehnquist, which would have been bad enough, since any vacancy allows for one of the Top Neocon Suspects to be put through. But no, it's the worst. It's Sandra Day  -- the swing vote.

God knows I've held enough against her -- not least her role in Bush v. Gore, when she's described by Vanity Fair as "overheard expressing her dismay [on Election Night] over Gore's apparent victory":

"This is terrible," she exclaimed. She explained to another partygoer that Gore's reported victory in Florida meant that the election was "over," since Gore had already carried two other swing states, Michigan and Illinois.

Moments later, with an air of obvious disgust, she rose to get a plate of food, leaving it to her husband to explain her somewhat uncharacteristic outburst. John O'Connor said his wife was upset because they wanted to retire to Arizona, and a Gore win meant they'd have to wait another four years. O'Connor, the former Republican majority leader of the Arizona State Senate and a 1981 Ronald Reagan appointee, did not want a Democrat to name her successor. Two witnesses described this extraordinary scene to Newsweek. Responding through a spokesman at the high court, O'Connor had no comment.

(Thanks to Digby for the extended quotation.) O'Connor was viewed as  "emotionally fixated on stopping a recount" -- because she  knew she would want to retire! Still, in the years since she said that she's been an important bulwark in stemming the damage from Bush v. Gore.

Her vote has been crucial in so many of the SCOTUS rulings we've counted on in this administration: protecting choice in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, decriminalizing private sex acts between consenting adults in Lawrence v, Texas,  recognizing the basic civil rights of Guantanamo detainees in Rasul v. Bush. SCOTUSblog, which is worth checking every five minutes right about now, notes a few:

These are among the cases in which Justice O'Connor's has been the decisive vote or opinion, and in which a more conservative Justice might well vote to overrule the governing precedent. (Post in progress. Please suggest additional cases.)

Note: Because most Justices consider stare decisis a more serious obstacle in cases of statutory construction, those cases (e.g., the Davis and Jackson Title IX decisions) might be more secure, even if Justice O'Connor's replacement would not have agreed with her as a matter of first impression.

McCreary County v. ACLU (2005) -- Ten Commandments displays

Jackson v. Birmingham Board of Educ. (2005) -- Title IX Liability for Retaliation

Rompilla v. Beard (2005) -- standard of reasonable competence required on the part of defense counsel by the Sixth Amendment

Johanns v. Livestock Marketing (2005) -- assessments for government speech

Smith v. Massachusetts (2005) -- double jeopardy

Small v. United States (2005) - felon firearm possession ban doesn't cover foreign convictions

Tennessee v. Lane (2004) -- Congress's Section 5 power

McConnell v. FEC (2003) -- campaign finance

Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) -- affirmative action

Mitchell v. Helms -- direct aid to religious schools

Stenberg v. Carhart (2000) -- "partial-birth abortion" ban

Davis v. Monroe County Board of Educ. (1999) -- recognizing school district liability under Title IX for student-on-student sexual harrassment

Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network (1997) -- injunctions against abortion-clinic protestors   

Morse v. Republican Party (1996)

Zadvydas v. Davis

Brentwood -- state action

Hunt v. Cromartie -- race-based redistricting

Rogers v. Tennessee -- "judicial" ex post facto

(UPDATE: For those with a subscription or willing to sit through a quick Absolut ad, Salon has a list with more detail, as well as an article that explores possible scenarios -- quoting Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University Law School, as saying "It's going to be a long, hot summer." And one reads with a grimace references Noah Goldberg's thoughtful piece on the front page of the Times Magazine, "God's Country?", which speaks explicitly of the "O'Connor compromise" on church-state issues.)

And as Nina Totenberg just said on NPR. at 75 she's been "at the top of her game intellectually." But her husband is desperately ill, and she's making the kind of decision women who are responsible for their families do.

Speculation about her replacement already includes Alberto Gonzales, about whom I feel I have written as much as I can stand (here's my final stand on the eve of his confirmation hearings), seen by some nervous folks as ethnically appropriate and adequately vague on abortion. The thought of someone who cut his teeth trampling the constitutional rights of Texas' death row, going on to solicit opinions that could provide legal cover for torture becoming a Justice makes me physically ill.

Though in checking referrers just now, after the first time I threw up my response, I found someone searching for "Supreme Court" and "Royce Lamberth." Now that's an intriguing prospect, given that Lamberth has been the judge demanding justice for the plaintiffs in Cobell v. Norton.

Bush just issued a quick list of vague concepts about a replacement and shot out a demand for "a fair vote."  If there was a need for the mother of all filibusters, any set of "extraordinary circumstances," this is it.

The post I was going to write was about Maher Arar, who wants the U.S. officials who kidnapped him and shipped him to Syria to be subject to Canadian criminal charges. The extradition battle alone will dominate the headlines, or should.

Meanwhile, Arar's suit against Gonzales and John Ashcroft may ultimately come to the Supremes this year; so may the ultimate constitutional challenge to the so-called Defense of Marriage Act  and various challenges to the Patriot Act.

SCOTUSBlog gives this useful list of upcoming cases:

No. 04-623, Oregon v. Ashcroft – assisted suicide
No. 04-1084, Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal – religious use of drugs
No. 04-1152, Rumsfeld v. FAIR – military recruiting on campus and gay rights
No. 04-1144, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood – abortion parental consent
No. 04-1244, Scheidler v. NOW – abortion protests

Given that last, and O'Connor's outstanding role in Casey, NARAL has plunged into the fray, and MoveON has a new ad (quicktime link) that focuses on Schiavo (which seems odd to  me). The games have begun, indeed -- or rather, La commedia riprendere.

I'll let Arar have the last word for now:  his question applies to so many of the questions that the Senators looking at the new justice need to keep in mind.

"Are there any controls on these people?" he asked, referring to authorities. "Is this the way to fight
terrorism -- by abolishing due process, by abolishing justice?"

fascist picture story time

Speaking of what the press isn't covering....a  quick meander from Kos led me here. Many thanks to the Lebanese/Iraqi Christian blogger liminal catharsis;  this is a psycho mix of the medieval Passion Play, the Army Adventure Van, and  all this talk of "patriot pastors" and other bashes at the fragile church-state wall. Pseudo-Christian politics, with a militaristic cast that looks like "Team America" on some very bad mescaline. I'm importing the whole post, which liminal put up in February, and will comment very briefly after.

              

Holy S**t! It's fascist picture story time!! 

So people don't think I'm independently inventing anything. I still had the window open when I noticed the whole thread went down. So I took screen shots as proof. Here's where these pictures originate via locomono's post on Fark.com :

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14


I'm just going to post two pictures first and the story. I'll comment more later; one thing though: What is the difference between Muslims trying to defend their homeland by recruiting from mosques and Christians trying to defend their homeland by recruiting from churches? And this is coming from an old school Iraqi Assyrian Orthodox Christian. In plain speak, I think both are wrong any way you cut it. This absolutely blows my mind. This is another one of those whatever happened to the separation of church and state moments.  Onward Christian soldier.


This first picture is the American flag clearly covering up the cross.


This picture apparently shows banners of the various branches of American Armed Forces hanging from the pews.

Now here's the story told by a self-proclaimed Republican, remember...locomono, whom I completely agree with besides the fact he supports the war:

First off, this is absolutely true and only happened about an hour ago. I am a Christian, a republican and support the war in Iraq, but this pisses me off in ways I cannot explain even to myself. This is not a debate thread, after you read this and look at the pictures, if you post anything it will be reactions, advice, or simple opinion. I know there are a lot of military personal in this forum and I would love to here what you have to say about this but if this turns into a flame war I will be extremely upset with whoever's involved. Now on to the story

The other day my dad tells me we're going to a "guy's night out" banquet. Innocent enough sounding, right? Well I haven't done anything that could be considered a favor for him in a long time, and it seems important to him if incredibly boring so, what the hell I'll go. He picks me up at the house around six. I nearly walk out the door about 5 times each time remembering something I've left behind, the last thing I go back for is my camera.
In the car conversation goes as awkwardly as it usually does with my dad,
"What is this thing anyway? Just sitting around card tables talking about good ‘ol days?"
"Probably not they've got one of the guys from the battle in black hawk down to talk about his time there"
Thinking to myself, at least that doesn't sound too bad, "Cool enough. Where is it, are we gonna get there on time?"
"Oh, it's right up the street at porter memorial"
So, that's kinda weird that it's at a church, but whatever. Churches are relatively cheap to rent out during the week.

When we get there traffic is crazy, there must be two thousand people coming to this one church. It's kind of odd that there are three squad cars just to stop traffic and let us all in, but you know what they say, "when enough people gather together in harmony, the fuzz come to break it up"

There's a humvey and black hawk helicopter sitting outside with corresponding units, half the people that are walking in with us are wearing service shirts. Whether air force, army, marines, coastguard, ambulance driver or fireman, all these guys get a check from Uncle Sam. Ok, I don't have any problems with men in uniform, unless I'm drunk outside and they're cops. A door opens and we're headed into the basement for pork barbeque sandwiches, chicken quarters, refried beans and slaw. On the way I glance guardsmen setting things up with that military motion you don't lose in civilian life until about a year out of boot camp. We tell old war stories full of gore and glory and times we almost bought the farm, as we eat. Without any of that kind of story of my own I told him about a PI named John Landrith killing three armed kidnappers with a rusty old meat cleaver to save a seven year old. It's well received in the basement of a church while we eat our Oreo minis. When our meal is done the mass is herded to the sanctuary were we watch the history channel's documentary on the events of black hawk down. When the lights come up my earlier discomfort is redoubled. I realize something is very ********ed up, and start taking pictures. What I see reminds me of footage from the third right the way patriotic imagery is thrown around bugger all. What you’re looking at is government mesh thrown over the steps to the balcony, and a huge flag covering up all but the tip of a huge cross in the first picture, and the huge amount of people sitting below various armed forces banners in the second. There was a nice POW one behind me. I apologize for the poor quality but it’s a new camera, and I’m still learning how to use it, especially in low & mixed light conditions

So, I can't help myself.  I'd like to share locomono's utter disbelief and completely repost the thread in this discussion forum.

They were ready to start the show, so after a raffle for all five branches of the military t-shirts, UK basketball tickets, and Famous Dave’s BBQ coupons(the caterer), we were subjected to a really shitty Rockapella group wearing camo with cackies, and singing mixed Christian rock and patriotic numbers.

talking to saints in north england

Quick post: I saw this sweet movie last night.  Millions  brings all of us back to that moment, at nine or ten years old, when we  mused intensely, with an intensity others called weird, on BIG questions.  The small protagonist of this film, Damian, talks to saints as if they were his drunk old uncles. With their hints, he spends most of the film trying hard "to be good," to do what he thinks is right. I'm suddenly curious if this is what  Danny Boyle, the director, was once like, long before the Trainspotting years.

Though the trailer might make it seem a little saccharine, it's worth the glimpse, and the film  feels not sentimental but honestly emotional. Also funny, whimsical and entirely new: a distant cousin, of course,  to  Joan of Arcadia (consoling me a little about the latter, which has betrayed me these last weeks by opting to become a faux Buffy.) 

I'll leave it to more cinematically-minded people, like Rachel, whose  review and meditation on the film is well worth reading.  and to critics like Manohla Dargis to identify all the elements that make it work.  I also want to shout out to Dargis, who like me almost didn't graduate Hunter High School in 1979 because of the math Regents: her writing here, and often in her work for the Times, is lyrical , as when  she outlines the movie's premise:

Damian has moved into new digs, mostly, it seems, because their old home is where once upon a time they lived with a loving wife and mother. Recently deceased, the missing woman hangs over this woeful threesome like a sigh. Her absence shapes their days and nights, driving Ronnie to cuddle the pillows in his big empty bed and sending his children deep into worlds of their own making, one shaped by pre-adolescent tremors, the other by ecstatic faith.

Alex Etel, who plays Damian,  makes Haley Joel Osment look like a cereal box image. (Not for nothing does Salon call Etel "unreasonably appealing." )   The wild poet locked in this small pre-monk is just waiting for the next movie. Or rather, the wild young activist, as the film's fantastic ending suggests. As Jehanne Darc knew, all that truck with saints can drive you into the future.

humans live out of curiosity

From  an unbelievably good book of short stories called Sarajevo Marlboro, by  Miljenko Jergovic (translated by Stela Tomasevic):

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I flick through books, and wait for the carrots, parsnips and the lettuce to grow. Humans live out of curiosity. That's the best way, and the most honest way. Anything else is just a false way of  courting other people's tears. Camus demanded and gave melodramatic explanations. For those whose death isn't accidental, the situation is as follows: women and homosexuals slit their wrists, soldiers and boors shoot themselves in the head, actors and romantics swallow pills, the clumsy and neurotic shoot themselves in the heart, the ignorant and the perverse hang themselves, the ambitious and the weak jump off bridges, sad cases and intellectuals jump from roofs or top floors.

The parsnips are the first to sprout, followed by lettuce and finally the carrots. The tiny leaves are as soft as a newborn baby's hair.

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As Voltaire suggests, sometimes the garden is all we have .

The rest of the book -- which I hope to review for ABR, and will blog my notes as usual -- features stuff like this:

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Elena was happy and successful. Zlaja was happy and unrealistic, Often she accompanied him on his drinking bouts but only when there was a gap in her busy schedule.....As a couple, they hadn't reckoned on the non-stop shellings:  it couldn't be ignored or avoided; it destroyed real as well as imaginary worlds.

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No wonder some characters revert to parsnips. The only other choices are on the menu at the suicide cafe.   (Link is to another TSP excerpt, which a few of you may have heard me read in public.)

Writing about it, even to work it out, is an option only if you're not an illegal immigrant some bored FBI agent wants to nab.  From Detainment, the blog set up to support the girls in Queens:

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In fact, an FBI official told The New York Daily News, "Nobody here believes they are wanna-be suicide bombers." Another official at the Department of Homeland Security commented, "We're not spun up about this case." So why, then, are these young women in jail, cut off from their families? Why are their lives being ruined? This is an insane injustice.

Please open your hearts to both families. The family of A., the young Guinean woman, is in urgent need, and owes money to their lawyer. They have also lost their income, as the father has also been detained on immigration violations. As we learn more details about her situation, we may find they have other needs as well.

The young Bangladeshi woman, T., and her loved ones also face an enormous challenge. Her family needs to raise approximately $10,000 in the next three months just to get by. There are three children. The vast majority of the money would go towards housing, because the family has had to give up their apartment out of fear of surveillance or other threats to their safety.

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Ed, my little brother, commented rather poetically on this case: "I would rather we recieve comment for being wrong than cry later for doing nothing. "  I won't argue here that those FBI agents could have been doing something more productive than reading teenn girls' high school essays; I'd just love for him, and the silent hordes who agree, to concede that there's no there there. It's  time for someone bright at HSA to hear the comments, and to decide this is getting to be more of a pain than it's worth.  And it's our job, I guess, to keep telling the story till something actually happens.

It's been on NPR as well as continuing Times coverage (though the latter will insist on mentioning a suicide bomb fear). but the girls are still detained. I feel proud of having been the first to throw this up in the commentish blogosphere (Body and Soul , The Heretik, and Bitch Ph.D. since made sure it got proper notice)  and now wonder what else is possible. The power of the press, even the Times,  is severely limited, at least against these monsters. (Click that NPR link and hear Nina Bernstein's frustration.)

I hope the girl who wrote the sincere essay about suicide and Islam is taking good notes in detention. Send her Dostoevsky and Malcolm X. Send her Jergovic as well (who some have compared favorably to Calvino), though he may be a little scatological for her current level of Islamic devotion. But voices from hell deserve such clear notes, and wide distribution.

I'm, certainly going to read more Jergovic if I can (he has two novels also). Knowing a little about translation, I looked up Tomasevic as well -- only to find that she has mostly done nonfiction before, and now works for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. I hope she realized from this book that she's a poet, and years from now writes her own fiction or narrative nonfiction. She could certainly draw it  from the ICTY commedia: Milosevic's clowning self-defense, rich NGO buzzards in their expensive jackets .

the passion of poor mrs schiavo

I'm so glad I don't have cable television.

I wasn't going to write here about Terri Schiavo. That nightmare commedia, where pseudo-Christian legislators use a woman with a liquefied cerebral cortext and a flat EEG to whip up their  most fanatical troops and delude suffering parents along the way,has already been done so well by the incredible thinkers catalogued here by Majkthise, including (for those who can stomach his over-the-top language) Rude Pundit.  I simultaneously avoideed the subject and immersed myself in the blogswarm, leaving Rachel to chase after the track record behind Bush's 1999 "Futile Care" Law and  to link to Jon Stewart's own painfully funny outrage on the subject.  I watched as the Reeps began to use this as a reason to destroy America's judiciary -- a task that, no matter the ultimate outcome for this family, may yet be on a roll.

I watched as the U.S. Congress passed a piece of unconstitutional legislation without a quorum, and heard legislators that aren't physicians try to diagnose Schiavo, while one that is, Sen. Frist, did so from a 5-year-old videotape, admitting that he hadn't "read all 33 medical affidavits." Either he doesn't know what a flat EEG means -- in which case  his medical education is sorely lacking - or he saw no harm in scoring points with the Bible-toting crowd, a welcome distraction from the  budget Congress just approved. Which, among other atrocities (like more huge tax cuts for the rich),  cuts the very Medicaid that has helped keep the woman breathing all this time.

And I've been as a aware as anyone  of each judicial decision, as men with impeccable Republican credentials turned back every pseudo-legal dance presented to them. Many, like Judge Greer, did read the medical affidavits.

So why am I writing now?

Because I stopped by the CNN website, saturated with news of "Terri" , and made the mistake of clicking on the link for "background of the case." What struck  me was the medical and legal naivete of the writing, as if readers who aren't doctors or lawyers don't deserve to be informed in enough detail to get what's going on here.
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"Doctors that Michael Schiavo hired have said she is in a persistent vegetative state. That does not mean she is brain dead. People in a persistent vegetative state cannot think, speak or respond to commands and are not aware of their surroundings. They may have noncognitive functions and breathing and circulation may remain relatively intact. Terry Schiavo breathes on her own and blinks."
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Simple and suggestive; it makes me think of aphasia, of all those stories you hear about comatose people who suddenly revive. But contrast it with the much fuller  information ifrom the court itself? (Obtained from Florida lawyer Matt Conigliaro, who states at the outset that takes no side in the controversy over the feeding tube:)

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Over the span of this last decade, Theresa's brain has deteriorated because of the lack of oxygen it suffered at the time of the heart attack. By mid 1996, the CAT scans of her brain showed a severely abnormal structure. At this point, much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid. Medicine cannot cure this condition. Unless an act of God, a true miracle, were to recreate her brain, Theresa will always remain in an unconscious, reflexive state, totally dependent upon others to feed her and care for her most private needs.
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Her cerebral cortex has been replaced by liquid. Her EEG is flat.  How  many versions of "not alive" don't you understand? I knew we had hit a new  medical low when the new charlatans started talking about hyperbaric oxygen therapy, a form of snake oil that pops up whenever people are at their most desperate. But what many of these folks are counting on is prayer -- there's no other way is say day is night like that.

They're entitled to pray, of course. But why does CNN defer to their sensibilities? Why do these infotainment spectaculars calling themselves news outlets treat the protesters like sober people of conscience, and not the doctors and judges who are simply offering their  best judgment -- at the risk of their lives? More to  my point, why are they afraid to say that she is already dead, preferably before  one more person talks about a "culture of life?" (Update: after seeing clips tonight of the 3 cable networks demonizing both Michael Schiavo and Judge Green and using words like "murder," I understated the problem.) (Update II: one of the neurologists who has examined her has now  confronted MSNBC about this, in the  process laying out all the actual evidence again.)

And now Randall Terry's in on the act -- giving me  yet another reason to regret, as I have over the years, that when he and I were Respectful Opponents at a women's clinic in Binghamton, New York, as I guided women at a clinic past his  bloody-baby brochures, that I didn't take the opportunity to push him gently into the path of an oncoming car.  (OK, I don't kill people. But his track record makes such fantasies irresistible.)

James Wolcott states succinctly what''s going on here:

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So if a wife believes her terminally ill husband would prefer to have life support removed, his parents agree, but (say) a sister "chooses life" and fights for custody, the sister's wishes should prevail over the wife's and parents'? There's never going to be an easy way to adjudicate these matters, and it would be characteristic of Republicans to pack something as Lifetime-cable sounding as "Terri's Law" with all sorts of mischief. Particularly since Krauthammer and his allies are rallying around Terri as if she were a large-scale fetus, which explains the use of the code phrase "innocent life" used by Randall Terry and others to describe her. As one of the vigilants, sounding tired and sad beyond his years, complained on cable news today, "Between abortion and euthanasia, it seems like they got you coming or going." Fostering a "culture of life" is just another way of trying to control women's bodies, which is what animates conservative mullahs, even to the point of trying yet again to subvert women's college athletics and Title IX.
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"Large-scale fetus" except, of course, that most fetuses past five weeks have more cerebral activity than Schiavo's body displays at the moment.  But it's not even "just" women's bodies they're after If these minions get their way, all the most private decisions will come with governmental opprobrium on one side and a priest's stamp on the other. With the cheerleading of our state media.

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday: the day that some, I'm sure, were counting on celebrating a faux-resurrection. If she dies tomorrow, words like "martyr" and "murderer" will be bruited about, if they've not been already  I'll be in my brother's house among many Catholics and much cable television. And I wonder if I will have the fortitude to point out to them how this passion play - much like Mr. Gibson's last summer - runs roughshod over the core messages of the man they claim to be celebrating.