James Carville has an editorial in the Financial Times, of all places, explaining “How Karl Rove lost a generation of Republicans.”

He’s generous in noting that, “If we concluded our analysis in 2007 and confined our judgment merely to Mr Rove’s immediate electoral record, we would have no choice but to judge him a spectacular success. There is no doubt that Mr Rove won elections. He has perhaps one of the most remarkable win-percentages in modern American politics.”

From there, though, he touts a series of polls showing that the Democrats have made huge gains among young voters (which Carville surely knows is an oxymoron) and swing voters. Naturally, he blames Rove. So far as it goes, he’s got a point. There’s not much doubt that the divide and conquer strategy had its cost.

Still, Carville takes this well beyond its logical conclusions:

Mr Rove’s famous electoral strategy – focusing on the Republican base first – is also largely responsible for a shift in international public opinion against the US. It would not be fair to blame Mr Rove for the Iraq war. But it is clearly fair to blame his strategy for the Terry Schiavo fiasco and the Republicans’ adherence to the policies and doctrines of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson. The world and now most of the US are contemptuous of the theocratic underpinnings of the policy Mr Rove ushered into government.

I thought the Republican majority’s actions in the Schiavo case were outrageous and said so frequently. Still, I’m rather sure they’d have taken place were Rove to have retired after the 2004 election. But the idea that Rove — or anyone else — has ushered into government some sort of theocracy is absurd. What policies and doctrines have been adhered to, pray tell?

The irresponsible interventions of the former Republican majority in Congress notwithstanding, Terry Schiavo was allowed to die. Otherwise: Abortion? Still legal. Prayer in public schools? Still illegal. Gay marriage and civil unions: More legal than they were under Bill Clinton or ever before.

It’s likely true that the Republican Platform is out of step with the consensus on these issues, since the platform has been essentially static since 1980 and the public view has shifted inexorably leftward. But that’s hardly Karl Rove’s doing.

He has been assistant to the president, senior advisor and deputy chief of staff. Mr Rove was the architect of social security reform, immigration, the hiring and firing of justice department officials and the placement of literally thousands of ideologically driven buffoons throughout the US government. As deputy chief of staff he was also responsible for handling the White House post-Katrina reconstruction efforts. On these actions, history has already rendered its judgment on Mr Rove. And, as we say in Louisiana, “it ain’t pretty”.

This ascribes too much to Rove, I think. Certainly, it’s absurd to lay Katrina at his doorstep. Social Security reform barely made a blip on the radar screen;surely, it’s not responsible for the GOP’s poll standings.

The McCain-Kennedy immigration bill was bipartisan and the opposition was almost entirely from the Right. That issue, more than perhaps any other save the Iraq War, has hurt the GOP. But it goes against the thesis that Rove was pandering to the base at all costs. Indeed, politically speaking, the president and the party would have been far better served adopting the Rovian strategy.

To the extent that the under-25 cohort is permanently alienated from the Republican Party — and I’m more than a little dubious that it’s so — it has much, much more to do with the war than with a polarizing political strategist. And, ultimately, it’s decision-makers, not advisers, who get the blame for that. To paraphrase Rove’s predecessor, “It’s the President, stupid.”

A story in yesterday’s Guardian would seem to provide hope that a simple sleeping pill can revive people from a persistent vegetative state.

We have always been told there is no recovery from persistent vegetative state – doctors can only make a sufferer’s last days as painless as possible. But is that really the truth? Across three continents, severely brain-damaged patients are awake and talking after taking … a sleeping pill. And no one is more baffled than the GP who made the breakthrough. Steve Boggan witnesses these ’strange and wonderful’ rebirths.

For three years, Riaan Bolton has lain motionless, his eyes open but unseeing. After a devastating car crash doctors said he would never again see or speak or hear. Now his mother, Johanna, dissolves a pill in a little water on a teaspoon and forces it gently into his mouth. Within half an hour, as if a switch has been flicked in his brain, Riaan looks around his home in the South African town of Kimberley and says, “Hello.” Shortly after his accident, Johanna had turned down the option of letting him die.

Three hundred miles away, Louis Viljoen, a young man who had once been cruelly described by a doctor as “a cabbage”, greets me with a mischievous smile and a streetwise four-move handshake. Until he took the pill, he too was supposed to be in what doctors call a persistent vegetative state.

Across the Atlantic in the United States, George Melendez, who is also brain-damaged, has lain twitching and moaning as if in agony for years, causing his parents unbearable grief. He, too, is given this little tablet and again, it’s as if a light comes on. His father asks him if he is, indeed, in pain. “No,” George smiles, and his family burst into tears.

It all sounds miraculous, you might think. And in a way, it is. But this is not a miracle medication, the result of groundbreaking neurological research. Instead, these awakenings have come as the result of an accidental discovery by a dedicated – and bewildered – GP. They have all woken up, paradoxically, after being given a commonly used sleeping pill.

Across three continents, brain-damaged patients are reporting remarkable improvements after taking a pill that should make them fall asleep but that, instead, appears to be waking up cells in their brains that were thought to have been dead. In the next two months, trials on patients are expected to begin in South Africa aimed at finding out exactly what is going on inside their heads. Because, at the moment, the results are baffling doctors.

[...]

“Something strange and wonderful is happening here, and we have to get to the bottom of it,” he says. “Since Louis, I have treated more than 150 brain-damaged patients with zolpidem and have seen improvements in about 60% of them. It’s remarkable.”

After Louis’ awakening was publicised in the South African media, Dr Ralf Clauss, a physician of nuclear medicine – the use of radioactive isotopes in diagnostic scans – at the Medical University of Southern Africa, contacted Nel to suggest carrying out a scan on Louis. “The results were so unbelievable that I got other colleagues to check my findings,” says Clauss, who now works at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford. “We did scans before and after we gave Louis zolpidem. Areas that appeared black and dead beforehand began to light up with activity afterwards. I was dumbfounded – and I still am.”

[...]

No one yet knows exactly how a sleeping pill could wake up the seemingly dead brain cells, but Nel and Clauss have a hypothesis. After the brain has suffered severe trauma, a chemical known as Gaba (gamma amino butyric acid) closes down brain functions in order to conserve energy and help cells survive. However, in such a long-term dormant state, the receptors in the brain cells that respond to Gaba become hypersensitive, and as Gaba is a depressant, it causes a persistent vegetative state.

There are several other patients detailed in the story. A quick check of GoogleNews shows a smattering of other reports on this topic going back to last week after the research was published in the prestigious Science.

These reports will doubtless renew the bitter debate sparked by the Terri Schiavo case. Dean Esmay recounts the vitriol surrounding his siding with the parents over the husband and feels some vindication over the report. Some doctors familiar with the new study disagree.

Accident victims, like the woman in the Science report, often have severed connections between brain cells, although the neurons themselves may remain intact. As many as half of those patients regain at least some consciousness within a year of the accident. After a year, however, few recover. Those who don’t are considered to be in a persistent vegetative state.

Patients who suffer heart attacks or strokes, like Schiavo, have a much more widespread death of brain cells because of lack of oxygen, sharply reducing their chances of recovering. The window of recovery for such patients is only about three months, Fins said.

A 1994 study of 700 patients found that none who had been in a persistent vegetative state for at least two years regained awareness. Schiavo had been bedridden for 15 years.

I’m still reasonably confident that Terri Schiavo could not have been revived, let alone had anything like a normal life. Dean’s trump card is that we can’t be certain, a point with which I agree. Then again, life doesn’t offer many certainties.

All we can do in tragic cases like Schiavo’s, it seems to me, is trust that the next of kin, in consultation with the doctors, are making the best decision they can in the interest of all concerned. In cases where there is an inter-family dispute, it’s reasonable to have judges look at the situation to ensure there is no reason to believe the spouse isn’t acting in good faith. Telling them they have to allow their loved one to remain in a persistent vegetative state indefinitely–or, perversely, divorce them–because there might be a cure one day is simply too cruel a fate to ponder.

…and throws Joe Lieberman in front of the bus on the way. It’s really quite a piece of work, if you take the time to read the whole thing. It’s late, so I’m not going to go through all of the things The Times cites as evidence against Lieberman at the time of this writing. Perhaps I’ll update this post tomorrow. But, in the meantime, I’ll just say that every specific charge The Times makes seems like a reach with some instances that can not be described in any other way than incredibly petty.

And this lack of substantive reasons shows when The Times immediately informs us that “this race is not about résumés.” Really? No kidding. It can’t be about resumes because Lamont’s political experience is, at best, measly. And that’s probably why The Times spends a total of 34 of 924 words of the editorial actually talking about Lamont. And the best they can conjure up is that he “seems smart and moderate” [my emphasis] and has “showed spine” to challenge Lieberman even though he “does not have his opponent’s grasp of policy yet.” Wow! That really sounds like a ringing endorsement to me.

No, this editorial is not about Lamont. And it isn’t even about “Mr. Lieberman’s legislative record,” as The Times wisely informs us. That would be just plain silly. This is about Lieberman falling “in love with his image as the nation’s moral compass” and “his warped version of bipartisanship.” It’s about civility. And Joe Lieberman, unlike many of his Democratic colleagues, has refused to sink to the rhetorical lows that have come to define his party epitomized by DNC leader Howard “I hate Republicans” Dean. Perhaps had Lieberman just called the President a war-monger or compared America’s treatment of detainees to that of the Nazis, Soviets, Pol Pot or others, he wouldn’t find himself in this predicament.

BY THE WAY: My utmost respect to anyone that can explain the rationale of the following also from The Times editorial: “…and despite some unappealing rhetoric in the Terri Schiavo case, he has strongly supported a woman’s right to choose.”

UPDATE: The Washington Post likes Lieberman’s “warped version of bipartisanship.”

The guest blogger Allahpundit is guest blogging form Michelle and points out that today is the anniversary of Terri Schiavo’s death. Allahpundit says,

Michelle’s Schiavo archive runs to eleven pages on Google, but for me it’s this short post that resonates the most.

The link to another post by Michelle points to this article by economist Steven Landsburg. In that article Prof. Landsburg writes the following,

Now, Michael Schiavo, it seems to me, is in something very like the bluenose position here. If he had a use for his wife’s body—if he wanted to cook it up for dinner, let’s say—then I’d have more sympathy for him. (On the other hand, I don’t think we should make a habit of letting people cook their spouses up for dinner, because it creates very bad incentives with regard to keeping your spouse safe and healthy.)

Which is precisely what Michelle Malkin also quotes, but under the heading “Dehumainizing Terri” and also with the implication that it is tasteless. On that last part, the quote by itself is tasteless, but there is a tiny weenie problem for Michelle Malkin (aside from the fact that Michelle is missing the gallows humor here): Landsburg ultimately comes down on her side of the issue. At the end of the article Landsburg writes the following,

You could argue in response that Michael Schiavo has signaled an equally strong desire to bury her (by turning down an offer of $1 million and by some reports $10 million), but I see an essential difference between the two desires. One—the desire to feed—is like the desire to read Saletan or, more precisely, the desire to read some other writer in whom I personally see no merit. The other—the desire to prevent others from feeding—is like the desire to censor, and I recoil from censorship even when a strict cost-benefit analysis recommends it.

Earlier in the article Landsburg had noted that as a libertarian he would recoil at the notion of banning the reading of author he does not like. In short, he thought that siding the parents wishes would have been better for everybody involved since Michael Shiavo’s interests were to essentially “throw away” Terri, and Terri’s wishes were no longer relevant since she was no longer concious. So while it might have been useful to point to Prof. Landsburg’s gallows humor and feign outrage and disgust, perhaps Michelle would have better served to read the damned article to end and find out that Landsburg is on her side (and the same goes for Allahpundit…next time read the damn article all the way through and engage brain).

That is what it is looking like. Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek points to this New York Times article that paints and interesting picture in Canada. Here are the key paragraphs,

The country’s publicly financed health insurance system — frequently described as the third rail of its political system and a core value of its national identity — is gradually breaking down. Private clinics are opening around the country by an estimated one a week, and private insurance companies are about to find a gold mine…..

But a Supreme Court ruling last June — it found that a Quebec provincial ban on private health insurance was unconstitutional when patients were suffering and even dying on waiting lists — appears to have become a turning point for the entire country.

“The prohibition on obtaining private health insurance is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services,” the court ruled.

In response, the Quebec premier, Jean Charest, proposed this month to allow private hospitals to subcontract hip, knee and cataract surgery to private clinics when patients are unable to be treated quickly enough under the public system. The premiers of British Columbia and Alberta have suggested they will go much further to encourage private health services and insurance in legislation they plan to propose in the next few months.

Private doctors across the country are not waiting for changes in the law, figuring provincial governments will not try to stop them only to face more test cases in the Supreme Court.

Looks pretty bad. My guess that this is a Pandora’s Box for the Canadian government and now that it is opened it will be very, very hard to close. How do you tell somebody who has cancer that they can’t fork over the money for a diagnostic test, but instead have to wait and possibly die? Each such case is a politician’s nightmare (think Terri Schiavo).

The problem is that a badly designed health care system will have rotten incentives. Think of it this way, suppose a law was passed making the price of lobster 1/100th its current price. The obvious result is that there would be far fewer lobsters on the shelves. People would purchase the existing inventory, and at these low prices lobster fishermen would switch to other more profitable catches. We saw this kind of thing with the price controls during the past oil crises. And we see the same thing in Canada with one huge difference: unlike lobster there aren’t many substitutes for health care services.

As with the lobster example, there is a shortage of both nurses and doctors in Canada. This should be obvious. Where is one place that the government can control costs? Doctor and nurse salaries. Fix those at a fairly low level and the rate of increase and you can help control costs. Since doctors and nurses are almost all highly intelligent and motivated people they will see that they can get more for their work in other occupations or in other countries. So you end up with a shortage of doctors and nurses. The exact same logic applies to hospitals, MRIs, and other things as well. The population is largely unable to go someplace else to get an MRI scan so if you have only three MRIs throughout the entire nation, there isn’t much the people can do about it.

To make the who system work Canada has to make all other alternatives illegal (note by the way we saw the same thing with the Clinton Health care proposal). If this were not the case, then it would exacerbate the problem with doctors and nurses. Seeing that there is more money in private practice doctors and nurses would leave the government system for the private companies. This would make the waits and service via the government system even worse. Given the existence of private health care companies there would soon be private health insurance companies as well. Pretty soon the only people left on the government program would be those who can’t get insurance or are extremely poor. By this time you’d have a health care system that looks quite a bit like the U.S. system.

On top of it, I’d argue that there are in effect uninsured people in Canada and lots of them. What is the benefit if you have government insurance if you still have to wait 10 months to get an MRI, and 18 months to get the procedure done? For 18 months you don’t have health care that you need. In effect you have no insurance as you sit there in pain and missing out on large portion of your life.

I’d say things are about to change in Canada. Whether the change is for the better or not will depend largely depend on the politicians. This latter point makes me think it wont be for the better, but who knows maybe the Canadian courts will keep the politicians from mucking things up too much.

On the whole, I like reading Michelle Malkin’s blog.  I more often than not agree with her posts.  Of course, she also tends to suffer from partisan blinders and fails to point out similar faults with conservatives, although not all the time.  However, in reading this post about the plight of Haleigh Poutre there is this part of Michelle’s post that I think is precisely backwards.

As state officials prepared to remove Haleigh’s life support, the supposedly impossible happened:

A day after the state’s highest court ruled that the Department of Social Services could withdraw life support from a brain-damaged girl, the agency said yesterday that Haleigh Poutre might be emerging from her vegetative state.

DSS also said it has no immediate plans to remove her feeding tube.

”There has been a change in her condition,” said a DSS spokeswoman, Denise Monteiro. ”The vegetative state may not be a total vegetative state.”

Monteiro said Haleigh is breathing on her own, without the ventilator she has depended on for four months. Monteiro also said that doctors at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield elicited responses from Haleigh during tests performed yesterday.

Everyone had given up on Haleigh–except Haleigh.

This is a huge story, a wake-up call to “right-to-die” ideologues who recklessly put such unlimited trust in the medical profession and Nanny State.

At that point I came to a screetching halt.  The “Nanny State”?!?!?  Excuse me, but I tend to think there might very well be something to this right-to-die position.  And for me, part of it is precisely what Michelle is saying, I don’t want the Nanny State making a decision for me.  If I want to die, then why should the state have a right to prevent me from making that decision and following through on it?  Granted, this is different than the case of Haliegh Poutre in that she hasn’t indicated anywhere that she wanted to die if she came to be in such a state, but to use the rhetoric that Michelle is using is rather disingenuous, IMO.

Michelle continues,

The same government bureaucrats and doctors who had conclusively deemed the 11-year-old girl “hopeless” and her vegetative state “irreversible” now tell us she is responding to stimuli and breathing on her own.

They were wrong.

Yes, they were wrong.  But the wrong people have been executed by the state, yet I didn’t see Michelle arguing for a moritorium on the death penalty.  I’m sensing a fair amount of hypocrisy here.

Further, one of the differences between this case and the Terri Schiavo case is the length of time.  Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state for years.  From the sounds of it, Haleigh Poutre has been in a “persistent vegetative state” for months (note that the quotes in this sentence are deliberate).  Perhaps if Haleigh were 25 years old, blind, and with all indicators pointing towards severe atrophy of the brain tissue I think the issue would then be similar.

Frankly I find Michelle’s rhetoric misleading and more than a tad hypocritical on this one.

Michael Demmons passes on word of a tragedy with some eerie similarities to the Schiavo case:

AP – The photos hanging on Allison Avrett’s living room wall conceal the heartache they’ve come to represent.
[...] Most of them were taken before Avrett gave Haleigh up for adoption five years ago, long before the abusive blows that police say landed the 11-year-old girl in a hospital bed attached to the ventilator and feeding tube keeping her alive. Now, with Haleigh’s doctors saying she won’t recover from her vegetative state, the child is at the center of a right-to-die legal struggle.

The state Department of Social Services, which has had custody of Haleigh since she was hospitalized on Sept. 11, wants to remove her from life support. Her stepfather, Jason Strickland, who is charged with beating her and could face a murder charge if she dies, wants to keep her alive. A Juvenile Court judge has already ruled that Haleigh should be allowed to die. Strickland appealed, and the state’s highest court is scheduled to hear arguments in the case Tuesday. It will be the first time DSS has argued such a case before the Supreme Judicial Court.

Avrett, who gave up her parental rights when she let her sister adopt Haleigh in 2000, says her daughter shouldn’t suffer anymore. “They say the most she might ever do is open her eyes,” said Avrett, a 29-year-old stay-at-home mom with two other children. “I don’t want her to sit there longer than she needs to.”

Police say the injuries that left Haleigh with severe brain stem injuries came at the hands of Strickland and his wife Holli, Avrett’s sister. Within two weeks of the couple pleading innocent to the beating, Holli Strickland was dead, fatally shot in her grandmother’s West Springfield apartment. The body of her 71-year-old grandmother, Constance Young, was beside her. The possible murder-suicide is still under investigation.

In a legal brief filed ahead of Tuesday’s hearing, Strickland, 31, asks to be declared Haleigh’s de facto parent. His lawyer, John Egan, insists his client isn’t motivated by the chance he could be charged with murder if the girl dies. “We should be coming down on the side of life as opposed to death,” he said. He cites the differing opinions of two doctors who disagree on whether the girl’s feeding tube should be removed. Both doctors say her ventilator should be shut off. If she remains attached to the feeding tube only, she could live for several months, one of the doctors said. Without the tube, death would come much quicker. “There’s a 50-50 split in the medical opinion, and we ought to — at a minimum — be moving more cautiously on this,” Egan said.

In both the Schiavo case and this one, there was an allegation that the lead male figure had caused the condition that put the person into the vegetative state and that their interest in the suit was motivated by personal gain. Of course, the alleged villain in the Schiavo case was fighting to end a life he contended was long over wherease the alleged villain in this case is fighting to save a life.

xlrq wonders why several of us who supported Michael Schiavo in his right to decide the fate of his wife against state action have not condemned him for his rather smug inscription on Terri Schiavo’s tombstone:

Schiavo’s Remains Buried Amid Acrimony (AP)

The burial of Terri Schiavo’s cremated remains didn’t bring an end to the acrimony between her husband and her family. Michael Schiavo angered his late wife’s family Monday by not notifying them about the burial beforehand and by inscribing on her bronze grave marker the words “I kept my promise.” Michael Schiavo – who said he promised his wife he would not keep her alive artificially – also listed Feb. 25, 1990, as the date his wife “Departed this Earth.” On that date, Schiavo collapsed and fell into what most doctors said was an irreversible vegetative state.

Schiavo actually died March 31, nearly two weeks after her feeding tube was removed by court order. The grave marker lists that date as when Schiavo was “at peace.”

I don’t find myself particularly angered at this since, while making a point in such a way strikes me as unseemly, it’s entirely his business. A funeral and a tombstone exist entirely for the comfort of the living; the dead don’t much care. Michael Schiavo endured years of public scorn and lies perpetrated by the Schindler family; if he finds satisfaction in putting his version of events on a piece of rock that he paid for, more power to him.

Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state, would not have been able to function even if fed by mouth, and was not abused prior to her death, according to the official autopsy. As predicted, however, the Schindler family continues to charge that Michael Schiavo abused her and that she would have recovered had she been fed.

Schiavo Autopsy Shows Massive Brain Damage (AP)

An autopsy on Terri Schiavo backed her husband’s contention that she was in a persistent vegetative state, finding that she had massive and irreversible brain damage and was blind, the medical examiner’s office said Wednesday. It also found no evidence that she was strangled or otherwise abused. But what caused her collapse 15 years ago remained a mystery. The autopsy and post-mortem investigation found no proof that she had an eating disorder, as was suspected at the time, Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin said.

Autopsy results on the 41-year-old brain-damaged woman were made public Wednesday, more than two months after her death March 31 ended a right-to-die battle between her husband and parents that engulfed the courts, Congress and the White House and divided the country.

Her parents cling to their belief that her condition could have improved, in spite of the autopsy report, their lawyer said.

She died from dehydration, Thogmartin said. He said she did not appear to have suffered a heart attack and there was no evidence that she was given harmful drugs or other substances prior to her death. He said that after her feeding tube was removed, she would not have been able to eat or drink if she had been given food by mouth, as her parents requested. “Removal of her feeding tube would have resulted in her death whether she was fed or hydrated by mouth or not,” Thogmartin told reporters. He also said she was blind, because the “vision centers of her brain were dead,” and that her brain was about half of its expected size when she died 13 days following the feeding tube’s removal.

The last fifteen years of Terri Schiavo’s life were a tragedy. These results seem to confirm the view of the various guardians ad litem and judges who looked at the case that Michael Schiavo was not a monster eager to kill his wife and the judgment of all the medical experts not employed by the Schindlers.

Update (1536): The medical examiners at NewsMax dispute the autopsy findings as well.

The results of Terri Schiavo’s autopsy will be released today, likely sparking yet another round of controversy and irresponsible charges from both sides of the debate that gripped the nation for several weeks earlier this year.

Schiavo Autopsy Report to Be Released (AP)

The medical examiner’s office plans to release its autopsy report Wednesday on Terri Schiavo — findings her family hopes will shed light on the cause of the collapse that left her severely brain-damaged 15 years ago.

Schiavo, 41, died March 31, nearly two weeks after the feeding tube that had kept her alive was removed under a court order obtained by her husband, Michael Schiavo. Her death ended a bitter legal battle between Michael Schiavo, who said his wife did not want to be kept alive artificially, and her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, who disputed doctors’ finding that she was in a vegetative state and insisted she could improve with therapy.

Terri Schiavo’s brother, Bobby Schindler, said Tuesday his family is eager to see if the report indicates what went wrong when her heart stopped beating for several minutes in 1990. Testimony in a 1992 civil trial indicated that her heart stopped probably because of a severe chemical imbalance brought on by an eating disorder. The Schindlers, though, do not believe she had an eating disorder and have accused Michael Schiavo of abusing his wife, a charge he vehemently denies.

One hopes the results will put an end to all this. I just about guarantee that it won’t, however.

Michael Demmons points us to the interesting case of Gregory Scott Johnson, an Indiana death row inmate who wants to donate his liver to his dying sister but is being denied on the grounds that it would require him to undergo expensive tests that at taxpayer expense.

There’s another complication:

Many organs used in transplants come from the bodies of those recently deceased, but in Johnson’s case, the chemicals used in his lethal injection would make the liver and kidneys unusable. He has asked prison officials if he could be electrocuted instead, in which case it might be possible to reuse the organs.

That request is not likely to be granted because the equipment needed for an electrocution is no longer in place at the prison. State law has changed and now requires executions to be carried out by injection rather than in the electric chair.

The alternative is a “split liver” operation but there are expenses associated with that as well.

Michael sees some eerie parallels with the Terri Schiavo case, where a lot of taxpayer money was spent trying to keep someone alive who purportedly wanted to die.

It’s an interesting conundrum and my inclination would be to do what was necessary to keep Johnson’s 38-year-old sister alive here. Still, the Department of Corrections raises a good point here.

If Deborah Otis’ brother were not an inmate of the state, would we pay any of the costs for her to get a liver transplant?

Several bloggers have jumped on the story of Mae Magouirk, a Georgia woman who they charge is being starved to death despite her wishes. Oddly, the only reports I can find on this case [See Google and GoogleNews] are on personal websites or other sites (FreePress, WorldNetDaily) with an agenda. The lone exception is this News 11 story:

Last month’s fight over Terri Schiavo energized an Internet army and it has now jumped into a Georgia family tragedy.

Last month’s fight over Terri Schiavo energized an Internet army and it has now jumped into a Georgia family tragedy. Unlike Terri Schiavo, this patient had a living will, but her case is still tangled.

Ken Mullinax’s aunt, Mae Magouirk, suffered aorta damage in late March. She entered the Hospice LaGrange and in a living will, Magouirk said she wanted nourishment and fluids unless she went into a coma or a persistent vegetative state. Mullinax and Magouirk’s granddaughter, Beth Gaddy, fought in court over who should be her guardian. Probate Judge Donald Boyd appointed Gaddy.

Mullinax says Gaddy has withheld nourishment and fought further treatment saying Magouirk needed to be with Jesus. He also charged that the judge went along though Magouirk was hardly comatose. “This woman has a lot more years to live,” Mullinax, the woman’s nephew, said. “She recognized us and she looked at us, and said, please, please help me go home.” Asked what he thought that to mean, Mullinax said, “It sure didn’t mean home to Jesus, and it sure didn’t mean starve me to death.”

Judge Boyd called Mullinax’s charges completely false and said all relatives agreed to let three doctors decide what was next for Magouirk. He said that everyone was happy with the compromise. “They were hugging necks, and, as far as I knew, the family was fine,” the judge said. “I’m just asking anyone who believes in life to help us, and to get involved in this,” Mullinax said.

And folks have gotten involved. Just a few years ago, the most that would normally happen would be a few letters to the local paper and that would be as far as it went. But now, bloggers can get hold of a story, and instantly galvanize opinion worldwide. Bloggers from the Schiavo case heated up the Internet and swamped the judge’s phones and computer with what he said are wildly false charges. “I’ve even been accused several times of murder and I’ve had, I would say, close to a hundred e-mails,” Boyd said.

The CEO of the West Georgia Health System told 11Alive News, “No patient at our hospice is denied food or water.” Beth Gaddy could not be reached for comment.

Paul at Wizbang has an extensive post on this and a follow-up interview with the nephew.

We clearly don’t have all the facts here. What we do know:

1. This is not simply a case of some crazy granddaughter trying to kill a conscious woman because she’s old and has glaucoma. The woman has a serious heart condition.
2. Powers of attorney are revokable, so it’s absurd to suggest that someone with a piece of paper could subvert the expressed, known wishes of a conscious person.
3. A judge and the hospital officials deny the nephew’s story.

For the record, I oppose the killing of grandmothers with glaucoma or, indeed, pretty much anyone who hasn’t been convicted of a crime and has a functioning brain and consciousness. My gut tells me that isn’t what’s happening here. It’s unfathomable that a judge would simply allow someone with power of attorney to order that an otherwise healthy person be denied food and water contrary to their written wishes as expressed in a living will. Perhaps I’m wrong, though.

Senator Mel Martinez (R, FL) says his office is the source of the infamous Terri Schiavo talking points memo.

Senator’s Office Source of Schiavo Memo (AP)

Florida Republican Sen. Mel Martinez says an infamous unsigned memo passed around on Capitol Hill emphasizing the politics of the Terri Schiavo case originated in his office. The memo — first reported by ABC News on March 18 and by The Washington Post and The Associated Press two days later — said the fight going on then over removing Schiavo’s feeding tube “is a great political issue … and a tough issue for Democrats.” “This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue,” said the memo, which was described at the time as being circulated among Senate Republicans while legislation was being considered to place the Schiavo case under the jurisdiction of federal courts.

Martinez said in a written statement that he discovered Wednesday that the memo had been written by an aide in his office. “It is with profound disappointment and regret that I learned today that a senior member of my staff was unilaterally responsible for this document,” Martinez said. He said he accepted the resignation of the staffer who drafted and circulated the memo. “This type of behavior and sentiment will not be tolerated in my office,” he said.

Martinez did not identify the aide, but The Washington Post said he was the senator’s legal counsel, Brian Darling. “Until this afternoon, I had never seen it and had no idea a copy of it had ever been in my possession,” Martinez said of the document. He had previously denied knowing anything about the memo and condemned its sentiments.

So much for claims that this memo was a forgery.

Michelle Malkin has an excellent historical roundup on this topic. She’s right, too, that the Left’s celebrations on this (see Jerome Armstrong for a reasonably sober example) are mostly unfounded.

While some on the Right have made claims that the memo was a Democratic forgery, that’s not what the story was about. Rather, the argument was that the source of the memo was unknown but was played in such a way by ABC News and others as to give the impression that it came from the Republican leadership and was widely circulated. Neither of those seems to be true.

My initial post on this looks good in hindsight:

The actual origin of the memo will likely come out soon enough, especially with the blogospheric attention it’ll receive. Still, not to get too Dan Rather here, the essence of the memo is true even if it was forged. That is, there’s no doubt that the Republican leadership in Congress is using the Schiavo case as a political wedge issue. (And, for that matter, so are the Democrats.) That’s not the same thing, by the way, as saying that they don’t honestly believe allowing her feeding tube to be removed is wrong or that they don’t genuinely care about her fate, as I’ve argued previously. But everything is politics the world of politics.

Even though I opposed what the Republicans (and a not insignificant number of Democrats) in Congress did on the issue, the above isn’t a criticism. Aside from being politically embarrasing, there was nothing unethical about the memo in question. Politicians considering the political impact of their votes is a good thing in a representative democracy.

Update (1019): The WaPo story: Counsel to GOP Senator Wrote Memo On Schiavo (p. A1)

The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last night. Brian H. Darling, 39, a former lobbyist for the Alexander Strategy Group on gun rights and other issues, offered his resignation and it was immediately accepted, Martinez said.

Martinez, the GOP’s Senate point man on the issue, said he earlier had been assured by aides that his office had nothing to do with producing the memo. “I never did an investigation, as such,” he said. “I just took it for granted that we wouldn’t be that stupid. It was never my intention to in any way politicize this issue.”

Martinez, a freshman who was secretary of housing and urban development for most of President Bush’s first term, said he had not read the one-page memo. He said he inadvertently passed it to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who had worked with him on the issue. After that, officials gave the memo to reporters for ABC News and The Washington Post. Harkin said in an interview that Martinez handed him the memo on the Senate floor, in hopes of gaining his support for the bill giving federal courts jurisdiction in the Florida case in an effort to restore the brain-damaged Florida woman’s feeding tube. “He said these were talking points — something that we’re working on here,” Harkin said.

While I don’t think the memo itself is problematic beyond political embarrassment, the conflicting stories of Martinez and Harkin should be brought before the Ethics Committee for investigation. If Martinez in fact presented the memo to Harkin as a means of lobbying on the bill but is proclaiming publically that he’d never seen the memo before, he should be censured. If Harkin is lying about this, then he should be censured. Yet again, it seems that the cover-up is worse than the “crime.”

I don’t seek to open old wounds, but since it’s the weekend and blogging is usually light, I want to provide a forum in which the Terri Schiavo case can be discussed.

In an earlier post I said that my hope is that we’d err on the side of individual liberty rather than on that of government intervention. But there were conflicting interpretations of fact in this case. So here is the way I see it:

* For whatever reason Terri Schiavo suffered cardiac arrest which caused brain damage due to a lack of oxygen.
* Michael Schiavo claimed that Terri said that she would not want to live in such a condition, and he sought legal permission to not artificially feed her.
* The court agreed.
* There are numerous appeals, all of which decide that the original decision should stand.
* Congress and the President believe that it is their duty to intervene in a single case, so they instruct the court to hear the case again. Congress and the President are denied.
* Every other appeal is denied, based upon the reasoning that the husband is the proper person to defer to in this particular case.

If my facts are correct, then what we have is not an activist court (an idea that Steven Taylor has already properly fisked), but a court that actually respected individual autonomy and federalism (my conclusion, not his). I know that Terri Schiavo was starved to death, and I’m really uncomfortable with that. But I’m not convinced that she was murdered in some Nazi manner.

Commenters: please take me seriously when I say that I know that I don’t have all the anwsers, and I’m not even sure if I have the facts straight. But yelling at me with ALL CAPS or something similar will only detract from your argument. I’m searching for understanding here, not dogma.

Terri Schiavo died shortly before 10 A.M., according to news reports.

Terri Schiavo, 41, Dies in Fla. Hospice (Washington Post)

Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose condition ignited a protracted legal struggle, died today at a Florida hospice, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed under a court order. Representatives of both sides in a dispute over her fate confirmed the death shortly before 10 a.m. EST.

The death of Schiavo, 41, ended the court battle that had pitted her husband, who wanted to take her off artificial life support, against her parents and siblings, who sought to keep her alive at all costs. But the death appeared unlikely to quell the broader controversy fueled by the Schiavo case, one that set right-to-life, antiabortion and conservative religious groups — with backing from President Bush and Republican leaders in Congress — against advocates of a “right to die” when the brain no longer functions.

Schiavo’s death, at the Woodside Hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., came 15 years after she suffered cardiac arrest, experienced a loss of oxygen to the brain and slipped into a coma as a result of an eating disorder. She later emerged from the coma, but she never regained consciousness and remained in what doctors said was a “persistent vegetative state.”

May she rest in peace.

See my Terri Schiavo Case archives for previous posts on this subject.

NYT, CNN, and AP have obits as well.

Others blogging:

• Bob Owens is, ironically, “live blogging” the television reports.
• Jeff Jarvis will be talking about it on MSNBC at noon.
• LaShawn Barber: “It’s all over.”
• Kevin Aylward has a photo roundup.
• Kevin McGehee argues that Terri Schiavo’s last days were quite “meaningful,” indeed.
• Ed Morrissey promises silence except for a call for prayers.
• Rusty Shackleford: “Terri Schiavo Finally Succumbs to State Sanctioned Starvation”

See also the trackbacks below.

Minor errors corrected.