Patrick’s Rants

Without many details, it has been announced that Terri Shiavo has passed away.
Gone are the legal battles.
I can only imagine that Michael continued to sit at the side of her bed, holding her hand when she quietly slipped away.
Peace Terri.

Terri Schiavo’s parents have once more come so close yet so far away.
The courts have continued to uphold the Separation of Powers doctrine, again rejecting appeals by the Shiavo’s and even taking an opportunity to jab at Dubya and Congress for over stepping their bounds.
This case, like the president’s popularity, will soon fade.

CNN.com

I hadn’t seen this commercial in a while so I thought it had been taken off the air, but apparently not. The scene opens with three guys heading towards the stalls in the restroom. They each greet each other on the way towards their morning ritual. We see this repeated twice more. Three times they greet each other. The commercial is for a laxative/fiber suppliment… I don’t even remember which one.
I personally don’t want to be taking something that causes me to have to use my employer’s facilities, which this commercial seems to indicate, at the same time as other people. Personally, this is “private time” not social interaction hour.
Big thumbs down.

CNN.com – U.S. Supreme Court rejects Schiavo parents’ appeal – Mar 24, 2005

For the 5th time the US Supreme Court has refused to hear Terri Shiavo’s case.
From an AP story:

“This is not a death with dignity,” Mahoney said just before the Supreme Court decision was announced. “If Terri were an animal, she would not have to endure this.”

Perhaps if she were an animal she would have been put to sleep many years ago. Perhaps Florida needs a Death with Dignity law like Oregon that allows a physician to administer lethal doses of pain killers to end a patients life, if the patient wants it.

Again Terri Shiavo’s parents have appealed to the Supreme Court.
Congress is saying that the law they signed required doctors to reinsert a feeding tube until the case can be heard by presumably “activist judges” who share the same “right to life” opinions as the religious right.
Jeb Bush is trying to step in again to have the state take custody of Terri just as they would take a child out of an abusive home. This is the same state agency that a few years ago lost a child in its care who later turned up dead (good karma for a link )
Good ole (bad ole?) Dubya has to face his own polar views. When he was governor of the state of Texas he signed what is called the Advanced Directives Act. According a recent article a mother who wanted her child maintained on life support was pre-empted by the child’s doctors and was disconnected just last week. Now he wants to make sure that we “err on the side of life”? Give me a born again break. (more…)

Congress pulled an all nighter, cut short vacations, called the President back from his “Social Security Reform” 60 day jaunt to sign a bill that puts the “smaller government” right into one family’s struggle over the right to die pushing a personal family matter right out of the jurisdiction of the State courts and into Federal court. So George W. Bush approves of some “activist” judges – hoping that an “activist” judge would take up the cause and presumably rule in favor of “life”. Terri’s family has stated that they believed she was getting better – 15 years after falling into what the court appointed physicians can only call a perpetual vegetative state. The family is deluded with the belief that after 15 years she can somehow get better, that she responds to stimuli.
Early this morning a Federal judge rejected her parent’s case for a restraining order tht would have reinserted a feeding tube. The judge ruled that her parents didn’t have a very good chance of winning the case so a restraining order was deemed unneccessary. Michael Shiavo had been asking the court for at least seven years to allow his wife to die. Her parents had been fighting against him for the same amount of time.

This brings us to the issue of living wills, which Terri did not have. (more…)

Thanks to Jake on http://utterboring.com I have lost 10 minutes watching this strange video entitled How to Kill a Mockingbird
If that wasn’t enough… there’s also this little diddy

Thanks Jake.

Alan Greenspan has been a long time neutral voice concerned merely with the financial fitness of the country. He has run the Federal Reserve Board with pragmatism without letting politics get in the way of his recommendations on interest rates. He bucked George HW Bush’s request to lower interest rates when it would have been in GHWB’s favor to have lower rates. Indeed GHWB blamed Greenspan for his election loss to Bill Clinton in 1992.
Greenspan urged Clinton to lower the national debt, lower the deficit. Clinton did and one of the best economies that we have seen in years, some might say since before Jimmy Carter, followed. Mr Greenspan cautioned against “exhaulted exuberance” in the stock market, he saw stocks that could not reasonably be priced the way they were without some kind of correction. The “tech bubble” popped not too long after.
He has been right more times than not, he is even arguably a financial genius. Why is it then that he is backing Dubya’s Social Security private accounts? Perhaps senility is setting in, perhaps he wants to be reappointed to his position on the board which expires in 2006, perhaps he is letting his politics get in the way of rational thinking. (more…)

Poker Sites under Blogger Attack
Oh those poor blog spammers! Now their online poker spam won’t get them the best ranking, and people won’t be hitting my site when looking for online poker. Instead, bloggers are taking back their space by putting links to wikipedia, the online encylopedia editable by the world essentially, and more specifically links to the online poker definition on wikipedia. (more…)

In the eagerly awaited opinion likely to be appealed to the state’s highest court, San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer said that withholding marriage licenses from gays and lesbians is unconstitutional.

“It appears that no rational purpose exists for limiting marriage in this state to opposite-sex partners,” Kramer wrote.

The judge wrote that the state’s historical definition of marriage, by itself, cannot justify the denial of equal protection for gays and lesbians.

“The state’s protracted denial of equal protection cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has become traditional,” Kramer wrote.

Judge Kramer ruled that denying same sex marriage was akin to previously illegal interracial marriage, segregation, the treatment of women as their husband’s property and treats people differently based upon their preference.
In other news, the “Defense of Marriage Act” or “Homophopes-R-Us” that was passed last year disregards states rights when it comes to same sex couples. Not only is that offensive to same sex couples who are legally married it also snubs countries where multiple spouses are legal essentially saying that the United (Christian) States of America know what’s best for the world.
Let us not forget that the twisted bastardization of Islam led us to Al Qaeda. The twisted bastardization of Christianity will lead us similarly to the shadow of the valley of death and the “faithful” will follow as sheep.