Continental chainsaw

Florida is in the news again, this time with the ongoing saga of a woman whose brain has been mostly fluid for over a decade, the right-wing groups who back her family, and the temper tantrum of Tom Delay. Digby explains it all:

By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother's wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.

Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo's care thus far.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schiavo's because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.

And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.

Like Kung Fu Monkey, I miss Republicans. You know, the guys who would ask you how you were going to pay for something, like feeding people or buying a new building or whatever. The ones who prided themselves on keeping the government (and the deficit) small, manageable, and out of your life.

Instead, we have the GOP-controlled Congress and the President creating special laws to overrule every court that's ever looked at this case, because the religious zealots that pull their strings don't like what they see. Then, when these are inevitably dismissed by judicial review (which is the whole fucking point of the judiciary branch and checks and balances, look it up in a civics textboook sometime), they'll cry "activist judges" and attempt to dismantle something else.

We should have taken heed after the fuckups of the 2000 election and chainsawed Florida off the continent. Give them to Cuba--after all, if the Miami Cuban refugees (who gave us the Elian fiasco, ran drugs for the CIA, have links to both the Kennedy assassination and Watergate, and forced 40+ years of madness in foreign policy) want to fight Castro, let them do it when he's running the place.

I don't know about you, but I am not comfortable with the Speaker of the House maligning private citizens. Particularly one as ethically-challenged as Delay is. The guy should be busy preparing for prison, not browbeating the House into passing a law that nobody outside of his core constituency agrees with. In the meantime, I'm going to go look at saws that can cut through bedrock.