NOTE: Current updates on this travesty will remain at the top of the page until Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is reconnected or she has been starved to death. Read our original post here, and please scroll down for other news.

~~ Gnomon

Terri Schiavo, invalid sacrifice to amoral bioethics laws and an arrogant judiciary -- both of which we've allowed to metastasize for decades as we puttered with our stocks and PlayStations -- begins her 14th day deprived of food and water this afternoon.

Neither the 11th Circuit Court nor our US Supreme Court is pleased to raise a finger. Instead we get this overbearing counterblast from Judge Stanley F. Birch Jr: "Congress and the Executive Branch acted in a manner demonstrably at odds with our Founding Fathers' blueprint for the governance of a free people our Constitution. Any further action by our court or the district court would be improper."

Only the 2 lone dissenting 11th Circuit Court judges seem to grasp the overweening arrogance of a judicial branch that puts mercy before justice, the letter before the spirit, and exalts itself above the other two branches found delineated in "out Founding Fathers' blueprint:"

"It is fully within Congress's power to dictate standards of review for federal courts. Indeed, if Congress cannot do so," write Judges Gerald Tjoflat and Charles R. Wilson presciently, "the fate of hundreds of federal statutes would be called into question."

Congress, of course, mandated a de novo hearing -- a complete starting over from the beginning -- of this matter by the federal courts. That determination was casually brushed aside by justices banding together to protect their power.

NOTE: Current updates on this travesty will remain at the top of the page until Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is reconnected or she has been starved to death. Read our original post here,and please scroll down for other news.

~~ Gnomon

Almost two weeks after her forcible starvation death began, yet another motion goes before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Haven't we gotten beyond the notion that any justice will be had there?

Our guest commentator, Billy Yank, sees parallels between the death of Terri Schiavo and another immoral death two millenia ago.

The Passion of Terri

If you think that the perpetrators of the death of Christ lived 2000 years ago, think again. They are alive and well today.

Let’s start with the Annases and Caiphases -- those bishops who are all weepy about executing capital murderers, but now turn their backs on an innocent woman being starved to death.

Now let’s go on to the mad mob who screamed for the blood of Christ. Modern Zionists will continually howl over The Holocaust, but when a woman is starved to death -- just like Father Maximilian Kolbe and others in the concentration camps -- the Zionists can’t be bothered.

Next let’s go to the Sanhedrin, the council that illegally condemned Christ to death. They claimed to be preserving the Faith, yet they violated that Faith to commit judicial murder. Not only do we have the Liberalist judges who are bound and determined to put an innocent woman to death, but even judges like Scalia and Thomas have been unusually quiet.

Then there are the Pilates.

Governor Bush, like the Roman governor, has the executive power to send in the police and take Terri out of the hands of her murderers. He can protect her life until a just court will do what Congress and the President passed a special bill to provide, a de novo investigation of the case. Democrat Janet Reno, President Clinton’s attorney general, bypassed the courts on principle for politics. Why can’t Gov. Bush to so to save a life?

Billy Yank

NOTE: Current updates on this travesty will remain at the top of the page until Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is reconnected or she has been starved to death. Read our original post here,and please scroll down for other news.

~~ Gnomon

Although she clings to life and her parent's say she is still responsive, Terri Schiavo's body is shutting down. The latest to support not murdering helpless invalids by starvation: Reverend Jesse Jackson.

This article reports that morphine has been given twice when the nurses noticed signs of the pain and suffering doctors assure us is no part of death by starvation.

Michael Schiavo and her parents have agreed on one thing: to have an autopsy when she's gone.

NOTE: Current updates on this travesty will remain at the top of the page until Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is reconnected or she has been starved to death. Read our original post here, and please scroll down for other news.

~~ Gnomon

Ms. Schiavo struggles on -- now, at least, with a morphine drip to relieve the agony of her starved body consuming itself.

NOTE: Current updates on this travesty will remain at the top of the page until Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is reconnected or she has been starved to death. Read our original post here, and please scroll down for other news.

~~ Gnomon

Every imaginable court action has now been rebuffed, and the invalid we have decided to starve to death enters the final stages of her life. Will she leave this life on Easter Sunday?

Meanwhile, the President's action in this matter has earned him the boos of the audience, we are desired to believe by pollsters.

Gnomon refuses to, mainly out of a wistful hope that the American public's moral sense has not atrophied to such an abysmal level.

NOTE: Current updates on this travesty will remain at the top of the page until Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is reconnected or she has been starved to death. Read our original post here, and please scroll down for other news.

~~ Gnomon

Ms. Schiavo's parents valiantly fight on as she wastes away. But unless Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has a miraculous transformation of conscience, there is little hope. And there is not much time left.

Terri Schiavo has apparently done her best to make her wishes (which her husband and the courts are supposedly implementing so zealously) known, but no one listens.

Meanwhile, Michael Schiavo's lawyer Mr. Felos sanctimoniously urges us all to have a nice Easter.

NOTE: Current updates on this travesty will remain at the top of the page until Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is reconnected or she has been starved to death. Read our original post here, and please scroll down for other news.

~~ Gnomon

Terri Schiavo enters her 7th day of starvation this afternoon. Now it is up to the Supreme Court.


UPDATE (2:45 pm): Sadly, appallingly, they failed Ms. Schiavo -- and they failed us all.

NOTE: Current updates on this travesty will remain at the top of the page until Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is reconnected or she has been starved to death. Read our original post here, and please scroll down for other news.

~~ Gnomon

Nearing a week of being denied even a bit of nourishment or a drop of water, Terri Schiavo languishes powerless in her hospital bed as those who were once the guardians of mercy, but now are mere bureucratic functionaries, allow legalism to smother justice.

"We sympathize, but we're bound by the law," intoned two justices of the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

"I fail to see any harm in reinserting the feeding tube," countered the lone dissenter, Judge Charles Wilson. "Congress intended for this case to be reviewed with a fresh set of eyes."

Now, barring some extraordinary action by the President or Congress, all there is left is the Supreme Court. And they have refused twice in the recent past even to listen.

NOTE: Current updates on this travesty will remain at the top of the page until Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is reconnected or she has been starved to death. Read our original post here, and please scroll down for other news.

~~ Gnomon

After going home and having a nice, relaxed supper and a good night's rest, U.S. District Judge James D. Whittemore went back to work this morning and denied the least shred of human dignity or comfort to Terri Schiavo.

Meanwhile, various experts continue to assure the public that starving is a lovely way to die.

Ms. Schiavo's parents have now pinned their waning hopes on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta while their daughter enters her 5th day of being denied food and water while lying defenceless in a hospital bed.

A Registered Nurse that cared for Ms. Schiavo in the mid-90's has sworn in an affidavit that at that time she could speak words like "help me" and "pain." Others have testified to this as well. One wonders what she may be trying to say right now.

A mysterious ebola-like disease is striking down people in Angola, mostly children. Some are speculating it's another outbreak of the deadly Bird Flu, but that's apparently not being tested for right now.

NOTE: Current updates on this travesty will remain at the top of the page until Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is reconnected or she has been starved to death. Read our original post here, and please scroll down for other news.

~~ Gnomon

After hurdling various procedural roadblocks thrown down by democrats seemingly determined to demonstrate they're on the wrong side of every issue, Congress finally passed the bill shortly after midnight. President Bush signed it at 1:11 am.

The bill, which basically just gives the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida clear jurisdiction in this matter, also declares (and it's about time) that

"It is the Sense of the Congress that the 109th Congress should consider policies regarding the status and legal rights of incapacitated individuals who are incapable of making decisions concerning the provision, withholding, or withdrawal of foods, fluid, or medical care."

Read the complete text here.

Now, U.S. District Judge James D. Whittemore (appointed by President Clinton in 1999) is considering the case -- first of all, whether to begin feeding Ms. Schiavo again.

This study in the Journal of Adolescent Health is getting a lot of press because to jaded newspapermen it's a useful way to deride virgins.

In point of fact, the report found that teens who take an abstinence pledge "transition to first sex later, have less cumulative exposure, fewer partners, and lower levels of nonmonogamous partners." But, they have about the same level of sexually transmitted diseases as everybody else.

Why?

Because (here comes the bluntness again) nobody's informing these kids that oral and anal sex are SEX. And you can pick up an STD from these popular sports -- which are seemingly universal today -- as easily as you can from regular sex.

The authors of the study conclude that abstinence is not enough because "most of them [i.e., pledged teens] will eventually engage in premarital sex." But the real problem appears to be that nobody has educated them on what "abstinence" actually means in the first place.

If they can abstain from sex of the baby-causing kind (which they can), then they could surely keep away from the oral and anal varieties -- if society doesn't make them think it's all just harmless fun (thank you Bill Clinton!).

It is worth noting that a previous study of the same database came to a more positive conclusion.

NOTE: Current updates on this travesty will remain at the top of the page until Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is reconnected or she has been starved to death. Read our original post here, and please scroll down for other news.

~~ Gnomon

C hoosing to take the optimistic view, we seem to see Congress momentarily but vaguely perceiving issues beyond their regular political tunnel vision. Though incredibly there are isolated democrat Representatives attempting to stand in the way (namely Robert Wexler of Florida and Earl Blumenauer of Oregon), a bill seems likely to pass that will keep Ms. Schiavo alive. The President has returned to Washington to sign it immediately.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals is also considering the contention that due process has not been followed, and may stay Terri Schiavo's torture-slaying as well.

Meanwhile, estranged husband Michael Schiavo, who apparently believes starving one's wife to death is a family thing, appeared on CNN to prounounce the following:

"I'm outraged, and I think that every American in this country should also be outraged that this government is trampling all over a personal family matter that has been adjudicated in the courts for seven years. I think that the Congress has more important things to discuss."

Contrary to his jaded view, Congress has from time to time passed laws about whether people ought to kill each other.

NOTE: Current updates on this travesty will remain at the top of the page until Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is reconnected or she has been starved to death. Read our original post here, and please scroll down for other news.

~~ Gnomon

Ms. Schiavo's food has been cut off and her death by starvation has begun. This was preceded by one of the most deluded and hypocritical statements in recent memory. Speaking to Reuters about Congress' efforts to prevent the state sponsored torture-death of an innocent, crippled, helpless woman, her husband's attorney, George Felos proclaimed with religious fervor:

"Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert are not members of the Politburo in Stalinist
Russia. The state does not own Mrs. Schiavo's body and Congress cannot simply order her to remain alive contrary to her [alleged] medical treatment wishes and court order."

In what the media perversely calls a "right-to-die case," Terry Schiavo will be slowly executed by starvation beginning today, her inherent right to live negated because Florida courts agree with her husband that she is an undesirable.

This, unfortunately, is not a watershed case because we've been starving undesirables -- particularly undesirable babies -- to death for years. Ms. Schiavo's situation merely brings the issue finally into the consciousness of the public.

With dead-hearted, ivory-tower legislative dithering blocking several efforts in Washington and Florida to stop this atrocity, the House of Representatives has begun an investigation of the matter, subpoenaing doctors to prevent her death.

Quite frankly, Gnomon is rather pessimistic of the outcome. Miracles happen and the last election gives some hope that over half the country may still have conscience and good sense. But since at least 1973 we have been a society increasingly comfortable with the idea of quietly eliminating inconvenient people, regardless of what they may suffer in the process.

The "slippery slope" warned of back then, has become a headlong slide into the abyss.

Once again, we will point out: This is not a woman being kept artificially alive by machines; this is an invalid who only needs to be fed and cared for like any sick person. This decision means we are refusing to feed a disabled woman who cannot feed herself.

By any moral standard -- even those we would apply to a sick dog -- starving her to death is wrong. In fact, it is actively evil.

The foundation battling for her life can be found here.

Meanwhile, in Briton, it's still ok to abort any babies you don't like the looks of.

In our Misdirection Department: A new ACLU report entitled Caught In The Net says the problem is not that women commit drug crimes, the problem is that we put them in jail.

As the US Senate slowly recovers from years in the grip of delusional policies, another ray of light has peeped through the haze: They just voted to keep ANWR oil exploration in the budget.

ANWR, for those that don't recall Vice President Al Gore harping continuously about it in the 2000 election, stands for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. US News' Washington Whispers column claims democrats plan to refer to it as "the Arctic Refuge" from now on to conjure up mental images of fluffy bunnies being annihilated by drill bits.

But the 10.4 billion barrels of oil can be extracted from the relatively small portion of ANWR it resides in without hurting the bunnies, never fear. US dependence on middle eastern sources of oil is a foolish, dangerous, longstanding policy that needs to be broken before it does us some real damage. Drawing on the ANWR oil is sheer common sense.

No wonder Senate democrats have opposed it so long.

Find out how long your state could run on ANWR oil here!

We almost titled this post Ha Ha Ha Hah!! because the President's brashness, all of it justified, cracks us up.

This time, hot on the heels of appointing plain spoken John R. Bolton UN Ambassador, Mr. Bush has now chosen none other than so-called "neo-conservative" thinker, policy mogul, and Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to be President of the World Bank.

Not that he's a shoe-in, but traditionally the World Bank is headed by an American while the International Monetary Fund is run by a European.

George W. Bush continues to bestride the world.

OPEC, heeding the wishes and veiled threats of Saudi Arabia (which finally stepped up to the plate after much dithering), has decided to raise oil output.

This should grant us some relief in gas prices in a few weeks, though part of that is driven by quivering oil execs afraid the spread of democracy might lead to tumult that would cut off some of their supply.

It never hurts to jack up prices ahead of disaster, you know.

When Hezbollah staged a large pro-Syrian demonstration in Lebanon last week, opponents of President Bush's policies were cheered. "See?" They chortled, lifting their beleaguered heads above the ramparts, "The 'arab street' doesn't really like democracy."

But, that seems to have been a bit premature.

What's this? Is the CIA mysteriously spiriting muslim fascist terrorists from the benign streets of Europe?? We are shocked -- shocked! -- to find that such things are going on in Milan!

Then again, it has been going on for 20 years, Louie.

Gnomon would like to thank our readers for their patience amidst our webhosting difficulties, during which we went fishing for a few days, knowing of no better way to help.

And now, on with our show...

Due to technical difficulties beyond our control, our webhost appears to down. Gnomon apologizes and hopes to be back up soon.

Speaking of geopolitical strategy, the President articulated his yesterday in a passionate and stirring speech:

"Three and a half years ago, the United States mourned our dead, gathered our resolve, and accepted a mission. We made a decision to stop threats to the American people before they arrive on our shores, and we have acted on that decision. We're also determined to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

"This objective will not be achieved easily, or all at once, or primarily by force of arms. We know that freedom, by definition, must be chosen, and that the democratic institutions of other nations will not look like our own. Yet we also know that our security increasingly depends on the hope and progress of other nations now simmering in despair and resentment. And that hope and progress is found only in the advance of freedom.

"This advance is a consistent theme of American strategy -- from the Fourteen Points, to the Four Freedoms, to the Marshall Plan, to the Reagan Doctrine. Yet the success of this approach does not depend on grand strategy alone. We are confident that the desire for freedom, even when repressed for generations, is present in every human heart. And that desire can emerge with sudden power to change the course of history.

"Americans, of all people, should not be surprised by freedom's power. A nation founded on the universal claim of individual rights should not be surprised when other people claim those rights. Those who place their hope in freedom may be attacked and challenged, but they will not ultimately be disappointed, because freedom is the design of humanity and freedom is the direction of history.

"In our time, America has been attacked. America has been challenged. Yet the uncertainty, and sorrow, and sacrifice of these years have not been in vain. Millions have gained their liberty; and millions more have gained the hope of liberty that will not be denied. The trumpet of freedom has been sounded, and that trumpet never calls retreat.

"Before history is written in books, it is written in courage -- the courage of honorable soldiers; the courage of oppressed peoples; the courage of free nations in difficult tasks. Our generation is fortunate to live in a time of courage. And we are proud to serve in freedom's cause."

Master geostrategist George W. Bush's multipronged offensive against the roots of middle eastern fascism continues to gain momentum (even in the press! ), and the President shows no inclination to slow up.

Al Qaeda attempted to prevent all this with a devestating plot to bring the allies to their knees by kidnapping Russell Crowe. But, it didn't work out.

This just in: "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine!"

More specifically, watching KingPin (???) is good for you while Saving Private Ryan is deleterious to your health. We're not certain this is what King Solomon was thinking, but things have changed a bit since then.

"On Thursday, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad traveled to the
Saudi capital hoping to secure Saudi support before a summit meeting of the Arab
League.

"But Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah told President Assad
to withdraw Syrian troops from Lebanon and end the country's international
isolation. Saudi Arabia became the second Arab country after Egypt to call for
Syria's complete withdrawal from Lebanon," we hear.

The Bush Strategy for freeing the Middle East from the thralldom of Islamic Fascism marches on, folks.

Alan Greenspan -- once revered for wisely stoking the 90's boom, now denigrated because he keeps saying Mr. Bush is right (hmmm...) -- urges quick action on Social Security, and says personal accounts are just what they need.

Furthermore, after all the economic trauma incurred during the first 5 years of the 21st century, the American economic freight train continues to chug steadily along. But these deficits -- the by-product of repairing the trauma -- have got to go.

Read his entire statement here.

The world's most successful nerd, Bill Gates, is now a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

This should stand him in good stead in the next Sword & Sorcery RPG he plays.

Today is the birthday of America's greatest living writer, Tom Wolfe. He's 74.

Executing kids under 18 for their crimes is no longer permitted -- and rightly so.

This is a line that plainly needs to be drawn though knowing exactly where it goes can be difficult. Eighteen was chosen from one of several traditional "ages of accountablity." Thirteen and 16 seem a bit too early to draw the line; 21 is too old.

Justice O'Connor dissented, pointing out that there are obviously pathological monsters younger than 18.

However that may be, there are quite enough other true monsters that can't receive capital punishment soon enough.

President Bush is considering adding a carrot to the stick he's offering Iran.