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.