The Last Saturday in April is approaching...
Posted by RollCast

Vox populi, vox Dei?

Deaddrifts recently noted the remarkable silence of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America on the Terri Schiavo Schindler tragedy; a review by Blogizdat shows how profoundly widespread this silence is among nearly all of the mainstream American Protestant churches.

John Paul "The Great".

Today the world lost its most important moral voice, and a most beloved man of God. Now in His loving embrace, Requiescat in Pace.

Requiescat in Pace.

Into your hands, Lord, we commend her spirit.

Some remarks that may help align our moral compass.

This Day.

...Jesus again cried aloud and breathed his last. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, rocks split, and graves opened; many of God's saints were raised from sleep...

...And when the centurion and his men who were keeping watch over Jesus saw the earthquake and all that was happening, they were filled with awe and said "This must have been a son of God"...

Matthew, Ch27 V50-52,54

Speaking the bitter truth.

A blogger's rant about the Terri Schiavo tragedy, not for those with delicate dispostions. No doubt PETA will complain.

Terrible news from Minnesota.

Yesterday, a teenager entered a Minnesota high school and killed eight people, after killing his police officer grandfather and stealing his guns. The first victim was a security guard, who, according to NPR, was unarmed. How on earth was the guard suppose to protect the school from such a threat? What were they thinking?

The Husband.

A piece from NR a few years ago with some background on the Terri Schiavo tragedy begs the question - who really represents Terri's interests? Some astounding accusations, that, if true, would shame anyone siding with Terri's "husband". Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus weighs in and also recalls NPR's "evenhanded" treatment of this story.

Perhaps the most repugnant comment I've heard on this came from the none other than Ms. Maureen Dowd, who snickered on Imus this morning that Tom Delay and Bill Frist were acting out a sequel to "Weekend at Bernie's" - with Terry Schiavo as "Bernie". I glad that Ms. Dowd discovered the humor in this tragedy, high atop the Upper West Manhattan skyline, where the people below are just so many ants to burn with her magnifying glass.

More on Clear Channel and Thayrone X.

Another woman has opined on Clear Channel's public relations stunt, the firing of Thayrone X:

...Recently, over 200 indecency complaints filed against Clear Channel were terminated in an agreement wherein $1.75 million was paid to the FCC, and in return all cases were dropped and were not admissible in re-licensing hearings. Clear Channel was also fined when a disc jockey on WKQI in Detroit taped and broadcast a prank phone call made to a faith center, asking for a prayer as a joke, without informing the volunteer. The hip-hop songs played on both WJLB and WKQI are full of misogynist lyrics far worse than anything Thayrone plays...

Today's Prayer.

Courtesy of the ELCA Southeast Michigan Synod website:

Thank you Lord for giving us another day. Thank you for those we love, and protect and keep those we can not see. Amen.

Please also pray for Terri Schaivo. Apparently, the ELCA has not seen it fit to comment on this tragedy, but they have bushel baskets of thoughts on human sexuality.

Correction: after some digging in the ELCA website, I found the Social Statement on End of Life Decisions. This document does not directly address the issue of when a patient's wishes are unknown, and when there is irreconciable disagreement between concerned parties regarding a patient's fate. More importantly, it does not discuss the specific issue of this case - accelerating an end of life that is not near its natural end, because a concerned party, let us say "percieves a unacceptably poor quality of life". It does state the following:

...Our faith as Christians informs and guides us in approaching personal and public decisions about death and dying today. Among the convictions that orient us are:

- life is a gift from God, to be received with thanksgiving;

- the integrity of the life processes which God has created should be respected; both birth and death are part of these life processes;

- both living and dying should occur within a caring a community;

- a Christian perspective mandates respect for each person; such respect includes giving due recognition to each person's carefully considered preferences regarding treatment decisions;
truthfulness and faithfulness in our relations with others are essential to the texture of human life;

and,

- hope and meaning in life are possible even in times of suffering and adversity; a truth powerfully proclaimed resurrection faith of the church.

"Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Rom 14:8). For those who live with this confidence, neither life nor death are absolute. We treasure God's gift of life; we also prepare ourselves for a time when we may let go of our lives, entrusting our future to the crucified and risen Christ who is "Lord of both the dead and the living" (Rom 14:9). While these convictions do not give clear-cut answers to all end-of-life decisions, they do offer a basic approach to them.

Allowing Death and Taking LifeWithholding or Withdrawing Artificially-administeredNutrition and Hydration

Patients who once would have died because of their inability to take food and water by mouth can today be kept alive through artificially-administered nutrition and hydration. These measures are often temporary and allow many to recover health. At other times, however, they alone maintain life, and they do so indefinitely. In those cases, is it ever permissible to withhold or withdraw such measures?

Food and water are part of our basic human care. Artificially-administered nutrition and hydration move beyond basic care to become medical treatment. Health care professionals are not required to use all available medical treatment in all circumstances. Medical treatment may be limited in some instances, and death allowed to occur. Patients have a right to refuse unduly burdensome treatments which are disproportionate to the expected benefits.

When medical judgment determines that artificially-administered nutrition and hydration will not contribute to an improvement in the patient's underlying condition or prevent death from that condition, patients or their legal spokespersons may consider them unduly burdensome treatment. In these circumstances it may be morally responsible to withhold or withdraw them and allow death to occur. This decision does not mean that family and friends are abandoning their loved one.

When artificially-administered nutrition and hydration are withheld or withdrawn, family, friends, health care professionals, and pastor should continue to care for the person. They are to provide relief from suffering, physical comfort, and assurance of God's enduring love...


Unfortunately, there is no statement here about a prevailing moral rule when the issue of "unduly burdensome" treatment is debated, or even when it is not clear who is speaking as the legal representative of the patient. Clearly, this document was meant to address the issues relevant to terminally ill patients and events near their death. Perhaps the first conviction mentioned above - that life is a gift from God - provides this guidance. Later, in the document, the issue of physician-assisted suicide is discussed, and it is stated:

...However, the deliberate action of a physician to take the life of a patient, even when this is the patient's wish, is a different matter. As a church we affirm that deliberately destroying life created in the image of God is contrary to our Christian conscience. While this affirmation is clear, we also recognize that responsible health care professionals struggle to choose the lesser evil in ambiguous borderline situations -- for example, when pain becomes so unmanageable that life is indistinguishable from torture...

This is about as close as this document gets to the tragedy of Terri Schiavo. One of the problems of a church leadership that repeatedly attempts to be all things to all people.

Liberalism at the Crossroads, Part IV.

VDH with a critique of the Hard Left's noxious rhetoric flooding the Democratic Party (thanks to LGF):

...something has gone terribly wrong with a mainstream Left that tolerates a climate where the next logical slur easily devolves into Hitlerian invective. The problem is not just the usual excesses of pundits and celebrities (e.g., Jonathan Chait’s embarrassing rant in the New Republic on why “I hate George W. Bush” or Garrison Keillor’s infantile slurs about Bush’s Republicans: “brown shirts in pinstripes”), but also supposedly responsible officials of the opposition such as former Sen. John Glenn, who said of the Bush agenda: “It’s the old Hitler business.”

Thus, if former Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore breezily castigates Bush’s Internet supporters as “digital brownshirts”; if current Democratic-party chairman Howard Dean says publicly, “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for” — or, “This is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good”; or if NAACP chairman Julian Bond screams of the Bush administration that “Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side,” the bar of public dissent has so fallen that it is easy to descend a tad closer to the bottom to compare a horrific killer to an American president...

Liberalism at the Crossroads, Part III.

John Leo weighs in, noting the Left's corrosive hostility to religion:

"...Worse, the cultural liberalism that emerged from the convulsions of the 1960s drove the liberal faith out of the mainstream. Its fundamental value is that society should have no fundamental values, except for a pervasive relativism that sees all values as equal. Part of the package was a militant secularism, pitched against religion, the chief source of fundamental values..."

Amen.


Battle of the Titans.

Wow! What a finish to the Ford Championship at Doral! Tiger Wood's eagle on the 12th hole, followed by back to back birdies by Phil Mickelson to even it up, only to let Tiger slip away on the 16th by matching his bogie! Exciting to the end with Phil's desperation chip on 18 that curled around the lip of the hole! Hats off to Tiger - he earned the victory.

Aye, laddie, that 'twas a Hell of a ro'ond 'a Golfe!


Facelift for Radio Oblique.

My flea circus of an internet radio station - now with "Formula X4" for deeper cleansing action, has a new playlist of R&B, Oldies, Rockabilly, and a kinder and gentler website. Fightin' the Media Conglomerate Man: heard Enima's latest hip-hop offering on four over-air stations simultaneously - aaahhhhghhh! When will they cue up some Don Woody, eh?

Freedom Marchers.

More evidence of the extraordinary bravery of the Iraqi people:

Thousands Protest at Iraqi Bombing Site

By QASIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press Writer; Tue Mar
1, 6:48 PM ET

HILLAH, Iraq - Thousands of mostly black-clad Iraqis protested Tuesday outside a medical clinic where a suicide car bomber killed 125 people a day earlier, braving the threat of another attack as they waved clenched fists, condemned foreign fighters and chanted "No to terrorism!"

...But anxieties over another attack did not prevent more than 2,000 people from gathering outside the clinic Tuesday, shouting "No to terrorism!" and "No to Baathism and Wahhabism!"...

The Power of Perception.

Tom Friedman clearly states the remarkable transformation in the last month:

Thanks to eight million Iraqis defying "you vote, you die" terrorist
threats, Iraq has been reframed from a story about Iraqi "insurgents" trying to liberate their country from American occupiers and their Iraqi "stooges" to a story of the overwhelming Iraqi majority trying to build a democracy, with U.S. help, against the wishes of Iraqi Baathist-fascists and jihadists.

Yes, the transformation of the MSM.

A Trip to the Moondog Kingdom.

No, not moonbat, but Alan Freed's "Moondogger Show", circa April 1954. For those of you that despise the unimaginative offerings modern FM radio (I can set my watch to when the local "classic rock" station will loop back to Stairway to Heaven), here's a great offering from the Reel Radio Repository. It's from the Bruce Portzer Collection of radio airchecks, a half an hour of the King of the Moondoggers (RealPlayer required) in his prime with some truly great R&B. And while you listen, why don't you enjoy a cold Erin Brew?

The Pope's Brave Witness to Faith.

William F. Buckley has recently admitted he now abstains from praying for the recovery of the Pope. He also comments:

The temptation is, always, to pray for the continuation of the life of anyone who wants to keep on living. The pope is one of these. In the past, he recorded that he did not plan ever to abdicate, that he would die on the papal throne...

...To leave it before death can be construed as forsaking a mission charged by God almighty. That isn't the consensus of theologians.

John Paul's ministry has had different phases - covert opposition to Nazi occupiers, not-so-covert subversion of Soviet totalitarianism, remarkable journeys across the world to celebrate Mass with Catholics everywhere, and holding firm to the sanctity of life in an era of rapidly advancing technology and rapidly declining morality. Perhaps this stage of his life may be another phase of ministry - showing us how bear suffering with grace, dignity, and a complete commitment to Christ and to life until God calls him home.

Smoke gets in your eyes, the State gets in your wallet.

The Age of Reason has a great post on Jenny G (Jennifer Granholm, Governor of the Fair State of Michigan) pinging residents for online smoke purchases.
He also has a great collection of postings on smoking rights and abuses against by the Nanny State.

Meet the Blogs.

Brain Terminal's Evan Coyle Maloney recently interviewed Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, resulting in a very interesting Q&A. Milbank then asked if there was some manner in which the Post and the Blogosphere could collaborate. To which I replied:

I'd be very wary about cooperation or collaboration between the Blogosphere and the WP. There is just too much risk of the blogs either being co-opted or influenced to serve the Post's interests. The great value that I find in blogs is independent fact-checking, story follow-up, and critical analysis of journalism. This is activity that is not necessarily in the newspaper's interests. For example, if they were interested in criticizing coverage of a news story, say by the NYT, wouldn't they be doing it? Has the Post dug deep into the fiasco at CBS to confirm or dispute the findings of the Thornberg Report? And has anyone been impressed with CNN/Howard Kurtz's "Reliable Sources"?

By the way, this is should be the policy with the Washington Times as it is with the Post. And I think that current "market forces" appear to "rank" blogs pretty well already.

Frankly, blogs serve an important regulatory function, and as the Dept of Agriculture doesn't (or at least shouldn't) collaborate with meat-packers, nor should blogworld collaborate with the MSM.

Professor Churchill, meet Senator Byrd.

A few years ago Senator Robert Byrd found himself in a wee bit of trouble when he referred to "White ...", well, you know the word he used. Our intrepid scholar Ward Churchill was in spiritual communion with the Senator when he recently referred to whiteness as not a genetic condition but a noxious state of mind. Listen and receive enlightenment here (mp3 file).

The Liberal Crackup, 2005.

Dead Drifts, as part of the election post-mortem, opined that the Democratic Party was at a crossroads, that it presently faces a choice between being a political or ideological party. Martin Peretz, editor of the The New Republic, has developed this theme, suggesting that Liberalism, and by implication, the Democrats, "need(s) to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions", such as its flirtation with anti-Americanism from the EU and Islamofascists. Note that TNR charges for this analysis. Dead Drifts provides it gratis, while omitting the unnecessary sniping at Mr. Buckley and Mr. Kirk.


Satire as Thoughtcrime.

One of the golden arrows in the quiver of American arts and letters, satire has been loosed by some of our greatest artists against civilization's most noxious and pernicious foes. Sadly, in our time, certain attitudes regarding certain subjects are sacrosanct, and satire is not tolerated as it dares to use humor to comment on these issues.

Dead Drifts has mentioned an incident involving a beloved local bluesman and disc-jockey, Thayrone X, who was canned by WQKL, a cog in the Clear Channel Communications Media Machine. The putative cause for his dismissal was for playing a song by a satirical songwriter-performer, "Unknown Hinson". The song, entitled, "Trunk of My Cadillac Car", is Hinson's satire of the misogyny found in some country music culture. Thayrone's firing has been applauded by a local women's group, whose representative recently commented:

"There are many ways that our community can help end violence against women, ranging from challenging people who make sexist jokes to volunteering at a domestic violence/sexual assault program.

Furthermore, having all members of a community work toward achieving this goal is absolutely necessary.

Clear Channel Radio in Ann Arbor has decided to work toward this end by refusing to broadcast radio programs and songs that glorify violence against women or any other group of individuals... "

According to this statement merely playing such a song is a thoughtcrime against women. It's useful to recall exactly what satire is: wit, irony, derision, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice, folly and evil. Hinson's act and music follow this definition. Yet self-appointed commissars insist that they - and only they - can define misogyny (alas, blonde jokes are now taboo), can percieve what abets misogynistic violence, and prescribe what is a "proper" attitude in dealing with it. Their cause is not so noble as to justify the subversion of the basic liberty to think as one chooses, and to oppose wrong in a manner that one sees fit.

Mel Brooks once remarked that the most effective way that he could confront the monstrous evil of Hitler and Nazism was to make them look silly and ridiculous. Our culture is richer for his satire, as it is also with Unknown Hinson's.


P.S. If Tim Robbins loves Unknown, why can't we all love him?