Good News, for a Change. (1) Christian Science Monitor journalist Jill Carroll was released by her captors in Iraq today. It was insane of Moslem men who claim respect for women to have taken and threatened her to begin with, but they have redeemed their honor. Good for them.
+
Her family "has no plans to travel to Baghdad" to welcome her back to society. Yes, please do not go to Iraq. We don't need more Americans taking foolish risks with their lives.
+
Iraqi insurgents need to prove that Islam is about peace and justice. Right makes might.
+
(2) Today is the anniversary of the death of the vegetable Terri Schiavo, over whom Republican loons became so exercised that they made themselves look like the fools and extremists they are. The good news? Ms. Schiavo is still dead, and the attempt by the Schindlers, her stupid parents, to make her death into "euthanasia" cannot succeed.

Robert and Mary Schindler have reorganized the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation to mount a political attack on what they call "the deliberate killing of the disabled or anyone deemed 'unworthy' of life."

Nobody killed Terri Schiavo, and she wasn't alive in anything like a human sense. Real Christians don't lie. And they sure don't make false accusations of murder against people who value real human life.
+
The fake controversy that religious nuts stirred up around their dauter was resolved within weeks of her finally being released from vegetative-life after the Schindlers had wasted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of other people's money, and in so doing taken resources away from people who could actually have been helped. An autopsy revealed that Schiavo's brain had wasted to half its normal size, so there was absolutely no possibility of her ever having resumed normal human functioning.
+
Senator Bill Frist — a doctor, for chrissake — disgraced himself in making a 'diagnosis' from a video(!) that she was not in a "persistent vegetative state". It turned out that yes, she sure as hell was.
+
Will that egregious error in judgment blunt Frist's drive for the White House in 2008? One can hope so. Every time the Schindler-Schiavo crowd open their mouth, they remind the Nation of how wrong they and Frist were. Keep up the good work.
+
Life is for the living, and medical care is for people, not vegetables.
+
(3) Randy McCloy, the miner who just barely survived a mine cave-in that killed 12 others almost three months ago, is up, walking, and talking! Hey! The whole Nation came together in concern over this one West Virginian who was in a coma for weeks after his rescue, hopeful for his full recovery, but worried. We also listened sadly to the stories of the notes that miners who did not survive left for their loved ones. They had the quality of those poignant letters from Civil War soldiers who were later killed that made so much of Ken Burns's magnificent PBS documentary series, The Civil War, so wrenching.
+
West Virginia is a persistent remnant of that war, since it comprises the counties of Virginia that remained faithful to the Union when their traitorous fellow Virginians tried to secede. Isn't it time to heal that wound? Let's merge West Virginia back into Virginia, one of the more progressive/less regressive Southern states, and thereby strengthen Virginia's faithful elements. Maybe West Virginians can get Virginia to rename all those highways and other public places given the names of traitors.
+
(4) Two New Orleans police officers caught on videotape beating a helpless man on a sidewalk for no good reason have been indicted "on felony charges that could send them to prison for years." Whether they are ultimately acquitted or convicted is in a way less important than that they have been indicted, because such indictments put on notice all police officers tempted to "excessive force" / "police brutality". Much of any police force is recruited from the same social classes as the criminals they are tasked to control. But when society gives people guns and truncheons, it must also strive to give them ways to control themselves. For that, we need both carrot (training and counseling) and stick (prosecution of officers who abuse their power).
+
(5) Here in Newark, we are finally seeing some real springtime weather. My crocuses are open, my daffodils and hyacinths are popping, and the leaves that precede flower stalks on my tulips have come up thick thru last autumn's leaves. After weeks of subnormally cold weather — where is all that Global Warming we're supposed to have? We need some here — we might finally break 70 today, or tomorrow at worst.
+
March has been a lion in many ways. Maybe it will finally go out as a lamb after all.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,327.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:42 PM