From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Terri's
Tight Deadline
This morning brought very strange news in the Terri Schiavo case. From the Associated
Press:
In a rare legal victory for Terri Schiavo's parents, a federal appeals court agreed to consider an emergency motion requesting a new hearing on whether to reconnect their severely brain-damaged daughter's feeding tube.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta issued a written order without comment late Tuesday allowing Bob and Mary Schindler to file the appeal, even though the court had set a March 26 deadline for doing so.
In a one-sentence order, the court said: "The Appellant's emergency motion for leave to file out of time is granted."
Even as the court waived the legal deadline, a biological deadline approached. Terri Schiavo is now in her 12th day without food or water, and doctors have said she will likely be dead within two weeks of her feeding tube's removal.
Whatever the legal merits of the Schiavo parents' argument, the court's latest ruling certainly seems to vindicate the views of Judge Charles Wilson, who, dissenting a week ago in Schiavo v. Schiavo, wrote that "we should find that the gravity of the irreparable injury Theresa Schiavo would suffer could not weigh more heavily in Plaintiffs' favor. In contrast, there is little or no harm to be found in granting this motion for a temporary injunction and deciding the full merits of the dispute."
The best argument the "right to die" people have had in this case is that the legal process has worked, even if it's produced an outcome with which not everyone is happy. As the 2003 guardian ad litem report put it, "The courts have carefully and diligently adhered to the prescribed civil processes and evidentiary guidelines, and have painfully and diligently applied the required tests in a reasonable, conscientious and professional manner."
Yet there is now a strong chance that Terri Schiavo will die, pursuant to court order, while legal questions about her fate are unresolved. It's hard to see how this can do anything other than weaken Americans' confidence in the judiciary.
Who'll
Remember Terri Schiavo?--II
Yesterday we
speculated that the Terri Schiavo case may help Republicans and hurt Democrats
among voters who suffer from disabilities, who have obvious reasons to look
skeptically at claims that a low "quality of life" makes life not
worth living. We actually visited this issue last year: In September, we
noted that President Bush was doing surprisingly well in a Harris Interactive
poll of disabled Americans. He led John Kerry 48% to 46%. A similar poll a month
earlier had given Kerry a 50% to 40% lead.
Our thought then was that disabled voters were put off by Kerry's clumsy exploitation of the wheelchair-bound Max Cleland, but blogger Ed Jordan offered a better theory, which we noted the following week: that the swing was owing to the Florida Supreme Court's striking down a law designed to save Mrs. Schiavo's life. As Jordan wrote, "there is good reason to believe they are sensitive to the fact that liberals like Senator Kerry want to give them the right to die, while conservatives like President Bush want to give them the right to live."
More reason comes in a Nov. 9 press release from the National Organization on Disability:
In a dramatic shift in support toward a Republican presidential candidate, a clear majority of voters with disabilities chose George W. Bush over Sen. John Kerry in last week's national election. According to a survey conducted by telephone between October 29 and November 1, 2004 by Harris Interactive, likely voters with disabilities preferred President George W. Bush over Senator John Kerry by 52.5 percent to 46 percent. . . .
In past presidential elections, people with disabilities have consistently supported Democrats over Republicans by solid majorities. According to Harris Interactive, in 2000, Vice President Al Gore was preferred 56 to 38 percent by likely voters over then-Governor George W. Bush. Bill Clinton carried the disability vote 69 percent to 23 percent over Senator Dole in 1996, and 52 percent to 29 percent over President H.W. Bush in 1992.
NOD's president, quoted in the release, ignores the Schiavo issue and tries to explain the shift in terms of the same issues that affect all voters: terrorism, greater GOP turnout, high turnout among the elderly, who have a disproportionate rate of disability.
This seems unpersuasive. Overall, voters swung from a 0.5% Democratic plurality in 2000 to a 2.5% Republican one in 2004, a shift of three percentage points. The disabled, according to the NOD poll, went from an 18% Democratic plurality to a 6.5% Republican one--a shift of 24.5 points, and of 16.5 points after the Florida Supreme Court acted to bring about Terri Schiavo's death.
To be sure, there is a good deal of imprecision in these polls. They have a small sample size (253 disabled likely voters in the last pre-election survey), and the definition of "disability" leaves considerable room for interpretation. But the shift is so striking, it's hard to discount--and hard to explain except as a response to issues of particular concern to voters with disabilities.
He's
Lucky He Isn't Married
"Vatican Says Pope Given Feeding Tube"--headline, Associated Press,
March 30
These
Exotic 'Christian' Creatures
It's like something out of the Onion: "For Family, Religion Shapes Politics"
reads the headline of an article by Boston Globe reporter Brian MacQuarrie.
The scare quotes in the subheadline are a lovely touch: "Heartlanders convert
others to live daily by 'the word of God.' "
Here's how the piece begins:
Michael and MarCee Wilkerson bow their heads and pray before every meal, even when they are surrounded by strangers at Skyline Chili. Their older daughter, Brittany, 13, listens to Christian-accented rap, hip-hop, and R&B. And Brooke, 9, is fond of wearing a T-shirt that proclaims, "Jesus is my Homeboy."
A middle-class family in a Cincinnati suburb, the Wilkersons are evangelical Christians for whom a literal interpretation of the Bible is a blueprint for living. Religious beliefs also guide their politics in this staunchly Republican region, which helped President Bush carry Ohio and the national election.
To them, the president is "a godly man" and Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts is not. . . .
The Wilkersons oppose abortion and stem-cell research, consider homosexuality a sin, and regard same-sex marriage as the work of activist judges who cater to a dangerous fringe group. The future holds either heaven or hell, and the only way to paradise is to accept Jesus Christ. In their reading of Scripture, even a saintly non-Christian such as Gandhi has been doomed to eternal torment.
"This is the word of God," Michael Wilkerson says, brandishing the New International Version of the Bible. "There's only one way, and it's through Jesus."
The article continues in this vein for more than 2,600 words. There's nothing hostile or even disrespectful about it, but MacQuarrie comes across as if he were a visitor from another planet marveling at Earth's exotic culture. It never seems to occur to him that the Wilkersons are nothing more than a normal American family.
Bad
News for Hillary
"Koran Scholar: US Will Cease to Exist in 2007"--headline, Jerusalem
Post, March 29
Zero-Tolerance
Watch
Delegate Anne Healey, a Maryland state legislator, is proposing a law that "would
require school health officers to make sure students are allowed to wear sunscreen
when they go outdoors on sunny days, a right that is not universally recognized
in schools, according to cancer prevention advocates," the Washington Post
reports. Why is such a law necessary? Because school systems in some Maryland
counties consider sunscreen a form of contraband:
Montgomery County schools treat sunscreen as an over-the-counter medicine. A student must bring in a doctor's note to apply it, and only older students are allowed to carry it with them at school.
"If you had a very young kid, and they put it in their eyes, it could hurt them," said Judith Covich, Montgomery's director of health and student services.
Montgomery County is a tony Washington suburb, just the kind of place you'd expect to find officials so nannyish that they want to shield kids from sunscreen. Putting someone's eye out with sunscreen may be less of a risk than skin cancer, but of course the latter doesn't usually develop until later in life--long after the Montgomery County school system has lost interest in a kid.
What
Would We Do Without Teens?
"Insults Can Sting, Teens Say"--headline, St. Paul Pioneer Press,
March 29
What
Would We Do Without Harvard Studies?
"Harvard Study: Hitler Held Grudges, Craved Attention"--headline,
Associated Press, March 29
Why
Not Make It an Even 20 Bucks?
"Philip Morris to Pay $18.8 in Smoking Case"--headline, Associated
Press, March 29
If
Called by a Panther, Don't Anther
"Report: Three Panthers Filled Steroid Prescriptions With S.C. Doctor"--headline,
Associated Press, March 29
A
Big Fat Hoax
Yesterday blogger Vilmar Tavares (warning: link
includes foul language) e-mailed us a link to a story in the Pacific Northwest
Medical Journal titled "Curing Obesity Through Sterility: California's
Controversial Program Under the Microscope":
Beginning last November, the city of San Francisco began a program whereupon clinically obese men between the ages of 18 and 55 could undergo a procedure whereupon approximately 1/2 an inch is removed from each vas and the ends are sealed--commonly referred to as a vasectomy--completely free of charge. The overwhelming turnout led the State of California to follow suit, and now California is the first state in the Union to offer state-funded vasectomies to men who have been diagnosed as obese. . . .
By offering such a highly effective form of birth control freely to men who, by clinical diagnosis, have been deemed genetically inferior to the normalized median of homo sapien development, such a gene line would effectively be eliminated.
This sounded about as believable as "monkeyfishing," so we set about looking for evidence that this was a hoax. The site certainly looked realistic; its homepage linked to other articles that didn't sound phony, and the contact page gave a Seattle-area number for the Pacific Northwest Medical Association that answered with what seemed to be a functioning voicemail system.
On the other hand, a Factiva search turned up no references to the vasectomies-for-blimps program, nor any to the Pacific Northwest Medical Journal or the association. Online phone books contain no listing for either the journal or the association, and a Google search turns up nothing but links to the journal on a humor site called Broken Newz.
We went to Network Solutions and checked the Whois entry for the pnmj.org domain, which turns out to be registered to "KLAF Television" of Shreveport, La., no address or phone number given. We thought: KLAF, as in K-laugh? But it turns out there is a KLAF--in Lafayette, a 212-mile drive from Shreveport.
Reader Michael Segal found the proof that it's a hoax. The contact page at Broken Newz lists among its contributors Bill Doty and Joe Peacock, whose names appear in the "medical journal" article as a "nationally recognized geneticist" and "clinician," respectively.
Segal also tracked some of the real-looking articles that appear on the site and found that they were indeed real, though not original: This one is lifted from the Croatian Medical Journal, this one from Diabetic-Lifestyle.com, and this one from a Wisconsin Medical Society press release.
This morning we heard again from blogger Tavares, who had learned independently that it was a hoax. He sent a link to the disclaimer page:
Yes, this is a FAKE Medical Journal website for a FAKE medical association, complete with a fake voicemail system. . . .
Once again, we've proved that so-called "journalists" at so-called "reputable news agencies" are so-called "F---king lazy." It's not like we didn't drop about two billion clues that this particular article might not be full to the brim with medical fact, you know. In fact, we set up a voicemail system to log calls to the Pacific Northwest Medical Association specifically to track just how many reference and source checks were made by you, the mass media. The integrity part of Journalistic Integrity has been left completely by the wayside, and reporters / writers / disc jockeys / what-have-you are simply scraping sites like Fark.com and BoingBoing.net without so much as a verification call.
Did any reporters fall for this hoax? Not that we've seen. Journalists may be lazy, but then again, so is anybody by comparison with guys who would put so much work into a hoax that ends up fooling a solitary blogger.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Lisa Schell, Marji Meyer, Edward McDowell, John Chilton, Buddy Smith, Bennett Stern, Calin Popa, Mara Gold, Erik Andresen, Steven Wallach, Drew Anderson, Eli Meisels, Joel Goldberg, Yehuda Hilewitz, Chris Stetsko, Ethel Fenig, Jim Wright, Robert Zastrow, Steve Mann, Bob Woolley, Steve Early, Edward Schulze, Marion Dreyfus and Chris Hamilton. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: If Kofi Annan were a CEO, he'd be out on his ear.
- Bridget Johnson: It's time Hollywood gave up its love affair with communism.
- John Fund: Three new books look at the Gingrich revolution, 10 years later.
