Friday morning roundup

I'm spending the day at home today, in a cozy little ménage à trois with Mr. Brilliant and Benjamin Moore.

So here's some of what you ought to check out today.

• I hate to link to Jeff Jarvis; his ego is quite large enough already, thank you very much (not that links from little ol' me mean a heck of a lot), but he has a decent compilation of excerpts from conservative bloggers about a possible "GOP Meltdown" over the Schiavo case.


• Lost in the screeching that is Terrimania is the fact that C-Plus Caligula has been utterly silent on the deaths of ten Native Americans, one of them the shooter, in the Minnesota school shooting earlier this week:
  

  "The fact that Bush preempted his vacation to say something about Ms. Schiavo and here you have 10 native people gunned down and he can't take time to speak is very telling," said David Wilkins, interim chairman of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and a member of the North Carolina-based Lumbee tribe.

  
  Why people continue to be surprised that Bush's "culture of life" only applies to white Christians is beyond me.


• Media Matters reminds us of the background of Schindler family spokesnut Randall Terry. Perhaps it's unfair, but the Schindlers lost much of the sympathy I had for them when they made the Faustian bargain to have this domestic terrorist speak for them.


• John Gorenfeld, best known for bringing us the news of the coronation of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon as the Messiah in the halls of Congress last year, now tells us of the child abuser who is now the U.S. Ambassador to Italy.


• Bob Herbert has a nice rundown of some of the consequences of the Bush Budget -- child-care assistance for over 300,000 of the poor ended by 2009, cuts in food assistance for pregnant women, infants and children, cuts in funding for H.I.V. and AIDS treatment of over half a billion dollars over five years (whatever happened to that $15 billion, anyway?). And over a half-billion in tax cuts for the wealthy. More proof that that the Fundie right cares about life before birth, and preventing white Christians from going home to Jesus (maybe it's to ensure a good, mediagenic turnout for the Rapture?).


• I can't seem to stop looking at articles about Vespas....which is pretty strange because I am scared to death of motorcycles. But I work 10 miles from work, it's all roads of 40mph or less, and well, a Vespa gets 65mpg. We may all be riding Vespas soon, if Kenneth Deffeyes is correct.


• The Schiavo case is resulting in some pretty interesting behavior on the part of talking heads. I don't usually watch the Abrams Report, which comes on MSNBC after Olbermann's show, but it's been fascinating to watch this week, as Dan Abrams' head has come very close to exploding several times this week as he's interviewed some of the delusional wingnuts who insist that Terri Schiavo is just days away from full cognition. Today, even the usually subdued David Shuster pulls the curtain away from the Congressional grandstanding to show the law that Bill Frist and Tom DeLay have been touting for the toothless exercise in political cynicism that it is:
  

  Based on what Schiavo's parents have been saying this week, it appears the legislation's fine print was never shared with them by Bill Frist or anybody else for that matter. Early Monday morning, after President Bush signed the Schiavo bill, Bob Schindler was positively beaming in front of the television cameras. He said he walked into his daughter's hospice room and told her, "We had to wake the President up to save your life."
  
  Did Bill Frist and Tom Delay ever call the Schindler family and say, "not so fast?" Apparently not. In their latest court filing, the Schinder family still clings to the misleading notion offered by lawmakers last weekend that their bill required Schiavo's feeding tube to be immediately reinserted. Quote, "If Congress meant to give the federal courts the power to let her die..." says the Schindler's filing, then passing the law "would be little more than a cruel hoax." Read it again... The Schindlers argue: "If Congress meant to give the federal courts the power..." The fact is, that's exactly what Congress did. And a "cruel hoax" on Terry Schiavo's family is exactly the right description.