plumbing in Memphis
Ann Coulter is dead right once again in this week’s article:
[Judge] Greer has cut off the legal rights of Terri’s real family and made her husband (now with a different family) her sole guardian, citing as precedent the landmark “Fox v. Henhouse” ruling of 1893. Throughout the process that would result in her death sentence, Terri was never permitted her own legal counsel. Evidently, they were all tied up defending the right to life of child-molesting murderers.
Here’s a link to a Windows Media Player stream from the Glenn Beck program where Beck interviewed Terri’s brother. Listen to it! The horror of this whole affair is unspeakable.
No water for three days. If they did that to somebody’s pet cat, they’d have their building torn down by raging mobs and their entrails fed to the birds of the air. But they can do it to Terri. Or they think they can.
What was Terri’s crime? Why nothing, of course. If she were a criminal, maybe an axe murderer or something like that, the loonies and lefties would writhe and scream and be out there with candles and signs that say “Not In Our Name.” Instead, since she’s just an innocent white Catholic, they snarl and sneer and say that Bush is just trying to pay back “the Evangelical nutbags” who elected him. (Yeah, I heard it with my own ears on Air America.) They’re happy to see her disposed of.
I’ve often wondered what it would take to get the tree huggers on Terri’s side. Maybe if she were declared to be Florida’s State Vegetable the environmentalists would weigh in.
The case is far from simple, although partisans on both sides believe that it is. Here is an excellent site that covers all of the data in a sane way, as if anyone wants to be sane any more.
I’ll just make a few points:
(1) there are people on record who once appeared to be hopeless and unresponsive, yet they recovered and testify today that they were very aware of all that was going on–but the experts had said that they weren’t! Experts don’t know everything.
(2) Just because Terri is disabled doesn’t mean that it’s okay to kill her. The fact that she cannot eat on her own only places her in the same class as a baby or a quadriplegic. They want to kill her because her brain is damaged and they’re calling the feeding tube “life support” as an excuse.
(3) It’s hard to consider human life sacred without acknowledging God. Let’s face it: if there is no God, “sacred” is just another name for the way somebody feels about something. Atheism (they call it “the separation of church and state”) is coming home to roost in America.
(4) Why kill her with thirst? As I recommended in October, her loving husband Michael could saw off her head in a second or two; no muss, no fuss.
This testimony was given by a nurse who took care of Terri Schiavo:
Throughout my time at Palm Gardens, Michael Schiavo was focused on Terri’s death. Michael would say “When is she going to die?,” “Has she died yet?” and “When is that bitch gonna die?” These statements were common knowledge at Palm Gardens, as he would make them casually in passing, without regard even for who he was talking to, as long as it was a staff member. Other statements which I recall him making include “Can’t you do anything to accelerate her death – won’t she ever die?” When she wouldn’t die, Michael would be furious.
I am indebted to Carl Vonnoh, who bills himself as the Grub Street Plumber, for blogging this info first.
I’ve been cleaning drains for fifteen wonderful years. You’d think that I would have learned how to do it by now. But today I developed a new technique.
I cabled a kitchen sink drain, removed my cable, and closed up the opening I’d used. I then ran the water to test the drain. It backed up; the clog wasn’t moving, even though I’d put a steel cable through its evil heart just minutes ago.
We have ways of dealing with such clogs. I continued to let the water run and fill up both sides of the kitchen sink. Then I waited, minute after minute, for the weight of the water to move the clog on down the line. This has worked for me on dozens of previous occasions. Today’s clog wasn’t impressed, however.
The next step, since the clog wouldn’t move, was going to be a lot of trouble. I decided to try something I’d never done before, since it was easy and might work. I grabbed my ladder off the top of my truck and climbed up to the roof over the kitchen, put my mouth against the drain’s vent pipe, and began blowing into it, letting off, and blowing again.
If you don’t know diddly about drains and vents, this might be Greek to you. But trust me: I was blowing pressure against the water that was standing in the drain. Lo and behold, after half a minute the clog gave way and the system drained with a mighty roar.
I’ve probably cleared 12,000 drains, but this was the first time I tried this maneuver. Truly a red letter day.
(And you thought your life was going nowhere?)
Man sues over toilet collapse at rest stop
By Matthew Junker
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, March 18, 2005
Scott A. Keller, of Box 46, Everson, says he stopped at the Amos K. Hutchinson Bypass mainline toll plaza in Hempfield Township to use the restroom on May 4, 2003, when the accident occurred.
Keller stated in the lawsuit that he suffered whiplash, along with various other back and neck injuries, when the wall-mounted toilet fell to the floor. He’s seeking an unstated amount in excess of $30,000 for lost work, pain and suffering, and embarrassment and humiliation.
[His lawyer] stated in the filing that the turnpike commission is responsible for the defective quality of the construction, maintenance and repair of the toilet, and should have known it was going to fail and should have warned him.
Sure they should have. “Hey, Keller, that toilet’s gonna fall off the wall. We can’t see it and we know that you can’t see it, but we’re telepathic and we know it’s gonna happen.”
In fact, something like this cannot be seen ahead of time. If a wall-mounted toilet were half-off a wall, nobody would try to sit on it. Obviously that toilet looked perfectly secure. The weak places were inside the wall, totally out of view, and only a visual inspection of the scene of the crime can establish what went wrong. My guess is that the wood in the wall weakened from water or termite damage.
Get over it, Keller. We all have days like that. :hehe:
Harvard University’s president Lawrence Summers, dared to say that men tend to be more mathematically inclined than women, so the left is convulsing and foaming at the mouth. David Horowitz made some good points in his blog. Here’s an excerpt:
But even if Summers had raised a point that was incorrect, the attempt to suppress it and therefore to suppress his right — and with it the right of any faculty member or student — to raise an intellectual issue and to declare it politically incorrect is totalitarian in its very nature.
In case you’re interested in this sort of thing, Peter Nulty, the father of one of the jurors who convicted Bernard Ebbers, wrote this today:
We offer a few tidbits about the jury’s deliberations that my daughter, Aran, who was juror #10, shared with the family over the dinner table on Tuesday after the verdict was rendered. Her comments suggest that pundits who comment on jury proceedings from the outside are usually just guessing and guessing wrong. This is her account of what happened:
1. From the start she believes the jury unanimously distrusted the testimony of the prosecution’s star witness, Scott Sullivan. (Some experts are still saying Ebbers was convicted because the jury believed Sullivan, but the opposite is true.)
2. Bernie Ebbers helped his case by going on the stand and denying Sullivan’s version of events. She said this effectively convinced most jurors that Sullivan was lying to get a reduced sentence. (Many experts are saying Ebbers hurt himself by testifying, but the opposite may be true.)
3. Several days into the deliberations, after ruling out Sullivan, being wary of Ebbers, and becoming bleary-eyed by poring over financial evidence, the jury was still left with the possibility (i.e., with “reasonable doubt”) that Ebbers didn’t know that WorldCom’s books were being cooked. It also left the jurors with a pile of very circumstantial evidence and no “smoking gun,” i.e., evidence of something Ebbers did, said, or wrote that showed that he knew what was going on.
4. So the jurors pored for a second time through the judge’s instructions regarding what constitutes “conspiracy” and came to focus on a statement that willful ignorance of the wrongdoing was not the same as “innocence.” So they called for a white board and started methodically listing the pros and cons of whether he should have known what was going on.
5. They concluded that he should have. Or rather, they concluded that either he knew the books were cooked, or, if he didn’t know, it was because he chose not to know and was protecting himself by remaining ignorant of circumstances that were his responsibility to understand.
6. In the end, the two big witnesses probably canceled each other out, still leaving reasonable doubt that Ebbers was guilty. But, facing attack from highly circumstantial, yet voluminous, evidence, “reasonable doubt” survived until about noon on the eighth day when it finally winked out. It was the Byzantine financial record (which included two sets of books) that finally decided the case.
7. In the courtroom, the judge polled the jury individually, asking them one by one to confirm the verdict of guilty on all 12 counts.
8. Back in the jury room, many of the jurors wept. Suddenly the judge entered. She told them their case had been extraordinarily difficult and important. She thanked them for their service and said that she was proud of the way they had deliberated so patiently and painstakingly. Then the judge, too, shed tears.
Ann Coulter has hit a home run this week:
The New York Times said the problem was not enough government spending on courthouse security (“Budgets Can Affect Safety Inside Many Courthouses”). Yes, it was tax-cuts-for-the-rich that somehow enabled a 200-pound former linebacker to take a gun from a 5-foot-tall grandmother. 
Here’s a good quote: “The question isn’t ‘what causes poverty?’ but ‘what causes wealth?'” Read a good article.
