From the AP:

Jeb Bush and the state’s social services agency filed a petition in state court to take custody of Schiavo and, presumably, reconnect her feeding tube. It cites new allegations of neglect and challenges Schiavo’s diagnosis as being in a persistent vegetative state. The request is based on the opinion of a neurologist working for the state who observed Schiavo at her bedside but did not conduct an examination of her.

OTB has some comments:

While I find the idea of the state trying to assert custodial rights after over a decade of litigation outrageous, trying to do so via the legal process is at least less obscene than a unilateral decision to kidnap her.

Michael Demmons has more, and thinks GW Bush has a double standard.

If you haven’t read Kate’s story, you should.

Here she is.

Kate Adamson is the mother of two who suffered a double brain stem stroke and was in a coma for 70 days. She was completely unresponsive to stimuli and was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state. Doctors finally pulled her feeding tube and, for eight days, she lay dying. Instead of being unconscious as the doctors believed she was aware of everything.

During an interview on the O’Reilly Factor in 2003 she recounted the dehydration experience:

O’REILLY: When they took the feeding tube out, what went through your mind?

ADAMSON: When the feeding tube was turned off for eight days, I thought I was going insane. I was screaming out in my mind, “Don’t you know I need to eat?” And even up until that point, I had been having a bagful of Ensure as my nourishment that was going through the feeding tube. At that point, it sounded pretty good. I just wanted something. The fact that I had nothing, the hunger pains overrode every thought I had.

…

“I have a unique understanding of what Terri is feeling. I could feel everything that the doctors did to me, and I could do nothing. I was at the complete mercy of others, and they couldn’t hear me. I have been given the opportunity to speak on behalf of one that has been robbed of her voice. We are praying that God will move on the hearts of Governor Bush and the Florida Legislature to stand up and protect the right of Terri not to be starved to death.”

Via LaShawn. More from David Limbaugh who quotes from LifeSite:

During her early-afternoon speech Kate declared that “If they want to kill Terri they should have the guts to put a gun to her head” rather than condemn her to such a slow and painful death. She finished off by summing up the full import of the Schiavo case, saying, “The measure of a society is how they treat the least of us. Life is sacred or meaningless, there is nothing in between.”

Also at Cosmic X, Classical Child, Jack Lewis, Newshounds, BitsBlog and lots of others.

The county Treasurer in New Castle, PA won’t resign. Check out why his colleagues and constituents think he should.

1. Didn’t pay his taxes, and friends’ properties show up on the tax-exempt list.

… he had not been paying his taxes and his properties had mysteriously shown up on a tax-exempt list, along with those of some friends.

Felasco has repaid more than $8,000 in past-due property taxes and penalties. He told the New Castle paper he simply forgot to pay them.

Still unexplained, however, is how the properties showed up on the tax-exempt rolls while he ran the tax claim office.

2. He used his government cell phone to … well, read below.

… his county cell phone number turned up on a Web site promoting sex parties.

The local newspaper conducted a sting: They called the number at “Jeannie in the Bottle” and got directions from someone named Gary to an Ohio hotel where a swingers’ party was advertised. Outside, they snapped a picture of Felasco’s van.

…

Felasco has returned two county-issued cell phones. But Craig said the treasurer still owes $4,000 for calls on the phone whose number was listed on the Web site.

3. Oh, and some discrepencies in receipts.

A preliminary report found $44,000 in receipts were unaccounted for in one three-month period; Felasco said the discrepancy is due to confusion over how his office tallies credit card payments for dog licenses and other fees.

And Jeannine Felasco, his [ex?] wife says:

If you want to get Gary thrown out of office, you need to do a lot better than that.

Nice.

Just a quick post to apologize if I have deleted any legitimate comments on this blog. We have had over 1,000 comment- and trackback-spam entries in the last 24 hours, and in the process of cleaning them out I may have accidentally deleted a legitimate comment or two. If I did, please feel free to re-post.

Interesting article from Knight Ridder about “Netspeak” and its impact on the English language.

“The Internet is fostering new kinds of creativity through language,” said David Crystal, a historian of language at the University of Wales in the United Kingdom. “It’s the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of the written language and a new motivation for child and adult literacy.”

Well, well. It looks like Benon Sevan, investigated for siphoning off money from the UN’s Oil for Food program, has had his attorney fees paid for from the UN’s cut of the Iraqi oil money.

NYSun:

UNITED NATIONS - After months of denials, the United Nations admitted yesterday that, in an exception to its own rules, it has paid for the legal defense of Benon Sevan. The U.N.’s own investigation panel denounced Mr. Sevan for his central role in the oil-for-food scandal that has engulfed the world body.

Questions regarding whether the U.N. would cover Mr. Sevan’s legal fees were raised soon after the name of the oil-for-food program chief appeared on a list published by the Iraqi newspaper al-Mada shortly after the start of the Iraq war. The newspaper accused world diplomats, businessmen, and U.N. officials of accepting bribes from Saddam Hussein in the form of oil allocations.

Up until late last week, the U.N. said it had not paid any of Mr. Sevan’s legal fees. But yesterday, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard told The New York Sun that the U.N. had been paying his legal bills up until last month.

HT: Ed

Dawn asks, “Who will be Esther?”

And it is amazing to me that one can write satire so well about a case such as this one. Scott Ott has done it repeatedly here and here.

“What we’re offering to the state of California is an even-up trade,” said Bob Schindler, Mrs. Schiavo’s father. “Scott Peterson, who murdered his wife and son, gets to come to this nursing home where he’ll die in a week or two. Our daughter goes to death row in San Quentin, where she’ll likely live a long life as Peterson’s case is appealed.”

A Michelle Malkin reader asks an interesting question:

“If left to fend for themselves, advanced stage Alzheimers patients will starve just like Terri S. Is that an acceptable course, if the husband says so now?”

Bob Schindler, late Monday:

“While she still made eye contact with me when I spoke to her [Terri Schiavo], she was becoming increasingly lethargic,” Bob Schindler said in the papers. “Terri no longer attempted to verbalize back to me when I spoke to her.”

This is overwhelmingly outrageous. Apparently, as a direct result of removing nutrition and hydration from (ie. starving) Terri Schiavo, she was becoming lethargic and no longer attempted to verbalize. BECOMING? NO LONGER? The point should be obvious, she WAS DOING THESE THINGS before the feeding tube was removed!

It makes one wonder if Terri’s parents have contemplated drastic measures, such as kidnapping Terri and taking her to an undisclosed location somewhere with a doctor who has vowed to “first, do no harm.” As outlandish as such an idea seems, I have to admit that if my little child was being starved to death by the State, the thought would cross my mind. I would risk my life or freedom to attempt to save his life.

UPDATE: It seems others have a similar, but lawful way of taking just such a step.

There are two people in the United States who can save Terri Schiavo’s life right now. The president of the United States and the governor of Florida have the authority to use the police services at their disposal to take Terri into protective custody, restore her food and hydration, and arrest anyone who would interfere,” said Dr. Paul Schenck, executive director of the National Pro-Life Action Center on Capitol Hill. “For the sake of Terri’s life, we cannot afford to wait while the courts dither over jurisdiction.” Details of D.C. Press Conference

And here is a list of contacts at the Florida Legislature. A poster at BlogsForTerri thinks they can help.

The Schiavo case just keeps getting more bizarre.

According to the Empire Journal, whose site was recently hacked (don’t you just love the Left?), it turns out that George Felos, Michael Schiavo’s attorney, was a nine year member of the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast which operates Woodside Hospice where Terri Schiavo is housed. He was also a former chairman of that board. Felos resigned in 2002. Terri was moved to the Woodside facility in April of 2001 from a nursing home even though she didn’t qualify as a terminally ill patient and technically should not have been transferred.

Soooo, here we have the attorney for Terri’s husband, the pro death attorney, with a very questionable relationship to Woodside Hospice which is charged with Terri’s care.

Now that could explain a lot. It could explain why Terri is being deprived of medical care and no one is questioning this nor investigating it even though there is clear knowledge of this abusive treatment. It could explain why no one is allowed to reveal Terri’s condition and information is being withheld. It could explain why Michael could threaten nurses who are trying to treat Terri with getting them fired. It could explain why no one is investigating Woodside hospice for abuse or neglect in the care of patients. It could explain why the nurses at Woodside are intimidated and forced to abandon their professional calling of compassionate care. It could explain Michael’s unusually dominant control of Woodside and its staff.

And we have to ask, how many other Woodside patients have been deliberately killed? This is a legitimate question because hospice only gets reimbursed for costs, especially by Medicare and Medicaid, for only so long. The patient needs to be recertified every six months or they are sent to a nursing home.

There is also a question of Felos’ relationship to the court appointed doctors given his familiarity with the medical field through his tenure on the Suncoast Hospice board. Could he have influenced the doctors’ reports on Terri Schiavo? No one has investigated what appears to be incompetence on the part of the doctors. Their failure to give routine tests such as an MRI, for example, indicate a potential lack of competence or could they possibly be acting at the direction of Felos? Either one should open this case to serious review.

Add that to the fact that the administrator of Woodside Hospice is now circulating a petition among the staff condemning the action of Congress to keep Terri alive. According to one nurse, if you don’t sign it your job is threatened. Seems like that violates a few laws.

The dots are beginning to connect here.

Plus today on the Sean Hannity show a nurse from Woodside Hospice, Nora Lynn Wagner, who was threatened with firing if she spoke with Mr. Hannity, had the courage to reveal some very serious issues involving Woodside Hospice and Terri Schiavo in spite of the fact that she will no doubt lose her job if she hasn’t already. Both Wagner and Carla Iyer, another nurse who worked at Palm Garden of Largo Convalescent Center where Terri was prior to Woodside, have corroborating stories about Terri’s condition, her treatment, and the hostile actions of Michael Schiavo. Maybe someone should subpoena more Woodside staff.

Something is clearly amiss here. This smacks of a massive cover up. At worst it appears to be a conspiracy to commit the unthinkable. Will the courts or our elected officials sit idly by in the face of all this evidence? This is the kind of stuff from which murder mysteries are made.

And to complicate matters further, medical records from Terri’s hospital admission in 1991 indicate there was trauma to her head and no evidence of any heart problems or other diseases. (For the medically inclined the bone scan is here. Dr. William Campbell Walker’s deposition regarding the bone scan is here… He was the doctor who did the scan. Find additional independent medical analysis here and here.)

Correction: It was brought to my attention by thoughtomation that he did not make the quotes attributed to him below. I found the quotes here and they should be attributed to “err on the other side of life” whose link I don’t have. So as a kindness to thoughtomation click on the link below and check out his blog. My apologies for this error. TOL

Plus another bizarre twist surfaces regarding the former sheriff of Pinellas County, Everett S. Rice via Thoughtomation who wants to know why this wasn’t investigated at the time…

Main point all seem to be missing in media and elsewhere: why were not the charges of questionable abuse by DCF not looked into by the law at the time?

Thoughtomation goes on to say…

The sheriff Rice of Pinellas County during Terri’s initial hospitalization and rehab, who did not investigate abuse claims, is reportedly a friend of Judge Greer (who has given Terri the death sentence and other courts have ruled on law instead of investigating records).

Ole Sheriff Rice is now a State Congressman who, guess what !, voted to pull her peg tube. It gets worse, again from reading last weekend: Sheriff Rice employed Michael Schiavo, a RN, to work in a jail. And, even more, there are connections with Rice and Schiavo’s attorney being on the Hospice board (where Terri has resided for years instead of the requisite 6 months which is law). She was placed in a hospice facility when she was not actively dying.

Hmmmmm.One may ask,too, why this seems to be getting brushed aside as it smacks of criminal neglect, illegal denial of rights for the disabled and conflict of interest. Why is this ignored and not in the headlines?That I don’t have an answer for.

Maybe we can connect the dots a little bit more… after all if it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, is it really a dove?

I understand Michael wants to have the body cremated.

I highly recommend you read the article at Empire Journal. They have done great work.

More on this at Free Republic.

For a comprehensive historical look at this case from WND go here.

Keep getting this stuff out folks; Our elected officials and the public need to know about these things.

UPDATE: Other potential conflicts of interest, involving the hospice are summarized here. Try Googling some of these names and see where it leads you:

Judge George Greer
Judge John Lenderman
Martha Lenderman
Barbara Sheen Todd
George Felos
Mary Laybak
Euthanasia Society of America
Hemlock for Hospice
Attorney Jonathan Alpert
Gus Michael Bilirakis

UPDATE : It keeps getting interesting. This is a MUST READ article by Andy McCarthy at National Review. He discusses the recent Whittmore ruling.

Here’s an excerpt…

The latter is the course that Judge Whittemore chose to take. Here, it bears noting that Whittemore was placed on the federal bench by President Clinton in 2000 after spending a decade as a judge in the state courts of Florida. His opinion is a staunch approbation of the integrity of Florida’s procedural framework, and extremely deferential to the performance of his former state-court colleague, Pinellas Circuit Court Judge George Greer. Essentially, Judge Whittemore reasons: Florida’s procedures are fair and designed to achieve a just result, there is no basis to suspect that those procedures did not produce a just result here, and, therefore, federal due process has been satisfied — without any need to revisit (i.e. , conduct a de novo review of) the facts that were actually found here under those fair procedures.

UPDATE: More dots to connect at the Empire Journal. Check this out!