Death Takes No Holiday

Death isn't on a holiday in Florida, if blogs around the state are any indication. * * * * *

"It's too late to let Terry Schiavo die with dignity," Hot Wax Residue reflects. Florida blogs seems to offer a lot of evidence for that.

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Blogwood and Discourse.net are following reports which Carol Marbin Miller fleshes out with new details in today's Miami Herald that an armed showdown between state and local law enforcement in front of Terri Schaivo's hospice center was narrowly averted Thursday.

"Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, on Thursday that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding.

For a brief period, local police, who have officers at the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called "a showdown."

In the end, the squad from the FDLE and the Department of Children & Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.

"We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in," said a source with the local police.

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The FDLE called to say they were en route to the scene,"' said an official with the city police who requested anonymity. "When the sheriff's department and our department told them they could not enforce their order, they backed off."

Thank goodness the state agents phoned ahead!

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Right alongside that scary item, Miller has another report suggesting that the deaths of four disabled patients is traceable to the state's decision last fall to out-source, or privatize, medical care for disabled and elderly group home patients.

"Two developmentally disabled adults who lived in group homes in Brandon, and two others under the care of The ARC in St. Lucie County, have died since October 2004, a month after the state required the operator of the two Brandon group homes to change the way residents received nursing care."

A fifth patient "developed such a severe infection at the site of her feeding tube that she has been hospitalized in intensive care" for over a month. Following cuts in the quality of nursing care mandated by the state, the patients were being treated by --

"rotating 'pool' nurses who often did not know the group home residents -- and sometimes had no experience treating disabled people with severe medical problems," said Carol Middell, regional director for Spectrum, Inc., which operates the homes."

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Bark-Bark, Woof-Woof noticed this week that "a spokesman for the NRA suggests that in order to prevent shootings in schools like what happened in Red Lake, Minnesota, the teachers should be given guns." Yeah, why not? Then arm the students, too. That way, everyone can be on a level playing killing field.

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Both Why Now? and Gatorchick's Florida Blues were impressed by a Washington Post report on the contrast between President Bush's midnight ride to Washington to sign the Schaivo Relief Act (later declared unconconstitutional) and his silence about "the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history... ."

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It was bound to happen. And it will probably get worse. First we had Andy Worhol's famous bon mot about 'fifteen minutes of fame.' Now, Infomaniac reports, we have some idiot's precedent-setting offer to "sell his vegetative body to any groups or organizations which will support issues he's interested in."

I get it. Privatized issue-advocacy death watches. For profit, of course. Can we assume Fox News, CNN, and MCNBC will be among the bidders?

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People aren't the only things dying around Florida. Save Our Sarasota pays digital homage to "a wake on Main St. in memory of the Black Olive Tree."

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U.S. Senator Mel Martinzes campaigned last year against "judges who interpret the law and do not legislate from the bench," Florida News reminds us. Then he wonders, "If you don't support judges who legislate from the bench, why should we support legislators who judge from the, umm, wherever legislators sit?"

The answer is, they 'judge' from the seat of their pants.

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Great blogs must be attracted to the same metaphors. Jeb Bush "pumped up the religious right" in the Schiavo debacle, Florida Politics observes, but what will be the consequences? He warns: "When you lay down with dogs you get up with fleas." South of Swannee quotes a couple of right-wing extremists threatening Jeb Bush, and then muses:

"They say if you lay down with the dogs, you should expect to get fleas. If you lay down with vipers . . . "

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Gainsville report is baffled when he sees "the groups most vocal for continuing Schiavo's feeding are the same groups most vocal for the invasion of Iraq, which has cost the lives of more than 100,000 people, mostly innocent civilians, including children and the elderly – the very people our government claims to be liberating." He also wonders why those "people campaigning outside of Schiavo's hospital to keep her feeding tube in are wearing tape over their mouths." Good question.

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Poor Richard's Anorack solemnly takes note of the deaths this week of jazz great Bobby Short and architect Kenzo Tange.

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Even fictional death is attracting attention. The mystery movie "Last Life in the Universe," gets an "A" from Hatless. According to the Internet Movie Database it's a beach movie, kind of, about "a suicidal, obsessive-compulsive Japanese librarian ... forced to hide out with a pot-smoking Thai woman at her shabby beachside home."

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May as well mention two other movies for Pensacola Beach locals: Be sure to see Vera Drake and The Sea Inside now playing at Gulf Breeze Cinema 4. As the best fiction does, both prize-winning movies offer riveting, stunning truths about the human condition -- how we live and how we die.