Jesse Jackson - another CONSISTENT progressive who gets it.
Good old consistent anti-war, anti-injustice Jesse who's not part of the revolting nuanced anti-"this" war or anti-"this" injustice that is permeating a dying Democratic Party that can't take a consistent stance on anything.
Go Jesse. You get it. Tom Harken gets it. Even RINO "he-has-a-100% rating-from-the-DLC" Lieberman gets it. Already we have people here crying about Michigan not wanting to treat gays. It's time the pseudo wannabe Left got it through our microcephalic skulls that once you allow the state and our ambulatory arrogance to determine who is Lebensunwertes Leben (Life Unworthy of Life) and who isn't - you just might not like the results.
But hell, what would I know. I'm just a leftist retard - a lovely term coined right here in River City.
===
Jesse Jackson is expected to visit Terri Schiavo today as the invitation of the Schindler family.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2005/03/29/m1a_schiavo_0329.html PINELLAS PARK, Fl., March 28 / -- On Tuesday morning, March 29, The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., founder and president of the RainbowPUSH Coalition, plans to visit the Woodside Hospice, where Terri lives, located at 6774 102nd Avenue N. (near 66th Street N and 102nd Avenue N) in Pinellas Park, Florida.
Rev. Jackson is responding to an invitation from the Schindler family to come and pray with the family, and if possible visit Terri Schiavo in the hospice.
After meeting and praying with the Schindler family, Rev. Jackson will make a statement to the press.
Press Conference Details---
When: Tuesday, March 29, at approximately 9:30 AM
Where: In front of the Woodside Hospice, where Terri lives, located at 6774 102nd Avenue N. (near 66th Street N and 102nd Avenue N) in Pinellas Park, Florida.
Who: Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., founder and president of the RainbowPUSH Coalition
Why:
"I think the feeding tube should be reinstated. This is a very tough emotional, ethical, political issue. But you know
she is brain impaired, she is not brain-dead. And right now they're starving her to death. They're dehydrating her to death, and that raises profound ethical questions. That tube should be reinstated. She is not brain-dead. She's brain impaired. It's not right to starve her to death. That's not right ethically." -- Rev. Jesse Jackson
http://www.earnedmedia.org/tf03281.htm ...
Nearly half of the Congressional Black Caucus members who voted on the Terri Schiavo case last weekend supported the Republican-sponsored bill, but none participated in the debate and only one put a statement on his Web site.
Nine voted yes, 13 voted no, and 18 were not present. Supporters included such prominent African-American congressmen as Harold Ford of Tennessee and Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois. They all kept quiet about it except for Albert Wynn of Maryland.
While he said nothing during House debate, Wynn's statement on his Web site said that while the case should not have been brought before Congress, it had become "a question of conscience."
In the absence of a living will, he said, "Congress should afford Ms. Schiavo the opportunity to continue receiving life-saving sustenance."...
http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/cst-edt-novak271.html Lawmakers, Liberal Activists Back Saving Terri Schiavo
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Support for Terri Schiavo and her parents efforts to prevent her painful starvation death isn't just limited to conservatives, Republicans, Catholics or pro-life groups. A number of Democratic lawmakers and liberal political advocates want to protect Terri or, at least, allow her parents to have hearings in federal courts on their case.
...
Ralph Nader says a "profound injustice is being inflicted on Terri Schiavo" and he is urging Florida courts to allow Terri to stay alive.
...
They said the courts have imposed a "slow death" on Terri and noted that
attempts should be made to allow Terri to eat or drink on her own before starving her to death."Terri swallows her own saliva," Nader and Smith said. "Spoon-feeding is not medical treatment.
This outrageous order proves that the courts are not merely permitting medical treatment to be withheld, it has ordered her to be made dead."Meanwhile, civil rights activist and former presidential candidate
Jesse Jackson has chimed in as well. Jackson called on Florida Governor Jeb Bush to step in and help Terri.....
Senate Democrats have also issued their support for Terri and her parents.
....
"Her parents want to give her a chance. I think of my own daughter. We ought to give her a chance," added Democratic Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota. Rep. Jose Serrano, a New York Democrat who is a veteran of the civil rights movement said
courts "should err on the side of giving the family a chance to let her live." Another liberal Northeastern Democrat, Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, told the Associated Press the "human side" of the drama inspires his position. "I felt the position of the parents was particularly compelling. I have a daughter, so I understand how powerful that kind of love is," he said.
http://www.lifenews.com/bio847.html ==
What if There Is Something Going On in There
Copyright 2003 The New York Times
September 28, 2003, Sunday, Late Edition
SECTION: Section 6; Page 52; Column 1; Magazine Desk
Daniel Rios is 24 years old, with wavy black hair, a thick mustache and a glassy stare that seems to look both at you and through you. One day almost four years ago, while he was taking a shower, a blood vessel ruptured in his brain, and he collapsed on the bathroom floor. After emergency surgery, he lay in a coma for three weeks. When he finally opened his eyes, he could not speak or move his body; his head simply lolled. In the months that followed, the doctors monitoring him at the Center for Head Injuries at the J.F.K. Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, N.J., saw few signs that he had any meaningful mental life. Sometimes he looked as if he were crying. Other times his eyes would follow a mirror passed before his face. On his best days he was able to close his eyes on command. But those days were rare. For the most part he lay unresponsive, adrift in a neurological twilight.
One morning just over a year after his accident, Rios was taken to the Sloan Kettering Institute on Manhattan's East Side. There, in a dim room, a group of researchers placed a mask over his eyes, fixed headphones over his ears and guided his head into the bore of an M.R.I. machine. A 40-second loop of a recording made by Rios's sister Maria played through the headphones: she told him that she was there with him, that she loved him. As the sound entered his ears, the M.R.I. machine scanned his brain, mapping changes in activity. Several hours afterward, two researchers, Nicholas D. Schiff and Joy Hirsch, took a look at the images from the scan. They hadn't been sure what to expect -- Rios was among the first people in his condition to have his brain activity measured in this way -- but they certainly weren't expecting what they saw. "We just stared at these images," recalls Schiff, an expert in consciousness disorders at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. "There didn't seem to be anything missing."
As the tape of his sister's voice played, several distinct clusters of neurons in Rios's brain had fired in a manner virtually identical to that of a healthy subject. Some clusters that became active were those known to help process spoken language, others to recall memories. Was Rios recognizing his sister's voice, remembering her? "You couldn't tell the difference between these parts of his brain and the brain of one of my graduate students," says Hirsch, an expert in brain imaging at Columbia University. Even the visual centers of Rios's brain had come alive, despite the fact that his eyes were covered. It was as if his sister's words awakened his mind's eye.
To the medical world, Rios and the hundreds of thousands of other Americans who suffer from impaired consciousness present a mystery. Traditionally, there have essentially been only two ways to classify them: as comatose (eyes closed and responses limited to basic reflexes) or vegetative (eyes opening and closing in a cycle of sleeping and waking but without any sign of awareness). In either case, it has been assumed that they have no high-level thought. But Schiff, Hirsch and a small group of like-minded researchers are studying people like Rios and finding that the truth is far more complicated. Their evidence suggests that even after an injury that leaves a brain badly damaged, even after months or years with little sign of consciousness, people may still be capable of complex mental activity. "If I say, 'Touch your nose,' and you touch your nose, and then I say 'Touch your nose' six more times, and you don't do it, how do we account for the one time you did?" asks Joseph T. Giacino, a neuropsychologist who collaborates with Schiff and Hirsch.
(snip)
Nine years ago, when he was a young resident at New York Presbyterian Hospital, Schiff began working under Fred Plum, one of the neurologists who first recognized the "persistent vegetative state" in 1972. By the early 90's, technology was becoming powerful enough to offer a glimpse of what was happening in the vegetative brain, and Plum put Schiff in charge of a project to scan vegetative patients. After a long, often frustrating struggle to find patients to study, filling out reams of paperwork and coping with suspicion and indifference, Schiff and his colleagues published their results last year in the journal Brain.
Their findings were remarkable. Among other tests they conducted, they used a technology known as positron emission tomography (PET) to estimate how much energy the brains of their subjects were using. One subject, a 49-year-old woman who had been in a vegetative state for 25 years, would say something every few days -- often a curse word. Overall, the woman's brain was using less energy than the brain of someone under deep anesthesia, but some regions of her brain were running at close to normal, including the neural network that produces language. Those regions were still producing words, long after the woman's consciousness disappeared. Another subject was a 42-year-old man who had been in a vegetative state for seven years; he would groan and clench his teeth when he was touched or heard a loud noise but appeared to be soothed on occasion by his mother's voice or soft music. Schiff discovered that one area still functioning in the man's brain was associated with listening to music and recognizing a voice's emotional inflections. And in the truly exceptional case of one 25-year-old man who exhibited no physical responses at all, Schiff found that the patient's brain used almost as much energy as that of a conscious person. The results of the study offered hints about the nature of consciousness. High-level thought -- like language and memory -- occurs in networks of neurons located at the surface of the brain in a thin layer of tissue called the cortex. These networks also form loops, however, that dip deep within the brain, where they converge and then return to the surface. According to a theory proposed by Rodolfo Llinas of New York University, a special set of neurons deep in the brain synchronizes the activity of the loops of higher thought. The harmony of all the different thought processes gives rise to a coherence that we call consciousness. Schiff and his colleagues say they suspect that when a number of these loops or the region that synchronizes them is damaged, the brain slips into a vegetative state. Yet even after extensive brain damage, they argue, some of the loops may still function, though in isolation -- like fragments of mind.
(snip)
http://www.msu.edu/course/hm/546/nyt_pvs.htm
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