James David Vellman has refused to appear in front of Congress should he be subpoenaed while in a persistent vegetative state.

To:  House Government Reform Committee
From: James David Velleman
Re: My Advance Directive

Having discussed with my wife how I wish to be treated in case of irreversible brain injury -- a private matter that I choose not to air here -- I hereby inform you of my refusal, in advance, to respond to any subpoenas with which I may be served while in a persistent vegetative state.  Since I will not in those circumstances be able to assert this refusal, or my preference to be held in contempt of Congress, I am asserting them publicly now, in the hope of forestalling such ghoulish theatrics on your part, which would richly deserve my contempt.  Should this hope be frustrated, I have instructed my physicians and my attorney to deny you access to my hospital room.

I think we'll all need one of these soon.

Hat tip: Grammar Police

Americans are not happy about the the late-night intervention into the Schiavo case by the Republican-led Congress and the Administration.  ABC polling has some wowing numbers (pdf):

Support Removal of Feeding tube:
63% Yes   28% No

Support Federal Intervention?
35% Yes   60% No

Appropriate for Congress to Get Involved?
27% Appropriate   70% Not Appropriate

Reason Political Leaders Are Keeping Schiavo Alive?
19% Concern about Schiavo  67% Political Advantage.

The internals are even more devistatingly against the move, with a whopping 58% "Strongly Opposed" to Congressional intervention in the case.

Looks like the public has got it right, folks.

This weekend the GOP-led Congress yet again revealed its duplicitous face by deciding to intervene in the tragic Terri Schiavo case.  Eager to jump on the "pro-life" bandwagon to throw some marrow to the religious right, GOP leaders are trying to slop together an ill-conceived bill that would give a federal judge - presumably one hand-picked by Congress - the authority to review a decision by a Florida judge to remove Schiavo's feeding tube.  This move by Congress is all the more alarming because a federal court has already ruled that the Schiavo case should be decided on state grounds. 

Thus, the GOP leaders have dumped their principles for the sake of political gain.  Longtime vigorous defenders of State's rights and the Separation of Powers have once again decided that "values" trump more trivial matters like the Constitution, particularly with the 2006 elections on their minds.  If all goes according to plan, Congress and President Bush will sign into law a bill that exists solely as a means for judicial activism - precisely what the same members of Congress fought so bitterly when so-called activist judges in Massachusetts, and more recently in California, gave homosexual couples the right to marry.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan defended this encroachment upon the Tenth Amendment - which, to conservatives, next to the right to bear arms is the most hallowed of all the Bill of Rights - by parroting Senator Bill Frist's hypocritical plea: "This is about defending life."

Regardless of how you feel about the issues underlying the Terri Schiavo case, you cannot support Congress' intervention.  For Congress to stick its nose in this case at this juncture after the Florida courts have been weighing the competing interests for seven years is nothing short of appalling.  It is political grandstanding at its worst.  The GOP's monumental hypocrisy mirrors that of Schiavo's home state: In a state that executes prisoners at the most rapid rate in the country, its license plates state "Choose Life."

For GOP politicians the vigor to defend life - like their party's core principles - is all in the timing.

The specious argument du jour against a filibuster being used to defeat judicial nominees is that because it requires sixty votes, it is unconstitutional because it goes beyond what the Constitution says the Senate is required to do in confirming nominees.  As far as I can tell, these jokers think that the Constitution says that confirmation occurs with a majority vote of senators.  Sadly, No! 

Article II Section 2 says the following:

He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States

Nowhere does the Constitution define "advice and consent of the Senate" as a majority vote.  Indeed, the Senate could define "advice and consent" to mean whatever it wanted, including a unanimous vote.  Try that one on for size.

Now I expect most wingnut bloggers to avoid reading the Constitution unless forced to do so in school.  However, I do expect Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee to read it.  Yet, I see him on Instapundit repeating the same trash.

I am loath to accuse the good professor of being disingenuous.  But I find it hard to believe that he didn't act like a good lawyer and read the Constitution before asserting that Senator Boxer was arguing to change the Constitution.

The former Oakland A's star will join a number of other past and present MLB players before a congressional committee investigating steroids in baseball.  On Wednesday, Canseco's request for immunity from prosecution was denied.  According to a spokesman for committee chairman Tom Davis, no witnesses have been or will be granted immunity.

This statement from Congressman Davis' camp begs the question: Why bother to subpoena past and present MLB stars if they will predictably invoke their Fifth Amendment rights?  To what purpose does this serve?

The answer is simple.  Congress is not particularly interested in the juicy details of who injected whom with what; they can pick up a copy of Canseco's book for that information.  What Congress can accomplish today is to force multi-millionaire athletes to invoke their Fifth Amendment rights before the world and thus behave like common criminals.  Because no matter how much Americans claim they honor and revere the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the simple fact is that most people conclude that if a person invokes the Fifth Amendment, he must have something to hide.

If Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Curt Schilling, and others refuse to answer any of the committee's questions, then Congress has won the first battle toward forcing Major League Baseball to adopt a drug testing policy with teeth.

War on Terror, bah! Amid the recent Mad Tea Party appointments of John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz to the U.N. and World Bank respectively comes this Bush masterstroke. Because we all know how good terrorists have been at running things in the Middle East:

"Tuesday, March 15, 2005, WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush on Tuesday expressed the hope that Hezbollah -- which the U.S. State Department has long regarded as a terrorist group -- could enter the political mainstream in Lebanon."

Bin Laden, get your suit pressed and polish up your resume -- again.

Seven Dwarfs = Gay Lifestyle.  I kid you not: (From Chicago Tribune, Registration Required).

When Marshall Field's employed a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs theme for its 2004 holiday festivities, the Chicago-born retailer received some complaints that it was promoting the homosexual lifestyle, an executive said recently.

The concerned citizens divined that there was a "hidden gay agenda" in Field's theme "because seven men were living together," Gregory Clark, vice president of creative services for Field's in Minneapolis, recounted last month at a Retail Advertising & Marketing Association conference in Chicago.

I don't make this up people.

Here in D.C. all of the signs of a terror alert are upon us.  Bush's standing in the polls on a major issue is plummeting, and Fox 5 with our broadcast of 24 we are getting terrorism teasers for the 10 O'Clock News.

From the Instapundit, Glenn learns why maybe blaming a particular sect or creed or any one type of a religion for actions taken by members of that religion doesn't work.:

APPARENTLY, I'M INSUFFICIENTLY PRO-WAR, according to a reader from, of all places, Canada:

Tell your readers why the following can't impact on your Bush-spin sotted brain: respect for freedom of conscience does not negate contempt for the unconscionable. Islam is the most perfected form of tyranny ever concocted. You have learned to write off people like me, who would turn Mecca and Medina and Qom and Karbala into charcoal. Why don't you focus your hate - and it really is Western self-loathing, in deference to Eastern savages - on the mortal enemy of our way of life?

Impartially, objectively and properly: you are a pathetic pollyanna, who is incapable of discerning pure evil. And you are in the way.

Sigh. This is a rather inaccurate and ahistorical view of Islam. As was noted here shortly after 9/11, many American mistake Wahhabism for Islam, when Wahhabism is in fact a rather out-of-the-mainstream variety. The Saudis would like to encourage that mistake, and Osama bin Laden hoped to provoke a major religious war (though I don't think he understood the likely outcome), but I'd prefer to see neither get their way.

UPDATE: Adding to my bemusement is this email from reader John Mendenhall:

Re your reader who accused you of being of an insufficiently discerning take on Islam and the threat Islam, as a polity, poses to Western life:

A very simple, if no particularly elegant, thought exercise will isslustrate what he means. If, say, renegade Lutherans were suddenly to take to the airways, blow up big buildings in Malaysia, behead Muslim hostages, sink (what--dhows owned by Muslim governments) with maximal casualties, blow up as many innoncent Muslims as they could get their hands on--

Would the Western response be to:

a: send them money
b: build them schools
c: march enthusiastically in the streets with each fresh atrocity
d: publish blood libels in the national press, or
e: stop them in their tracks right now right away first thing this afternoon whatever it took.

If you chose any answer but (e) the reader is right is assessing your dhimmitude. Though the reader didn't say so as well as others might have, the dhimmitude of Europe and its cousin the dhimmitude of American liberalism is the Chamberlainism of our time. Except there were not very many Nazis and there are billions of Muslims.

(I am married into a Minnesota family and am keenly aware that the words "renegade" and "Lutheran" don't work so well together these last five hundred years.)

But wouldn't what the reader above suggests be the equivalent of blowing up Pentecostals and Catholics for the actions of those Lutherans?

Hello, the people who read you can't tell the difference between one group and another.  That's why we should not be focusing on the Islamic aspect of the terrorists but the terrorist aspect.  Literally it does not really matter if they are Islamic or Bahai.  They are terrorists, the same as Timothy McVeigh.  And as long as you emphasize the fact they are Islamic, you will never beat them because they will call on their co-religionists to protect them.  That's why we're losing the war.

Rather.  He told a true story some people didn't want to hear.  So they found a big mistake he made.  But saying he made a mistake and saying the story isn't true isn't the same thing.

More importantly, Rather went out and got the story.  The Big Story.  While Jennings and Brokaw had the wonderful studio delivery, Rather made sure to be right where it was happening.  He was there when JFK was assasinated, when King marched, when the action was thick in Vietnam and Afghanistan--Dan Rather was there.

And he wasn't afraid of asking the tough questions. From LBJ to Nixon to Bush to Castro to Saddam, he never failed to ask the tough questions.  A few times his questions made him part of the story.  But mostly he was getting the story.  TV won't be the same.  Partisans may yell, but history won't forget.  TV journalism has lost something great, something it can never get back.  And we have lost a voice of history.