In the grand scheme of things, it would be a tragic act, but less tragic than other things rightwing extremists have done.

Right wing extremists have blown up the Federal building in OK City. They bombed the Olympic Park at the Atlanta Olympics. They bomb African-American churches. They've bombed multiple abortion clinics and gunned down judges and doctors, etc.

There's a lot of victims of violent right-wing extremism. So, it's rational to assume there will be a lot more victims of right wing extremist violence before they stop acting out violently.

What if Laci Peterson got similarly afflicted  days before her murder and Scott announced against her parents objections a year later that he wants to pull the plug because Laci told her so. Now Michael is nowhere close to Scott Peterson in terms of mentality. After all, he did reject a million dollars. However, since we are considering rules, let's see how logical this law is anyway. These days, husbands come and go. Michael has moved on with a new partner and kids. He has had no kids with Terri. You only got your parents to worry about your fate your entire life. I would not favor parents over the husband necessarily. But when you got a tie, I would err on the side of life. This is not analogous to abortion where it's the woman's body. Terri's husband does not own Terri's body.

While I wish Terri's parents would move on, I fail to see why Michael can't just move on. I read somewhere that he won't be prevented from marrying legally again. He's got new kids.  It's not like Terri is suffering consciously. And any diginity Terri might have wished for by dying quickly is out the window with all the press.

As for why Michael can't just move on and let the parents do what they will: if he really knows that Terri didn't want these efforts, why would he wish to disrespect that by allowing the parents to override her wishes?

That's part of why I find it so strange that folks have flown to Tampa to pray for the life of a woman they don't know, why last Sunday millions of Americans had moral tales about Terri's life spun to them from pulpits across the country when they could have just as easily given this attention to some one three doors down from them living in a precarious state. It's crazy that they're so intent on taking this one woman's story so seriously when it's happening everywhere.

I'm going to adapt the arguments of a writer named John Dolan to finish this off. "The crimes of history are optional. We mix, match and discard according to taste and  convenience. Only when suffering is unusually dramatic and interesting, and/or involves people to  whom we feel particularly close, do most of us feel anything... In other words, the  Christian-derived premise that there is some Enlightenment moral sense in each of us, which  reacts with instinctive horror at any suffering, is simply nonsense... Take, for example, all the tens of millions of dead in the  Japanese occupation of China. They are rarely invoked in the West, because we don't need  them. The Japanese are thoroughly spent, neither a threat nor a bad example of anything we  worry about at the moment. The Chinese are [currently] more of a worry [to Americans], making the invocation of their  dead a dangerous concession." This Schiavo story is but a small cameo in an ongoing play titled, "Which of the billions of corpses clogging the earth will be dug up and flung at one's  opponents?"

You are lying, Hugh. Again.

However, with the many hours spent analyzing this issue, it would be nice if a network brought in a panel of doctors and asked them to do a commentary as a video rolls on explaining clearly to the viewers why Terri reacts the way she does at specific moments instead of a generic statement that it is all reflexes. That would be money better spent by the networks instead of wasting time hiring political commentators.

All of the medical information I have seen tells me that this woman is not conscious in any meaningful medical sense. PVS is a state that misses all of the upper brain functions.

If they were considering such an action, casing the joint would be the first move. That accomplished, Gritz would now have had a few days to create a plan and train his team.

Give me some outside odds, and I'll bet that this will get escalate to the point where guns are drawn.

Hypocrisy and irony are concepts totally lost on these folks.