100% correct, Chris! Now the question is how do we stop them? When they have control of the media, how can we communicate to the public that this is what's going on...and more importantly, how do we mobilize the "majority" to go out and vote these idiots out of office?

If their goal was to have the Schiavo story dominate a news cycle, it worked.  The story totally dominated cable news this weekend.  This morning as I walked into court, I saw six newspaper boxes in a row, all of which had the Schiavo story headlined, above the fold.  The LA Times had a dramatic photo of Schiavo's father and a headline about Bush signing the statute.

In all the coverage, I have seen nothing that reflects what might be called opposition, but would more properly be called a different point of view.

A review of the coverage shows that the Schiavo story is advancing Republican goals:

•  As noted, it dominated the news cycle;

•  It is being portrayed as a victory by the Republicans over a disorganized, compliant and/or weak Democratic Party;

•  Only one side, the 'save our daughter' is getting any air time;

•  It is being portrayed as a left/blue vs. right/red issue that left/blue even though actual opinions do not divide along these lines;

•  The coverage makes the Republicans look like they are doing whatever they can to help the parents, and the Democrats look like they have no position on a mother's love.

This story reveals the hypocrisy of Radical Right on at least two of its most important rally points:  marriage and federalism.

Last November, the Republicans were widely reported to have won the election by standing up for the sanctity of marriage.  In the Schiavo case, they are totally trashing the marriage.

The Schiavo statute also violates States' Rights that Republicans claim to hold sacred.  The proof is found in the words of the High Priest of States' Rights and this is one time, perhaps the only time, that I agree 100% with Justice Scalia.

In Cruzan v. Missouri Dept. Health, (1990) 497 U.S. 261, 292, Justice Scalia, in a concurring opinion, stated that:

. . . I would have preferred that we announce, clearly and promptly, that the federal courts have no business in this field; that American law has always accorded the State the power to prevent, by force if necessary, suicide - including suicide by refusing to take appropriate measures necessary to preserve one's life; that the point at which life becomes "worthless," and the point at which the means necessary to preserve it become "extraordinary" or "inappropriate," are neither set forth in the Constitution nor known to the nine Justices of this Court any better than they are known to nine people picked at random from the Kansas City telephone directory; and hence, that even when it is demonstrated by clear and convincing evidence that a patient no longer wishes certain measures to be taken to preserve her life, it is up to the citizens of Missouri to decide, through their elected representatives, whether that wish will be honored. It is quite impossible (because the Constitution says nothing about the matter) that those citizens will decide upon a line less lawful than the one we would choose; and it is unlikely (because we know no more about "life-and-death" than they do) that they will decide upon a line less reasonable.

These words should have been thrown in the face of the congressional Republicans by righteously outraged Democrats.  But, in a pattern that is by now well-established, they rolled over.

Sure, the GOP may have overreached this time, but where does that move us, really, in a long-term sense? Progressive politics won't get anywhere unless we can start to change our civic culture so that move away from a place where these types of sham issues just suck up the media oxygen for nearly a week, while real issues never see the light of day.

Feel free to delete this post after you read it.

It was not played up in the Miami Herald but the St. Pete Times has a reputation for investigative journalism and for taking on the churches (of all stripes).  It would not surprise me if this is, in fact, the "real" story behind this mess.

I wonder why the media pretty much ignored the story of con man extroadinaire Bernie Ebbers but plays up this other stuff?

Once it's all over, it won't be a matter of "gee, we should never have got tangled up in that mess." It'll be "even with all our power, we were unable to protect that poor girl from her evil husband and judicial activism!"

The feminist point was that seemingly personal issues--such as individual feelings of worthlessness, confusion etc., which afflicted millions of women in the late 50s and early 60s--were actually the result of political conditions: the pervasive denigration and disempowerment of women.

The rightwing inversion is that seemingly political issue--what sort of policies should the nation have--are matters determined by looking at personal issues: everything from "who would you rather have a beer with" to "who seems more honest" to "who's standing up to protect a helpless, dying woman?"

Lakoff explains various pieces of this. First, that people understand the abstract in terms of the concrete (how cognitive metaphors work in general). Second, from this it flows that that they understand national politics specifically in terms of family values. But there's also a more general sense in which directly-observed, concrete actions are taken to explain abstract actions which are not directly observed.  This covers the more commonly perceived realm of the symbolic--in which Republican scoundrels just love to cloak themselves in the flag, for instance.

Most people cannot engage intellectually and emotionally in the realm of actual public policy. It is simply too remote for them, cognitively. They can only engage generally, symbolically, and through surrogates.  Therefore, it is crucially important for Democrats, liberals and progressives to get far more serious in engaging on these realms--trivial though they may be from a policy point of view.

Of course, one consequence of this is that it puts us at an enormous disadvantage. The reason that liberalism is as it is--with all its seeming quirks and contradictions--reflects a long engagement in history, in which all sorts of simple approaches were tried and found wanting--if not downright disastrous.  Thus, protections that benefit criminals all the time in TV dramas are there because the absence of them meant no citizen was safe from arbitrary state power in the name of upholding the law.  But this is much easier to understand in theory than to protray directly in a simple TV-news-as-reality-TV drama. And that's what puts us at a disadvantage.

One way around this would be to hire a fulltime team of TV dramatists. Or, at the very least, to have an advisory board pool of people available to draw on anytime.

I'm damn sure that Joss Whedon ("Buffy, The Vampire Slayer"), for example, would know a hell of a lot more about how the Democrats should be playing this than anyone they've got in DC.  And this surely includes all their TV-campaign-ad consultants.

Drum also links to Yglesias who hones in on the hypocrisy of Republicans who are so concerned about Terry's corpse, but voted to cut Medicaid, which is keeping life support going.