Here's another edition of those tidbits in the news that attracted my attention...
Remember the resolution that was passed in the Senate the other day apologizing for lynching? There was a lot of speculation about why so many senators would refuse to co-sponsor such a bill and about why there was a voice vote instead of a recorded straight up or down vote.
WASHINGTON - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) refused repeated requests for a roll call vote that would have put senators on the record on a resolution apologizing for past failures to pass anti-lynching laws, officials involved in the negotiations said Tuesday...
As dozens of descendants of lynching victims watched from the Senate gallery, the resolution was adopted Monday evening under a voice vote procedure that did not require any senator's presence. Eighty senators, however, had signed as co-sponsors, putting themselves on record as supporting the resolution. By the time the Senate recessed Tuesday evening, five other senators had added their names as co-sponsors, leaving 15 Republicans who had not...
But the group that was the driving force behind the resolution had asked Frist for a formal procedure that would have required all 100 senators to vote. And the group had asked that the debate take place during "business hours" during the week, instead of Monday evening, when most senators were traveling back to the capital. Frist declined both requests, the group's chief counsel, Mark Planning, said Tuesday evening.
"It was very disappointing" that Frist handled the matter the way he did, Planning said. "Other groups have gotten roll call votes, so there was nothing new to this, nothing different that we were asking for."
Bob Stevenson, Frist's chief spokesman, said Tuesday evening the procedure the majority leader established was "requested by the sponsors."
The chief sponsors of the resolution, Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and George Allen (R-Va.), disputed that assertion.
Washington - Election Day 2000 was five months off, but Bill Frist was already in an enviable position. With a fat campaign war chest and only token opposition in what he had decided was his last race for the U.S. Senate, Frist could turn his attention to grander plans.
Frist began focusing on raising record amounts of cash for other Republicans. But while he was picking up political IOUs that could aid him greatly in a run for president in 2008, his own campaign finances took a sharp, and in some ways baffling, turn for the worse.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars Frist's supporters had given him to run for the Senate were dwindling at a rapid rate. Much of that money was lost in a stock market investment that experts say was out of line with the way candidates traditionally invest campaign funds. Frist's campaign also took on more than $1 million in debt so that it could repay Frist for interest-free loans he made to his campaign six years earlier.
And then, in a decision experts say violated federal campaign regulations, Frist filed reports with the Federal Elections Commission that made it difficult for his contributors and political foes to determine just how bad off his campaign finances were...
The situation raises the question of whether Frist, the scion of a wealthy Nashville family and one of the South's premier heart-lung transplant surgeons, was cavalier with other people's money while protecting his own.
Of course, the big news today that has the blogosphere all atwitter is the Terri Schiavo autopsy...
NY Times: "Schaivo's Brain Was Severely Deteriorated, Autopsy Says"
An autopsy on Terri Schiavo, the severely brain damaged woman whose death sparked an intense debate over a person's right-to-die, showed that her brain was severely "atrophied," weighed less than half of what it should have, and that no treatment could have reversed the damage.
During a televised news conference in Largo, Fla., the Piniellas-Pasco Medical Examiner, Jon Thogmartin, also said the autopsy showed that Ms. Schiavo's condition was "consistent" with a person in a persistent vegetative state. That point had become a key issue in the debate over whether to prolong Ms. Schiavo's life and whether she had a chance to recover normal brain function...
Dr. Thogmartin said Ms. Schiavo technically died of "marked dehydration" - not starvation - after her feeding tube was removed.
But he said the underlying mystery at the heart of her case - why she suddenly collapsed 15 years ago -- could not be answered. He said he considered the manner of her death to be "undetermined."
Instead, the medical examiner discussed some factors that did not appear to lead to Ms. Schiavo's illness.
The autopsy, for instance, showed that physical abuse or poison did not play a role in her collapse , he said. Ms. Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, had accused their daughter's husband, Michael Schiavo, of abusing her, which he has steadfastly denied. Dr. Thogmartin also said there was no evidence she had had an eating disorder before she collapsed, although a disorder was widely suspected because she had diminished levels of potassium in her blood.
And despite a widely televised video that appeared to show Ms. Schiavo responding to voices and other movement in her room, the autopsy said that Ms. Schiavo was blind in her final days. The medical examiner said she would not have been able to eat or drink had she been fed by mouth, as her parents had requested. The autopsy found no evidence that she suffered a heart attack, or that she had been given harmful drugs that may have accelerated her death.
Asked about persistent vegetative state, Dr. Stephen Milton, a neuropathology expert who joined Dr. Thogmartin at the news conference, said that term referred to a clinical diagnosis, not a pathological diagnosis. But, he said, "There was nothing in the autopsy that is inconsistent with persistent vegetative state."
Of course, this last story also relates to Frist. Remember his long-distance diagnosis via videotape? "She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli."
