The case has definitely been over-hyped, but it does deal with some critical ethical issues that do deserve close scrutiny.  The problem for the GOP is, the only thing that their bill does is add an additional Federal judicial review to the already overlong State review.  Changing the outcome of Terri Schaivo's case would require changing established law about what constitutes life support and/or who makes decisions in cases such as Terri's, and the GOP bill did neither.  As such, all it has done is establish a politcal circus that will last until a week or two after her body dies.

CSwelch has one point which everyone is gog to have to accept sooner or later.  The central tenet of the husband's medical claim is that the cerebral cortex has been destroyed, liquified.  The fact that she responds to a visual stimulus disproves this.  Vision is a function of the cerebral cortex, to respond to the visual stimulus she must not have a liquified cortex.  Therefore, the husbands central claim is wrong.  Whether Terri has cognition of the what the stimulus is or not, she must see it to respond even by reflex action, because she resonds, we know she can see, because we know she can see, we know the cerebral cortex is not destroyed entirely.

I hate to pop your balloon, but you are wrong.  The optic nerves branch and send data to both the cortex and the brainstem where various visual reflexes are controlled. 

To quote:

A small group of fibers in the optic nerve splits off and travels down to brainstem nuclei, which are groups of cells governing reflex actions. Those fibers mediate automatic responses, such as adjusting the size of the pupil, blinking, and coordinating the movement of the eyes.

I'll grant I haven't paid much attention, but what particular reasons, if any, are there for assuming that the election would be May 5?

Ironically feeding tubes were NOT considered life support 5-10 years ago in FL.

What changed that?  I honestly don't know much Florida law.

It was another right-to-die case that determined that particular issue about 10 years ago.  Before them, it was an undefined issue.  A similar ruling is effect in the UK but I don't know which side of the pond decided the issue first.

He’s not my type, so I doubt if he’ll ever be my husband.

Except that she is not on life support.

For the purpose of the law, gastric feeding tubes are classified as a medical intervention that is a form of life support.

Now, if you want to argue that the legal definition of life support and the like should be changed, fine do that, but under current law unless the parents succeed in their attempt to shop around for an activist judge who doesn't bother to follow law and precedent, this phase of this discussion will be over in a week or so as her body finally catches up with what her mind did 15 years ago.

I'm guessing that you feel that with the Socialists endoring Roosevelt, some of OTL Progressives decied to suport Taft instead.  Nothing else serves to explain how Taft ends up getting more EV's than in did in OTL. Actually, I think it would go more the other way.  With that extra backing, Taft would lose voters to both Wilson and Roosevelt, and Wilson would lose some votes to Roosevelt.

The net result is essentially the  same except that with the GOP receiving 0 EV instead of 8 EV as in OTL, it is likelier to disintegrate.  However, based on your first election results, I'm guessing you are aiming for a three-corner struggle.  It would only take a few minor tweaks to make that happen, so you're still well within my preference for plausibility.

Just for comparsion, here's what I would have imagined for the results from the same POD.

Wilson/Marshall 301EV  41.4%PV
Roosevelt/Johnson 230EV 40.7%PV
Taft/Butler 0EV 16.3%PV

Admitting she reacts to stimuli is acknowledging she's not PVS, by definition.  You've admitted that I'm right by admitting that she's reacting to stimuli.

Not at all.  It is clear that you are employing a standard stricter than that generally employed by the medical community which does not consider autonomic reflexes by themselves to be a sign of awareness.  The responses shown in those short selective clips do not constitute evidence that she has been misdiagnosed.  At best, they show that she needs to be carefully examined, but that should be the case before any diagnosis of PVS.  Three months worth of observation seems to be the generally accepted minimum time before a PVS diagnosis should be made, and given the fifteen years this case has been dragged out already, I have enough faith in our court system, that if there was a flaw to be found in the process used to determine whether she is in PVS, it would have found it by now.  The courts are awfully good at finding picky things when it takes the time to do so, and there has been plenty of time.

Given that some think that Atlasia has taken to electing jokes of late,  you might just be able to win with a campaign like this.

If you must have one from every state, I think Graniteville, SC, birthplace of southern textile mills would be a good choice.  (Not that including it would induce me to vote for this.)

That third map in the list of four is still of significance since in the unlikely event of a Senator resigning his seat, the special election would use the old district boundaries.  The first two are only of istorical significance, but I think it is nice to go ahead and include them.

The worst jobs right now are whenever someone loses to either Triple H or Jeff Jarrett.

In 1925, Calvin Coolidge became the first president to be sworn in by a former president, Chief Justice William Howard Taft.

Calvin Coolidge was sworn in by his father who was a Justice of the Peace in Vermont.

That was when Harding died.  1925 was after he got elected President in his own right.

All of the demonstrated actions in that clip are completely attributable to the autonomic system, not requiring any activity in the cerebral cortex which is where cognitive thought occurs.  Reflexive stimulus response is not an indication of cognitive ability.  Note, I would not claim that she is in a PVS state from that clip, no 30 second clip would be sufficent to do so, but I see nothing there that causes me to believe that she is not.  It would take a considerably longer period of observation before I would be comfortable with even a professional making a diagnois one way or other given her current condition.

To my admittedly layman's eyes, all I saw there was a reflexive response without any requirement for higher brain functions to be involved.  If that 30 second, hand-picked video is the best case that can be made for Terri not being in a PVS, then it is no wonder that judges have consistently found that she is in a PVS.

All I will say is that I'm not adding a Region landmark to my proposals.  If you want to make your own proposal, please do so.

A18, when it comes to transliterating Arabic names to English, there are often multiple ways to do so.  While Saddam is the usual way, Sadam is also used.  The situation is much the same with Usama Bin Laden.

Despite what some Texans think, there are other States besides Texas.

The GOP has certainly shown that just like the Democrats, they pay lip service to the concept of Federalism only when it suits them.  The only possible justification for what they've done is to assume that the courts of the State of Florida are incompetent. Given what happened in the 2000 elections, I can understand why the GOP might be tempted to think that about Florida courts, but I can’t agree with that assessment.

I have a question for you Ernest. If this happened so early on and you said that really started the change things then why did FDR win so huge in the deep south during his elections and the south really didn't start to split until 48-52?

   A combination of inertia and the fact in a good deal of the South, there was no other functioning party other than the Democrats. As an extreme example, between 1900 and 1944, the South Carolina Democratic Presidential candidate won over 90% each year.  Besides in 1940 and 1944, just like in 2004, war, not the economy was the central issue, and Roosevelt had certainly done his part to make certain that our military was prepared.
   By 1948, cooperation between the GOP and Southern Democrats on issues such as Taft-Hartley was fairly common. (Northern and Southern Democrats were a single party in name only.) The Dixiecrat split over Civil Rights finally broke up the one party tradition of the South and once that happened Southern voters began to see that you could decide a race during the general election instead of the primary.  Had the South had an effective two party system earlier, its split from the Northern Democrats would have come earlier than it did.  Instead, where we once had Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party we now have Northern and Southern Wings of the Republican Party. (If you don't believe that GOP has sectional wings, do you also believe that Olympia has more than a Snowe-ball's chance in hell of winning a Republican Presidential nomination?)
   Besides, the South needed a catalyst for change.  More than anyone else, Strom Thurmond was that catalyst.  Strom contributed to this shift not just with his Dixiecrat campaign in 1948 and his switch to the GOP in 1964, but with his 1954 Senate write-in campaign that challenged and weakened the established Democatic party structure in South Carolina. 

The Alamo is associated with but a single State.  The same would be true of almost any landmark other than a river or mountain range.  As a Texas landmark, the Alamo would be a good choice, but as a Southeastern landmark its not.  Besides, I imagine that the choice of eth Alamo might raise controversy with the Mexican-Atlasian community.

Whie I agree with nini2287 that the probable ticket would be Edwards/Clark, I don't hold as rosy a view of its impact:



Edwards/Clark 289 EV 50.4%PV
Bush/Cheney 269 EV 48.5%PV
Nader/Camejo 0 EV 0.5%PV (a slight increase from what happened)

Anything more than that would require something like one of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth being the assassin to affect the election by more than this.

However the down ticket effect would also be significant with Knowles, Castor, Mongiardo, Bowles, and  Daschle all winning their Senate seats, causing the Senate to be split evenly, but switching over to the Democratic control when Vice President Clark is sworn in.  In the House the Dems only pick up 3 seats comapared to what happened due tio the fact that the sympathy doesn't resonate down the ticket that far and there were so few close House races to begin with.

Good lyrics Ernest.  Maybe you could sing us some and post it

That's the problem, they aren't very singable at the moment.

What I find demeaning are not normal beauty pagents, but the kiddie beauty pagents, such as the ones that poor Colorado kid whose name I can't remember was involved in.  If they didn't have something to do with her murder I'd be very surprised.  We don't need to give potential child molesters the impetus towards thinking of kids as sex objects the way that those kiddie pageants do.

As a former Governor who experienced a lengthy redistricting effort, one that was complicated by several vacancies among the Governorships, let me say that I find section 3 problematic.  If the section is intended to prevent something like what happened in Texas in real life or to assure that a plan must be prepared sufficiently before an election so as to enable campaigning, there are other provisions that could be used to address those concerns better than a fixed two-week window to get redistricting done would address them.