AND IN OTHER NEWS...

Apparently Jeb Bush finally feels he's discharged his obligations to his puppetmasters in the Terri Schiavo case, now that even his state attornmey has told him there's no basis to file charges:

Gov. Jeb Bush has declared an end to the state's inquiry into Terri Schiavo's collapse 15 years ago, after Florida's state attorney said there was no evidence that criminal activity was involved.

Bush had asked State Attorney Bernie McCabe to investigate Schiavo's case after her autopsy last month. He said he now considers the state's involvement with the matter finished.

"Based on your conclusions, I will follow your recommendation that the inquiry by the state be closed," Bush said in a two-sentence letter.

In asking McCabe to look again into how Schiavo slipped into a persistent vegetative state, Bush had cited an alleged gap between when Schiavo's husband Michael found her and when he called 911. The governor had said the issue remained unsettled.

McCabe said, however, that while such discrepancies may exist in the record, Schiavo's statements that he called 911 immediately had been consistent....

But this isn't satisfactory to the folks at The Empire Journal, a New York-based Web site that regularly takes the Schindlers' side and inexplicably is treated as a news source by Google. Yesterday the Journal ran a story titled "Nurse: Schiavo Blood Chemistry Indicates Possible Strangulation."

In a medical analysis of laboratory reports in the Schiavo case, prepared by several medical professionals, the general conclusion is that the blood chemistry of the brain damaged woman showed lactic acidosis.

There are several causes for this but the one of interest is extreme exertion during anoxia, like fighting to breathe while a person was on her back, pinning her down and cutting off her oxygen by one means or another, except not with a pillow. That produces different blood chemistry....

"Oddly, the damage present was limited to the brain and not the cardiac muscle or the kidneys", Ward wrote in her report. Could that be explained by strangulation? Ward says yes.

"Ward" is a nurse named Karen Ward, who has denounced Judge Greer's rulings in the Schiavo case. We are told that, with the help of a fellow nurse, she

prepared a 400-page independent nursing study of the Schiavo case which included the medical labs, test results and impressions available to them. According to Ms. Ward, the study was sent to the Governor and other significant individuals, indicating that a basis existed not only for a Grand Jury investigation into the entire matter but an intervention by the courts, the Governor and the President to save the life of Terri Schiavo.

There's no evidence that Jeb or these "other significant individuals" ever asked for this report, but never mind. Could Terri Schiavo have been strangled? Ward and her colleague say yes. Alas for them, Florida's medical examiner says no, according to the state attorney general's memo, which was dated June 27 but just released yesterday:

Although the Governor suggests that the cause of Terri's "injuries" is more in doubt than ever, Dr. Thogmartin's extensive report makes clear that there is no evidence that she suffered any physical trauma. Despite repeated physical exams and radiographs, the hospital records contained no indication of traumatic injury. Dr. Thogmartin indicated the absence of such entries was significant since "contusions, abrasions, recent fractures and particularly healing fractures would have been visualized during the initial months of treatment" if they had been present. Similarly X-rays of her cervical spine that were taken within an hour of her admittance were negative and external signs of strangulation such as cutaneous or deep neck injury, blunt trauma or facial/conjunctive petechiae were not present.

So, er, no strangulation.

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In a related development, Mark Fuhrman's book on Terri Schiavo, Silent Witness, appears at #8 on the latest New York Times bestseller list, in its first week on the list. The Fuhrman book was outsold by the #7 book, also in its first week on the list -- Confessions of a Video Vixen by Karrine Steffans.