So now it's "All Schiavo, All The Time" in the corporate media. A brain dead 24 hour news cycle obsessed with a brain dead woman and the brain dead people who want to keep her shell alive. The Republican machinations to pump up their brain dead base using Terry Schiavo's undead body borders on the criminal while the Democrats, too cowed or too complacent, twiddle their thumbs and wait for the subject to turn back to Social Security.

Well, execept for one Democrat. When the Republican's were putting their bill on the midnight train though Congress we were treated to the delicious irony of Barney Frank, an openly gay Democrat, standing up to denounce the bill, a bill that tries to abrogate the rights of a married man. The fact that a gay man stood up to defend marriage, an institution to which he is not entitled, is even stranger than the fact that he belongs to a party whose tepid "civil unions" stance on gay marriage is even now being quietly shunted into political limbo.

Meanwhile the world moves on; Schiavo or no Schiavo. Anti-war protests from coast to coast and around the world barely registered a blip on the national media's radar. More attention was paid to grandmaster chess champion and paranoid loon Bobby Fisher's immigration to Iceland than to the hundreds of thousands of relatively sane people who turned out to protest an insane war.

The only other story vying for media attention is straight from the "if it bleeds, it leads" file. In Red Lake, Minnesota, another teenager went on another shooting rampage and managed to dent the Schiavo obsessed press for awhile. But don't hold your breath waiting for any meaningful reporting on it. Not while a Schiavo remains uninterviewed. You might wind up in a coma.