The developments that set Thursday morning's events in motion began the previous afternoon, when the governor and DCF chief Lucy Hadi held an impromptu news conference to announce they were considering sheltering Schiavo under the state's adult protection law. DCF has been besieged, officials say, by thousands of calls alleging Schiavo is the victim of abuse or neglect.

Now, let's put politics and ideology and all that stuff aside for the moment and consider: if I work in a state agency tasked with the protection of abused people, and I get a phone call alleging absue, what do I do? I act on it, right? I go through whatever legal procedures are necessary to protect the adult involved in case the allegations are true, and I investigate to determine what the situation really is, right?

So far so good.

What if I get two complaints about the same person, or three or four, all from people with some close contact with the person? As the numbers mounted, I might start to think that people may be coordinating their complaints in order to achieve some specific end, but I probably wouldn't let that stop me from protecting the person involved, and investigating. Better, after all, to be safe than sorry.

But if I work for this state agency, and I learn that the agency has received thousands of phone calls, all alleging abuse of the same people, most of them (presumably) from people in no position at all to know if there was abuse, and most of them (again, persumably) with no standing in the person's affairs, well, then my reaction has got to be entirely different. While I may still want to investigate the case, just to be certain, I also operate on the assumption -- a very reasonable assumption -- that these are either crank calls or a coordinated effort put together by someone with a serious agenda, not by people who have real factual information about actual abuse.

(This is even more the case where the condition of the woman has already been litigated, extremely publicly for years, and where your agency has tried to intervene before and been rebuffed by the judge in charge of the case.)

I do not, most certainly, just act as if thousands of complaints are thousands of times more serious than one lone legitimate complaint, unless those thousands of people were (in some inexplicable way) seeing or hearing or otherwise experiencing that the abuse was occuring. Intuition doesn't count, nor does hearing about it on TV.

Unless, of course, I'm acting either under the orders of my ultimate superior, the Governor of the state, or else doing what I'm fairly certain he wants done.

In other words, the excuse they used to attempt to forcibly seize Terri Schiavo, going directly against the specific order of the judge in charge of the case, is a fabrication, a confabulation, an extreme exaggeration, a dissembling, a falsehood, a lie, a goddamn straight-out full-bore piece of bullshit as pure as any of the various kinds of bullshit that have emanated from the GOP and the religious right in this case.

I have to tell you, these people make me sick, they tempt me to want to do things to them that are reprehensible and unforgiveable in response to their unbridled arrogance and mendacity.

Josh Marshall calls it "Amazing", I'll go farther and say it again: their behavior is absolutely disgusting.


More: A contract to kill is put out on Michael Schiavo and Judge Greer.

And... Ralph Nader sticks his nose in where it doesn't belong -- more evidence to support Nader's presence on my "Little List" ("they never will be missed") on the sidebar. (More: Scott Lemieux: "Whatever was progressive about Nader's project was swallowed by its paranoia and authoritarian moralism long, long ago. This is just another data point.")

And... Kevin Drum sums up the latest: "Jeb Bush is now certifiably batshit insane."