Sherry Darling
New Yorker
For those who missed my future husband Jon Stewart on TDS last night 
http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_daily_show/index.jhtml
http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_daily_show/index.jhtml
VP Cheney Accidentally Shoots Fellow Hunter
- Thread starter MrsSpringsteen
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nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
Just in: One of the bb's from the shotgun is now lodged in Whittington's heart. It's now caused atrial fibrillation (a not uncommon arrhythmia that is treated with various medicines & techniques, but can ultimately lead to a stroke, among other things). The A-fib has also caused a minor ischemia/infarction (heart attack).
Lovely.
Lovely.
deep
Blue Crack Addict
sure, it is all a big joke.
Kind of like when the President made his jokes about looking for WMDs under the table and behind the drapes.
Kind of like when the President made his jokes about looking for WMDs under the table and behind the drapes.
nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
Catlady said:
Canned hunt?
Have you ever been quail hunting?
It is not shooting fish in a barrel - it does take some skill.
MsGiggles
War Child
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- Messages
- 905
Dick Cheney is so old - shouldn't he be dead by now 
deep
Blue Crack Addict
Cheney has gone on canned hunts before.
And what skill does it take to shoot an old man in the face.
and then cover it up.
and slowly have it leak out that there is 'shot' in his heart and he suffered a heart attack.
i guess they had to let that information out
in case this guy takes a turn for the worse
move over Arron Burr??
And what skill does it take to shoot an old man in the face.
and then cover it up.
and slowly have it leak out that there is 'shot' in his heart and he suffered a heart attack.
i guess they had to let that information out
in case this guy takes a turn for the worse
move over Arron Burr??
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
Dick Cheney is not now, nor has he ever been, subject to laws created by mere human beings.
nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
VRWC!
It now has weapons!!
It now has weapons!!
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
'nbcrusader said:
and a weapon far less deadly.
nbcrusader said:
I haven't--it's not my cup of tea. But this wasn't "normal" hunting where the birds are wild and have the desire/opportunity to evade or escape. This place hand-raises the birds so they aren't afraid of humans. Then they let them out of a cage once the hunters are in place. Even if they wanted to fly away (which they don't because they have been raised not to view humans as any kind of threat), they don't have much of a chance. Texas has a lot of places like this, not just for birds.
Even a lot of pro-hunting groups oppose places like this as unsportsmanlike, because there's no skill involved. Paying customers are a lot of times guaranteed a kill.
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MrsSpringsteen
Blue Crack Addict
Oh no, now this has become very serious
AP
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas - The 78-year-old lawyer who was shot by Vice President Dick Cheney in a hunting accident has some birdshot lodged in his heart and he had "a minor heart attack" Tuesday morning, hospital officials said. The victim, Harry Whittington, was immediately moved back to the intensive care unit for further treatment, said Peter Banko, the administrator at Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial in Texas.
AP
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas - The 78-year-old lawyer who was shot by Vice President Dick Cheney in a hunting accident has some birdshot lodged in his heart and he had "a minor heart attack" Tuesday morning, hospital officials said. The victim, Harry Whittington, was immediately moved back to the intensive care unit for further treatment, said Peter Banko, the administrator at Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial in Texas.
deep
Blue Crack Addict
Catlady said:
when it is the result of Dick Cheney's careless actions
nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
Catlady said:
OP
OP
MrsSpringsteen
Blue Crack Addict
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/14/AR2006021400990.html
Some of the birdshot appears to have moved and lodged into part of his heart," Peter Banko, an administrator and spokesman for Christus Spohn Memorial Hospital, told reporters outside the Corpus Christi hospital. Banko said the birdshot "caused him to have a minor heart attack."
Asked if the birdshot could move more and endanger Whittington's life, David Blanchard, emergency room chief at the hospital, said: "When birdshot is in your body, there's always the risk they can move. We'll watch very closely for any migration."
He said later, however, that the single BB-like piece of birdshot is "in a fixed position" and it not expected to travel. Blanchard said he and other doctors treating Whittington feel "very strongly that all the other birdshot in him is not problematic." The number of other pieces of birdshot in Whittington's body is not known, he said, but could range anywhere from "more than five" to "less than 150 to 200."
Blanchard described the incident this morning as an "atrial fibrillation," or quivering of the upper part of the heart, as a result of irritability or inflammation caused by the piece of birdshot. He also described it as a "silent or minor heart attack."
Blanchard said what happened to Whittington was extremely rare. He said cardiologists may see a similar case only once or twice in their lifetimes.
Banko said cardiologists at the hospital were consulting with White House doctors because the doctors had first treated Whittington after Cheney accidentally shot him.
Blanchard said only one piece of birdshot was causing Whittington's heart problems at the moment. "This is the only one we are concerned about," he said.
He and Banko described the heart attack as "asymptomatic," meaning that Whittington did not display any symptoms of a heart attack.
"We picked up an irregular heartbeat,' Blanchard said. "At no time did he ever have any chest pain." He said the incident happened around 6:30 a.m.
"We knew he had some birdshot very close to the heart from the get-go," Blanchard said. However, "we're not 100 percent certain where it is," he added, explaining that doctors felt it was better to leave it alone than to operate to remove it at this point.
Blanchard said Whittington's coronary arteries are clear and that "he has the heart of a much, much younger individual."
According to the American Heart Association, atrial fibrillation affects about 2.2 million Americans. It happens when the heart's two small upper chambers quiver instead of beating effectively. As a result, blood can pool in the chambers and clot, potentially causing a stroke.
Some of the birdshot appears to have moved and lodged into part of his heart," Peter Banko, an administrator and spokesman for Christus Spohn Memorial Hospital, told reporters outside the Corpus Christi hospital. Banko said the birdshot "caused him to have a minor heart attack."
Asked if the birdshot could move more and endanger Whittington's life, David Blanchard, emergency room chief at the hospital, said: "When birdshot is in your body, there's always the risk they can move. We'll watch very closely for any migration."
He said later, however, that the single BB-like piece of birdshot is "in a fixed position" and it not expected to travel. Blanchard said he and other doctors treating Whittington feel "very strongly that all the other birdshot in him is not problematic." The number of other pieces of birdshot in Whittington's body is not known, he said, but could range anywhere from "more than five" to "less than 150 to 200."
Blanchard described the incident this morning as an "atrial fibrillation," or quivering of the upper part of the heart, as a result of irritability or inflammation caused by the piece of birdshot. He also described it as a "silent or minor heart attack."
Blanchard said what happened to Whittington was extremely rare. He said cardiologists may see a similar case only once or twice in their lifetimes.
Banko said cardiologists at the hospital were consulting with White House doctors because the doctors had first treated Whittington after Cheney accidentally shot him.
Blanchard said only one piece of birdshot was causing Whittington's heart problems at the moment. "This is the only one we are concerned about," he said.
He and Banko described the heart attack as "asymptomatic," meaning that Whittington did not display any symptoms of a heart attack.
"We picked up an irregular heartbeat,' Blanchard said. "At no time did he ever have any chest pain." He said the incident happened around 6:30 a.m.
"We knew he had some birdshot very close to the heart from the get-go," Blanchard said. However, "we're not 100 percent certain where it is," he added, explaining that doctors felt it was better to leave it alone than to operate to remove it at this point.
Blanchard said Whittington's coronary arteries are clear and that "he has the heart of a much, much younger individual."
According to the American Heart Association, atrial fibrillation affects about 2.2 million Americans. It happens when the heart's two small upper chambers quiver instead of beating effectively. As a result, blood can pool in the chambers and clot, potentially causing a stroke.
verte76
Blue Crack Addict
Catlady said:
When a relatively small amount of cardiac muscle gets necrotic, or, in layman's terms, dead from lack of oxygen. That's the kind of attack my mother had about a year ago. A massive heart attack is when a large part of the cardiac muscle gets necrotic and that person is no longer among the living because his or her heart basically dies.
nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
question: what if the guy actually dies?
Earnie Shavers
Rock n' Roll Doggie VIP PASS
Irvine511 said:
That's what I was about to ask. I guess the basic question is; does a law instantly apply, or would it be a situation where the family would have to lay charges?
JMScoopy
Refugee
somehow this has to be Bush's fault. 
OP
OP
MrsSpringsteen
Blue Crack Addict
NYTimes
WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 — When the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, came to the press room just before 10 a.m. Tuesday and suggested he was wearing an orange tie to avoid a stray shot from Vice President Dick Cheney, it seemed to signal an effort to defuse the accidental-shooting story with a laugh.
But by midday, it was clear that the staffs of the president and the vice president had failed to communicate. Just after arriving at work around 7:45 a.m., Mr. Cheney learned that the man he had shot, Harry M. Whittington, was about to undergo a medical procedure on his heart because his injuries were more serious than earlier believed, Mr. Cheney's spokeswoman said.
No one in Mr. Cheney's office passed the word to Mr. McClellan, senior officials at the White House said, adding that the press secretary would never have joked about the shooting accident if he had known about the turn of events involving Mr. Whittington.
It was the latest example of the degree to which Mr. Cheney's habit of living in his own world in the Bush White House — surrounded by his own staff, relying on his own instincts, saying as little as possible — had backfired since the accident in Texas on Saturday. Mr. Cheney's staff members have kept their comments to chronological details and to repeating the vice president's written statements.
The tension between President Bush's staff and Mr. Cheney's has been palpable, with White House officials whispering to reporters about how they tried to handle the news of the shooting differently. Mr. McClellan, while being careful not to cross Mr. Cheney or his aides directly, has made a point of reminding reporters of how he dealt with Mr. Bush's bicycle accident last summer, when the president collided with a Scottish policeman at the G-8 summit.
"I immediately briefed the press on how the accident had happened, and the condition of the police officer," who was taken to the hospital with minor injuries, Mr. McClellan said.
His message was clear: There was a procedure for conveying this kind of news, and it was not followed in this case.
The past three days have underscored, in public, what has always been clear in the Bush White House: Mr. Cheney plays by rules of his own making. It is the freedom that only a political figure who knows he is in his last job — he often says he will never run again — can get away with.
"What he did was not an irrational thing," said Mary Matalin, Mr. Cheney's former communications adviser, who spoke to him Sunday morning. "This was a very close friend this happened to. Everyone was shaken up about it. When I spoke to him, it was all about Harry, worrying about him," not whether he should get a statement out, or let his South Texas host tell a local newspaper.
To others, though, it is a telling example of the cocoon Mr. Cheney has created within the White House.
Even at the most secure meetings in the White House situation room, Mr. Cheney tends to ask questions but leave the participants guessing about his own views — largely, his colleagues say they suspect, for fear of leaks. His movements, once hidden for security reasons, are now often cloaked out of habit. Several senior members of the administration said they were not told of the shooting accident until late Sunday.
Several White House officials said no one among the White House staff, including the chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., felt empowered to dictate how news of the accident would be handled.
Presumably Mr. Bush could have declared how the news would be disseminated, something he does often on policy matters. Until this week, the periodic disconnect between Mr. Cheney's office and the rest of the White House has been the source of grumbling, but rarely open tension. The most notable exception came in August 2002, when Mr. Cheney, delivering a speech about Iraq, spoke so disparagingly about the utility of past United Nations weapons inspections that he left the impression that the administration would never again use inspections in an effort to assess the threat of Saddam Hussein.
In fact, Mr. Bush had decided to try to send inspectors back in, at least for a while, and it was left to Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, to call Mr. Cheney and get him to strike that wording from a speech he was giving a few days later.
In the past five years, Mr. Cheney has grown accustomed to having a power center of his own, with his own miniature version of a national security council staff. It conducts policy debates that often happen parallel those among Mr. Bush's staff.
But the team Mr. Cheney relies on has changed in recent months. The departure of I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was indicted late last year on charges stemming from the investigation into the leak of a C.I.A. officer's name, left Mr. Cheney without one of his chief confidantes. His most recent communications chief, Steve Schmidt, also departed, to run the re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California.
It was unclear if their presence would have made a difference last weekend, when the accident was not disclosed publicly for more than 18 hours. Some former White House officials put the blame for that squarely on Mr. Cheney.
Marlin Fitzwater, who was press secretary to the first President Bush (when Mr. Cheney served as defense secretary), said he was "appalled" at how the vice president handled the news of a serious accident.
"The responsibility for handling this, of course, was Cheney's," Mr. Fitzwater was quoted as saying in the online edition of Editor and Publisher. "What he should have done was call his press secretary and tell her what happened, and she then would have gotten a hold of the doctor and asked him what happened."
A full account could have been put out "in about two hours on Saturday," he said.
Ari Fleischer, Mr. McClellan's predecessor, said Tuesday that he suspected the reason Mr. Cheney failed to say anything publicly was because he viewed the hunting trip and the accident as part of his private life, not his public one.
"If this had been a question of fundamental policy," Mr. Fleischer said, "the president's staff and the veep's staff would have gotten together."
WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 — When the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, came to the press room just before 10 a.m. Tuesday and suggested he was wearing an orange tie to avoid a stray shot from Vice President Dick Cheney, it seemed to signal an effort to defuse the accidental-shooting story with a laugh.
But by midday, it was clear that the staffs of the president and the vice president had failed to communicate. Just after arriving at work around 7:45 a.m., Mr. Cheney learned that the man he had shot, Harry M. Whittington, was about to undergo a medical procedure on his heart because his injuries were more serious than earlier believed, Mr. Cheney's spokeswoman said.
No one in Mr. Cheney's office passed the word to Mr. McClellan, senior officials at the White House said, adding that the press secretary would never have joked about the shooting accident if he had known about the turn of events involving Mr. Whittington.
It was the latest example of the degree to which Mr. Cheney's habit of living in his own world in the Bush White House — surrounded by his own staff, relying on his own instincts, saying as little as possible — had backfired since the accident in Texas on Saturday. Mr. Cheney's staff members have kept their comments to chronological details and to repeating the vice president's written statements.
The tension between President Bush's staff and Mr. Cheney's has been palpable, with White House officials whispering to reporters about how they tried to handle the news of the shooting differently. Mr. McClellan, while being careful not to cross Mr. Cheney or his aides directly, has made a point of reminding reporters of how he dealt with Mr. Bush's bicycle accident last summer, when the president collided with a Scottish policeman at the G-8 summit.
"I immediately briefed the press on how the accident had happened, and the condition of the police officer," who was taken to the hospital with minor injuries, Mr. McClellan said.
His message was clear: There was a procedure for conveying this kind of news, and it was not followed in this case.
The past three days have underscored, in public, what has always been clear in the Bush White House: Mr. Cheney plays by rules of his own making. It is the freedom that only a political figure who knows he is in his last job — he often says he will never run again — can get away with.
"What he did was not an irrational thing," said Mary Matalin, Mr. Cheney's former communications adviser, who spoke to him Sunday morning. "This was a very close friend this happened to. Everyone was shaken up about it. When I spoke to him, it was all about Harry, worrying about him," not whether he should get a statement out, or let his South Texas host tell a local newspaper.
To others, though, it is a telling example of the cocoon Mr. Cheney has created within the White House.
Even at the most secure meetings in the White House situation room, Mr. Cheney tends to ask questions but leave the participants guessing about his own views — largely, his colleagues say they suspect, for fear of leaks. His movements, once hidden for security reasons, are now often cloaked out of habit. Several senior members of the administration said they were not told of the shooting accident until late Sunday.
Several White House officials said no one among the White House staff, including the chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., felt empowered to dictate how news of the accident would be handled.
Presumably Mr. Bush could have declared how the news would be disseminated, something he does often on policy matters. Until this week, the periodic disconnect between Mr. Cheney's office and the rest of the White House has been the source of grumbling, but rarely open tension. The most notable exception came in August 2002, when Mr. Cheney, delivering a speech about Iraq, spoke so disparagingly about the utility of past United Nations weapons inspections that he left the impression that the administration would never again use inspections in an effort to assess the threat of Saddam Hussein.
In fact, Mr. Bush had decided to try to send inspectors back in, at least for a while, and it was left to Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, to call Mr. Cheney and get him to strike that wording from a speech he was giving a few days later.
In the past five years, Mr. Cheney has grown accustomed to having a power center of his own, with his own miniature version of a national security council staff. It conducts policy debates that often happen parallel those among Mr. Bush's staff.
But the team Mr. Cheney relies on has changed in recent months. The departure of I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was indicted late last year on charges stemming from the investigation into the leak of a C.I.A. officer's name, left Mr. Cheney without one of his chief confidantes. His most recent communications chief, Steve Schmidt, also departed, to run the re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California.
It was unclear if their presence would have made a difference last weekend, when the accident was not disclosed publicly for more than 18 hours. Some former White House officials put the blame for that squarely on Mr. Cheney.
Marlin Fitzwater, who was press secretary to the first President Bush (when Mr. Cheney served as defense secretary), said he was "appalled" at how the vice president handled the news of a serious accident.
"The responsibility for handling this, of course, was Cheney's," Mr. Fitzwater was quoted as saying in the online edition of Editor and Publisher. "What he should have done was call his press secretary and tell her what happened, and she then would have gotten a hold of the doctor and asked him what happened."
A full account could have been put out "in about two hours on Saturday," he said.
Ari Fleischer, Mr. McClellan's predecessor, said Tuesday that he suspected the reason Mr. Cheney failed to say anything publicly was because he viewed the hunting trip and the accident as part of his private life, not his public one.
"If this had been a question of fundamental policy," Mr. Fleischer said, "the president's staff and the veep's staff would have gotten together."
joyfulgirl
Blue Crack Addict
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2001
- Messages
- 16,690
Irvine511 said:
from the New York Times this morning:
Fellow Hunter Shot by Cheney Suffers Setback
http://nytimes.com/2006/02/15/polit...&en=4115ca90864b33ca&ei=5094&partner=homepage
The downturn in Mr. Whittington's health significantly changed the tone of the White House reaction to the hunting accident. In Texas, Carlos Valdez, the district attorney in Kleberg County, said a fatality would immediately spur a new report from the local sheriff and, most likely, a grand jury investigation.
...
Under the law, even an accidental hunting fatality can result in criminal charges. Mr. Cheney could be charged with negligence, defined as failing to understand the dangers involved and disregarding them, or recklessness, defined as understanding the dangers and disregarding them.
OP
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MrsSpringsteen
Blue Crack Addict
There is speculation that he was drinking- that's all it is of course, and I find it very difficult to believe that is possible. I certainly don't want to believe it.
deep
Blue Crack Addict
MrsSpringsteen said:
explains why they waited a day for him to sober up
and he does have a history of drunk driving
deep
Blue Crack Addict
nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
Slow news day.
