Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Joe Scarborough And The Dead Women
Joe Scarborough just can't stop being associated with dead women. He made the mistake of inviting Dr. Ronald Cranford onto his show earlier this week to discuss the Terri Schiavo case. The good doctor promptly smacked the disgraced former congressman around like a red-headed stepchild. Go here for more on the good doctor, who is the head of the University of Minnesota's neurology department. (It's telling that the one local critic of his that the Strib scared up -- as a way of appeasing the conservabloggers and others busy mau-mau-ing the Strib for not reading like the Völkische Beobachter -- just happens to be the looney tune who runs the local equivalent of Operation Rescue.) As for Scarborough and the other dead woman in his life, here's a story for you all: At the same time in the summer of 2001 that the media was falsely trying and convicting Gary Condit over the disappearance of Chandra Levy, simply because Condit was one of her many boyfriends (and Josh Marshall, to his discredit, helped lead the charge -- a fact-free feeding frenzy that was only stopped by 9/11), Lori Klausutis, a young married staffer of Joe Scarborough, who was soon to leave Congress one step ahead of the scandal tsunami that was fast approaching -- was found dead in one of his Florida congressional offices. Lori's skull had suffered several severe blunt-force trauma injuries and fissures, including one that made a crack in her skull over seven inches long. Two of the traumas resulted in sizable hematomas, the largest being the size of a woman's fist. Now, remember this point: Hematomas cannot form once the heart stops beating and circulation is stopped. Why is this important? Because the coroner in the case, one Michael Berkland, ruled that Lori Klausutis had fainted due to a fatal heart attack while she was standing and then hit her head on the desk as she fell before hitting the ground. That only accounts for at most two of the head injuries -- and not for their severity. And if Lori was going to have a heart attack, why didn't she have it during one of the many 8k races in which she ran? It turns out that Michael Berkland had moved to Florida because he'd had his license pulled in Missouri for deliberately botching autopsies. Oh, and if her heart had stopped beating before she sustained the head injuries, how then did the hematomas form? Go read the following sites for more information: Denis Wright & Chris George "A Death in the Congressman's Office," American Politics Journal, Aug. 8, 2001 Various Klausutis links and info.
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