An informative piece at CNN.com updates readers about what’s going on in the Terri Schiavo case and captures some of the insane wrangling that the case has inspired.

Right now (very early Friday morning) the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Government Reform plans to issue a subpoena to require hospice administrators and attending physicians to “preserve nutrition and hydration for Terri Schiavo to allow Congress to fully understand the procedures and practices that are currently keeping her alive.”

This effort comes after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a plea by Terri Schiavo’s parents that it stay the removal of their daughter’s feeding tube until a court could decide whether Terri’s “religious freedom and due process rights were being violated” by her husband’s attempts to remove the tube. The Florida Supreme Court likewise rejected a similar plea from Florida’s Department of Children and Family Services.

The subpoena is a stop-gap measure while Congress decides what to do. Both the House and Senate have passed bills that would give the federal courts some sort of jurisdiction in the case, but the House version is broader than the Senate’s, and with Congress about to go on recess, quick resolution is extremely unlikely.

“As Terri Schiavo lays helpless in Florida, one day away from the unthinkable and unforgivable, the Senate Democrats refused to join Republicans to act on her behalf,” Denny Hastert and Tom DeLay have charged in a joint statement. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid shot back, “If the House Republicans refuse to pass our bipartisan bill, they bear responsibility for the consequences.”

Schiavo’s feeding tube is set to be removed at 1 p.m. today, but at this hour I don’t think anybody knows what’s going to occur.

Legislation to do anything about it stalled in Florida, but in partial defense of the Florida lawmakers, they’ve already dealt with this issue before, only to have the Florida Supreme Court deem their efforts unconstitutional. There a sense in which the decision is out of their hands.

That’s unfortunate. A great way to frame this story is to look at how the courts are taking hold of an explosive case with real ramifications for the debate about end-of-life issues and arrogantly refusing to accept any legislative curbs on their powers. Some conservative writers have used that frame, but reporters have been wary of accepting this angle, as it challenges all sorts of trendy Cherished Beliefs about the American political system.

Or just a gasbag? I’m strongly leaning toward the latter opinion after reading Koyen’s letter to the New York gossip website Gawker, explaining why he chose to resign as editor of the New York Press rather than take a two week unpaid suspension over last week’s anti-pope cover story.

As Koyen wrote, “I won’t be sent to my room without dessert. Hence, I resigned this morning.”

Koyen refused to go without getting in a few shots. He called publisher Chris Rohland a “spineless alt-weekly weenie” who is too comfortable with his wife and two kids in New Jersey to want to get caught up in controversy, and he accused owner David Unger of being “similarly spineless.”

After thanking his colleagues, Koyen again launched into Rohland and Unger, saying that “Such weak-willed and lackluster men should not be in control of a newspaper, especially not in these times of editorial restriction by way of advertiser dick-sucking. They’re too vulnerable to the appeal of money.”

As Koyen saw it, the publisher and owner had committed two offenses. They had told him to take those two weeks to “think about what this paper should be,” and they had refused to stand up for him in this “battle” of “free expression.”

“Problem is, New York Press already is the paper it should be,” Koyen wrote. “We are iconoclastic, occasionally obnoxious but always intelligent. If you see through the nasty Pope jokes, for instance, you will see a well-reasoned political argument.”

Koyen seized on Rep. Anthony Weiner’s mild comments that he hoped fellow New Yorkers would “exercise their right to take as many of these rags as they can and put them in the trash,” and cried censorship.

The only problem with that interpretation of Weiner’s remarks is that it completely misses the context. Weiner began by saying that, as a free alt-weekly, the Press is “way overpriced.” He then affirmed that “everyone has a right to free speech.” Further, it’s not clear that the congressman was telling New Yorkers to remove bundles of copies from the newsstands to trash them rather than just the one that they’re allowed. In other words, the sanest reading of Weiner’s words would be, “Ugh! This is trash!”

I would be negligent if I didn’t repeat here that even Satanists seem to agree with that judgment.

Over in the comments threads of Enter Stage Right, longtime New York Press contributor Alan Cabal tenders his resignation over the Press‘ recent anti-pope cover story. Cabal explains that he gave new editor Jeff Koyen and his sidekick Alexander Zaitchik

the benefit of the doubt [when they took over the paper after founder Russ Smith sold it], as I do with people in almost all circumstances. Their initial efforts seemed feeble and clumsy, but I felt that with some measure of support from the Old Guard they might be able to keep the transgressive pulse that drove the paper intact and keep it steady in these perilous times. I accepted the reduction in rates as a necessary sacrifice to keep the fiscally floundering effort afloat, assuming that at some point in the future, the disastrous decline in advertising revenues triggered by the 911 event might be reversed.

But he found that things didn’t exactly pan out:

Gone are the great iconoclasts attracted by [previous editor John] Strausbaugh’s unerring command of syntax and context. [Alexander] Cockburn, [Christopher] Caldwell, Andrey Slivka, R.S. McCain, J.T. LeRoy, Ned Vizzini, the incomparable Tony Millionaire, Taki, Szamuely, Bill Bryk, Amy Sohn, my dear friend Darius James, who first introduced me to John Strausbaugh — all gone. What fills the space? Bullies like J.R. Taylor and dickless juveniles like Matt Taibbi, whose hack tendencies clearly run in the family. Daddy does Michael Jackson on NBC, Sonny Boy trashes the Pope in a meaningless cat box liner. . . .

Lightweights all, desperately striving to be dangerous while leaving open the possibility of some safe and secure upward mobility in the defanged world of mainstream media. I’m a certified Satanist, and our current issue featuring Taibbi’s adolescent assault on the Pope embarrassed me. It was a waste of paper, and a mere insult, not in the least bit challenging, to the city’s Roman Catholic population. He could have gone into P2, Marcinkus, and the assassination of John Paul I, but no, the lazy brat just ran off a stupid and ugly list that a 12 year old Marilyn Manson fan could have done better.

Bottom line:

My loyalty has its limits, and here we are. Take my name off the masthead. I am no longer a “contributing writer” to this sophomoric mockery. NY Press once challenged the [Village] Voice — now it can barely compete with The Onion.

The story thus far: On Tuesday, the Manhattan-based alt-weekly New York Press ran as a cover story an article by Matt Taibbi. The title? “The 52 Funniest Things About The Upcoming Death of The Pope.”

The first entry read:

“Pope pisses himself just before the end; gets all over nurse.”

The final entry:

“Throw a marble at the dead Pope’s head. Bonk!”

In between were such gems as:

“After beating for the last time, Pope’s heart sits there like a piece of hamburger.”

and

“Dead Pope, still with baboon face, wheeled through corridors of Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome, learns answer to Great Mystery.”

Taibbi has the haunted corpse of the pope complaining he can’t reach his penis and worrying that someone else is taking his job. He has the College of Cardinals burning “5000 back issues of Manscape and Hung Inches that had accumulated in the Vatican lobby” in the chimney to announce the election of the new pope. Taibbi included a lot of riffs that might appeal to a bunch of frat boys late Friday night/Saturday morning, after a kegger.

Outrage commenced.

In the New York Daily News, Lloyd Grove called the Press “a handout that is best used to line birdcages.” He wrote that the story was “shockingly offensive,” and solicited comments from fellow New Yorkers. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, Mayor Bloomberg, and even Abraham Foxman lined up to denounce the alt-weekly. And Press editor Jeff Koyen, who is not normally in the business of backing down from a fight, refused to call Grove back.

The Catholic League got into the act, using the cover story as an opportunity to take a shot at what it believes is the reigning ethos of the Press. The press release “quoted” President William Donohue as saying that the alt-weekly’s “celebration of libertinism leaves it squarely at odds with the sexual reticence favored by Catholicism.” He continued:

It also leaves it squarely at odds with nature, which explains why attending funerals is not an uncommon experience for those who work there. But like a dopey dog who doesnÂ’t recognize his master, they plod along never learning from the wisdom the Catholic Church has to offer. And, of course, they hate the pope. Which makes sense: he is the one man whose commitment to the truth has literally driven them over the edge.

(I should break from narrator mode here to say that I don’t think I’ve ever seen Donohue land a more effective — or personal — shot.)

Drudge linked to the cover story, which briefly shut down the New York Press website. The blogs are still all over this. On her site Open Book, Amy Welborn called the story “pathological” and “insane” and wondered why Taibbi wasn’t locked up in a mental ward somewhere. Because of the difficulty that people were having getting through to the story, she reposted it in its entirety. She taunted, “Sue me NYPress, I really don’t care.”

At his Rightwing Film Geek blog, Victor Morton explained why he wouldn’t be reading the alt-weekly anymore. Morton wrote that his own “sense of humor is sufficiently sick that I could imagine myself, in principle, laughing at an article titled ’52 Reasons Person X’s Death is Funny.’”

Indeed, Morton would be willing to “excuse a LOT if I think it funny.” But he didn’t think this article was in any wise funny, and, given the length and stridency of the thing, he argued that it gave readers a window into a very black heart, “because keeping up that attitude for that length requires simple, pure, unvarnished, unredeemed hate.”

Morton further argued that there was good reason to stop reading the Press over this story. He explained, “[P]utting something on a professionally-produced publication’s cover says something about the kind of publication it is.” In this case, the Press chose to say something about itself that many readers should find distasteful and disqualifying.

Over at Demure Thoughts, Jennifer Somebody decided to mock the Press‘ slogan: “‘New York Press, New York’s [Premier] Alternative Newspaper.’ Alternative to what? This is just the shit the Times wishes it could print.”

Another day, another stay in the Terri Schiavo case. On Wednesday, Judge George Greer extended the stay on Michael Schiavo’s plans to remove the tubes that deliver food and water to his brain-damaged wife. It was the second time this week that Terri was given a reprieve.

The interesting thing about the Wednesday court hearing was that Florida’s Department of Children and Families tried to intervene, causing not a little bit of consternation for Judge Greer. The issues may or may not be resolved today, but the recent interest by the press in this story has been alternately overwhelming and infuriating.

A Google search turns up 1,500 related articles. One of the things I noticed while clicking on the odd Schiavo article is that the bloggers’ campaign to challenge claims that she is in a “permanent vegetative state” (i.e., a vegetable) has borne fruit. Reporters are likely to either refer to Terri as “brain damaged” or to report the controversy over her mental state.

For instance, a Washington Post story calls Terri a “brain-damaged woman” in the lede and informs readers that one of the legal hurdles Terri’s parents are trying to throw up involves “new scientific developments [that suggest] she might be ‘minimally conscious,’ rather than in a vegetative state.”

The Post plays the religious aspects of this story relatively straight, except where religion and Jeb Bush collide. We learn that unnamed “bioethicists and constitutional scholars criticized Bush (R) for pushing a law through the Florida legislature that gave him the right to stop Michael Schiavo from removing the feeding tubes,” but we never hear from a bioethicist or law professor on the other side of the issue.

Florida International University law professor Elizabeth Foley allowed that “the state has an unqualified interest in preserving life,” but then qualified that interest by saying “it does seem like the executive branch is trying to circumvent the judiciary.”

Actually, both the legislative and the executive branches are trying to save Terri Schiavo. In 2003 the legislature passed a law that would empower Bush to save Terri, but the justices of Florida’s Supreme Court — who are not known for their humility — decided to override both of the other branches of government. Why the Post didn’t choose to quote an “expert” questioning a judiciary that seems incapable of accepting any limits is beyond me.