None of these replies were the feedback that I expected to receive! But... it was all valuable it would seem.
@anon57585045, the circle is a push button with LED that was available as a part in Fritzing. The actual push button part I have is a 6-pin 2-line passthrough.
@anon85221860 Well I wasn't... and I wasn't yet clear that actually this was bad advice. Apologies for that. The post that ultimately clinched it was the very last post here by the 'system' user: I need the software to draw arduino circuit (schematic )
So perhaps that was sarcasm, or just so old it's no longer relevant... but Google has indexed it as the first result on arduino.cc to the search "arduino diagram tool" 
Grounding the data was intended to fix the blinking issue. But if I recall correctly for that thread I can't find now... it was the same thread where I learned data in should be preceded by resistors. Perhaps this is what actually fixed the problem, and the grounding just happened to not break my proof-of-concept testing.
It seems clear that I need to revisit resistance. After you questioned it, I redid my calculation and determined 1000 Ohms at ~250mW... so I'm double surprised by your suggestion for 220 Ohms. Which means I defintely need to revisit resistance.
I'll go rethink the circuit, redraw the diagram in something else, and re-math.