The Teabaggers Were Right! There ARE Death Panels!

If all the senators who had taken significant bribes-- let's say $100,000 and more-- from the Insurance Industry had to recuse themselves from voting on the Health Insurance Reform legislation that the Senate will soon be taking up... well, first of all, there wouldn't be a quorum. The only members of the Senate who haven't taken these massive bribes from Big Insurance are Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Daniel Akaka (D-HI), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), John Barrasso (R-WY), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Patrick Leahy (D-NH), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Tom Udall (D-NM), Jon Tester (D-MT), Jim Risch (R-ID), Robert Byrd (D-WV), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Mark Begich (D-AK), Jim Webb (D-VA), Bernie Sanders (D-VT), Michael Bennet (D-CO), and Herb Kohl (D-WI), most of them relatively new members who haven't had enough time to get a spot at the trough.

Yesterday Markos at Daily Kos discovered something that may be intuitive but is certainly not something the mainstream media has cared to examine-- that Max Baucus, the head of the Senate Finance Committee and the man who has consistently collaborated with Republicans who are most determined to kill health care reform, is not being supported in his anti-health care maneuverings by his own constituents. Baucus, who has scooped up $1,190,463 from his pals in the Insurance Industry, garners approval from 49% of the state's Republicans, very high for a Democrat, though not enough to save his political skin in an election against a real Republican. Only 41% of independents approve of his health care actions. And his own electoral base? Democrats disapprove of someone many of them now see as a corrupt bag of wind taking cash from lobbyists and selling them out. His approval on health care among Democrats is a dismal 34%-- and 55% disapprove! Why? Well, 78% of Montana Democrats favor a public option-- as do 41% of independents and even 23% of Republicans.

Progressive blogger and author Milt Shook has made it more than clear how by spending a trillion dollars on health care, the American people will save ourselves seven trillion.

The White House has been responding to the purposeful lies being spread by the Insurance Industry and amplified by right-wing Obama-hating crackpots like Jim DeMint and by media propagandists like Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, Savage and the rest. There are a dozen videos on a White House website dedicated to Health Insurance Reform. The topics deal with the ginned up teabagger chants and hysteria one by one and the people who are forever screeching "Read the Bill," never considering the idea of trying "Understand the bill" or respecting the rights of the folks who come to the health care town halls to find out what is in the actual bills being circulated (in Congress, rather than on extremist websites):

1- Congress did not vote to exempt themselves from reform;
2- Reform will expand your choices, not limit them;
3- No bill puts off care for the disabled for "further study;"
4- The Indian Heath Service will be fine and American Indians will benefit;
5- Reform will eliminate insurance discrimination against the disabled;
6- Reform will stop rationing-- not increase it;
7- The euthanasia distortion on help for families;
8- Vets health care is safe and sound;
9- Reform will benefit small business-- not burden it;
10- Your Medicare is safe, and stronger with reform;
11- You can keep your own insurance;
12- There is no panel to decide end-of-life care.

Hey! Wait one minute! Are you callin' Sarah Palin a liar and a fear-monger? She-- and plenty of Republicans-- claim there are death panels. In fact one of them, Betsy McCaughey-- who first invented the whole idea of death panels-- was in the news again yesterday, having been forced to resign from a position on the board of Cantel Medical. I guess they were embarrassed after Jon Stewart allowed her to make a fool of herself Thursday night on his show and to demonstrate that she was making it all up on behalf of the Insurance Industry. In fact, it has become abundantly clear where she-- as well as Palin and the rest of the well-compensated obstructionists-- came up with the whole idea of death panels. No one knows better than the Insurance Industry about death panels. Watch this 30 second exposé:




UPDATE: Would "Opportunist" or "Self Serving" Be A Better Description Of Betsy McCaughey?

Most people who actually know here skip right over that stuff and go right to "loathsome" and "shameless." In 1997, when NY Governor George Pataki kicked her off the Lt. Gov. slot on the Republican ticket, she jumped parties and claimed-- about as convincingly as Arlen Specter has-- that she was suddenly a Democrat. According to a NY Times article at the time, she couched her defection in terms of idealism, claiming that her experience with the GOP convinced her there was something wrong with their values. Doesn't this sound exactly like Specter?

''Tomorrow I will be announcing that I am joining the Democratic Party. I made this decision after years of soul-searching. I found that I had to choose again and again between doing what I knew was right, instead of what Republican politicians expect me to do... I've searched my conscience about leaving the Republican Party and I decided it was better to change parties than to change my principles.''

...She complained that she was forced to turn to Democrats in the Legislature when Republicans rebuffed her efforts to expand pre-kindergarten programs in the state and to restrict the ability of health maintenance organizations to refuse to pay for experimental cancer treatments.

''It showed me which party puts patients ahead of politics and campaign contributions,'' she said. ''It's the Democratic Party.''

Uh... yeah.

Real patriots will defend to your death the God-Blessed American Right to Lie -- and Americans' inalienable Right to Be Lied To

Pat Bagley, in the Salt Lake Tribune

by Ken

Okay, I admit it. Even I was taken aback by the scale of the lying the opponents of health care reform, or the warriors of the I Hate Obama movement generally, have engaged in.

Death panels???

In retrospect, though, I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, I'm the one who spent the entire presidential campaign jumping up and down screaming, "But every word out of the Republicans' mouths is a lie!"

I even articulated on several occasions the worry that all those lies being dumped into the innocent minds of impressionable Americans couldn't be good for the future health of the republic. What I had in mind, though, was mostly the increase in the quantity of sludge lodging in those minds, which seemed inevitable given the breathtaking amount of what was being heaved out. Say only a certain percentage of it stuck, you've still got that much more gunk mucking up people's brains, and in my darker moments I wondered whether we weren't being naive about just how high that certain "sticking" percentage might be. How many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, or that there were links between Saddam and Al Qaeda?

Swiftboating as a way of political life

The risk factor I paid less attention to was the steady wearing down of resistance to the habit of lying. In retrospect, the Swiftboating of John Kerry can be seen as a sort of trial run, whether that was the intention or not. The immediate objective was strategic: to neutralize any potential advantage that a war hero might have in a national election against a draft doger-turned-deserter. I wonder whether even Karl Rove imagined that you could befuddle the public to the extent of blackening the reputation of the war hero in the eyes of the people to whom that credential should have mattered most. If you're a political strategist, or at any rate a poliical strategist of a certain sort (Karl Rove, for example), you notice things like that, and you surely begin to wonder just how far you could push it.

Here we are in 2009, and we still don't know the answer to that. We still haven't found the limit. The process whereby a provision to make end-of-life counseling available to people who might otherwise never give any serious thought to preparing for the one stark reality we all face is twisted into "death panels" that decide who will live and who will die truly boggles my mind, which is highly boggle-resistant. (The fact that in the American health care system so beloved by people like Sen. Max Baucus, we have insurance-company bureaucrats making such decisions every day, and not just with regard to the elderly, really ought to be mentioned but isn't strictly speaking relevant to our discussion of political .)

What's intriguing is that the right to lie applies only to the Right. Remember when Bill Clinton got caught lying about the blowjobs he got from Monica Lewinsky? For months we had to listen to those sanctimonious GOP hypocrites on the House Judiciary Committee whine, "But he l-i-e-d." (They went into kind of chant mode for "lied," so that the word was stretched out to about 10 seconds.) That was all they needed to justify the president's impeachment -- and, they hoped, his conviction. Now every Republican lies every time he/she opens his/her mouth, and there is never any price to pay. They're heroes! Meanwhile your average "Christian values" conservative seems to be engaged in sexual escapades i doubt our Bill would have dared dream of.

Lying to them for their own damned good?

Obviously it's important here to tell the right kind of lies, and to tell them in the right kind of way. So what are "the right kind of lies"? They're the lies that many people not only don't mind but prefer to the truth, indeed may even insist on. That's right, brothers and sisters, the American people stand by their God-given right to be lied to!

Someimes these are lies that make them feel good, but more often they're lies that make people feel bad, but bad in a special kind of way. People like to be outraged, especially if they get to play the victim of malevolent forces whose villainy relieves them of responsibility for all that sucks in their lives. Back in the good old days, when "Tiny George" Bush and "Big Dick" Cheney were doing their best to scare the bejezus out of their fellow Americans, those fellow Americans gobbled up every lie they were fed, and the more it made their juices flow, the more alive they felt. God, that War on Terror was great! We didn't actually know who we were fighting, or how we were fighting them, but we spent money on it like it was going out of style, and nobody we knew was getting hurt, and it just felt great to be afraid -- it gave us a reason to live! By gosh, it was more exhilarating than this week's episode of Dancing With Big Brother. And best of all, it was all the libruls' fault, and the towelheads', and the homos' -- let's vote them all off of the island.

In a sane society, the first time somebody mentioned the nonexistent "death panels," the response of any normal person with an undamaged brain would have been, "Huh? That really doesn't sound likely." But the Right has worked hard for decades now to minimize the presence in the population of undamaged brains, and so the utterly insane response was, "The libruls wanna kill Gramma!"

In reality, I suspect there are few families that don't have at least one story of a relative or friend who went through the agony -- for all concerned -- of a grueling final leg of life's journey made worse by failure to anticipate its grim realities. I can thank my mother, now enduring a lengthy version of that final leg, for having the foresight to make her wishes known clearly in a living will: She wanted no extraordinary measures taken. She made this clear in conversation as well as the living will, and while I would never decline any medical procedure that offered her some genuine hope, I know -- and all the health care professionals involved in her treatment know -- that that's all she wants.

Lacking a shred of human decency

Counseling of this sort is precisely what that obscure provision buried in the health leigslative drafts seeks to make sure is available to everyone. You would think, who could possibly object?

Unfortunately, in our present political situation we have an entire political movement -- not at this point a large movement, but one that by virtue of its very shrunken state has nothing to lose -- dedicated to telling Americans lies they will like, and pressuring its band of (almost literally) confederates to keep the faith. Was there a sorrier spectacle than Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson, caught by the archdemon of the Shithead Right, President Obama, as having sponsored legislation to do just this, having to back off the only evidence I've encountered that he actually has a shred of decency?

I don't know how a creature like Sarah Palin is able to look in the mirror without feeling an urge to blow her diseased brain out. Even she isn't stupid enough not to know she's lying her putrid guts out. But she is part of a political movement that thrives on, almost exists only for, boiling hatred, and I guess she figures somebody's gotta keep that blood boiling. The people demand their lies.

The final crushing irony is how much of this is done in the name of Jesus. Jesus, of course, would forgive them all, because that's what he did. But I've got to think that even Jesus would have a moment there when he felt despair at the evil being wrought in his name.

Hmm, I've been going on awhile now (I do get worked up, as you may have noticed), and still haven't gotten to the specific lies that set this particular round of philosophizing in motion. In our 6pm PT post I promise to try to shut up so you can hear some answers to some of the health care lies.

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New GOP Civil War: Those Who Believe The Death Panel Gibbersh And Those Who Don't-- Michael Steele Says He Does

I spent much of Tuesday palling around with teabaggers at Adam Schiff's health care forum in Alhambra. Before I headed out there I looked into conservative Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson's reaction to Sarah Palin's myth-making episode about death squads or death panels in the health care bill. Just hours before Rush Limbaugh told him he'd better retract his statements-- or else-- this is what he told the Washington Post's Ezra Klein:

I have no idea. I understand-- and you have to check this out-- I just had a phone call where someone said Sarah Palin's web site had talked about the House bill having death panels on it where people would be euthanized. How someone could take an end of life directive or a living will as that is nuts. You're putting the authority in the individual rather than the government. I don't know how that got so mixed up.

Like Isakson, Insurance Industry shill Chuck Grassley (R-IA- $931,874) is up for re-election in 2010 and very scared that he could be primaried by a teabagger or birther. So he's moved further to the right than he's ever been in a very long-- many would say overly long-- career. Today he endorsed Sarah Palin's death panel calumny. "Appearing at a town hall in his home state of Iowa, Sen. Chuck Grassley told a crowd of more than 300 that they were correct to fear that the government would 'pull the plug on grandma.'" Oddly, by his twisted logic, it looks like Grassley's own grandson, a member of the state legislature, is eager to pull the plug on Grassley (as are more and more Iowa voters)!

Looks like the next GOP senator who will be hearing from Limbaugh will be Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who told an Anchorage crowd that Palin's bullshit is offensive. "It does us no good to incite fear in people by saying that there's these end-of-life provisions, these death panels," Murkowski, a Republican, said. "Quite honestly, I'm so offended at that terminology because it absolutely isn't (in the bill). There is no reason to gin up fear in the American public by saying things that are not included in the bill." GOP Florida Neanderthal John Mica, on the other hand, may not have read the bill be he sure spends a lot of time listening to Hate Talk Radio and he's on the death counselor team.

It's an outrageous lie and it's been debunked over and over by responsible political leaders and analysts. But, man, does it work with the two-digit IQ base that gets its world view from Hate Talk Radio and Fox! Every other imbecile I spoke with at the Alhambra tea party brought it up and most of them were waving around copies of "the bill" that plainly said grandma and grandpa would be killed by ACORN and the SEIU if ObamaCare passes. That's why they keep yelling "Read the bill." How could these stupid congressmen not see that-- in plain black and white. They showed it to me and there it was! I saw it over and over. "Grandma and grandpa will be killed by a panel of ACORN and SEIU experts if ObamaCare passes." It's right in the bill they all carry around with them! Proof and who cares if someone like Howard Dean, who even CNN says should be killed, says Palin's claims are preposterous. He didn't read the bill. And what does he know about medicine anyway?

She made up the term "death panel" and claimed that part of the health care reform bill now working it's way through Congress required that families with children with disabilities, or elderly people who are infirm, could be judged by one of these death panels, which could control their fate and decide if they would die. GOP leadership repeated this outrageous claim across the airwaves on the Sunday morning talk shows. The mainstream media gave this claim credibility simply by repeating it.

My wife and I have practiced medicine for over forty years combined. There is no truth now, nor has there ever been any truth to the idea that the government encourages euthanasia or infanticide.

Our country is in trouble. Claims like these are routinely refuted by people who know better, but they are recirculated because they are sensational, and the MSM purports to take a balanced position without a thoughtful assessment of the facts. Fox News actually has people on in support of these outrageously false claims.

In fact, these kinds of claims are lies. There is no nice way to say it. This kind of stuff is far beyond the usual politicians' tricks of shading words and imputing meanings that aren't there. To quote a famous American who began the process of ending the McCarthy era in the fifties I address the MSM: "At long last, Have you no sense of decency?"

Are you kidding? Sense of decency? The blood sucking scumbags at CNBC directly incited teabaggers to start a riot today for them to film. Sense of decency? How about a vague sense of staying within the ethical and legal limits?

As for Michael Steele... is job is to smear President Obama and get his approval ratings down and cripple his ability to get anything done for America. I want to personally thank Democrats like Ben Nelson (D-NE), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Evan Bayh (D-IN), Ann Kirkpatrick (Blue Dog-AZ), Walt Minnick (Blue Dog-ID) and Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS) for helping Steele do his job and accomplish his goals.



And for all the nuts and teabaggers who would follow Sarah Palin over the cliff of rationality, most Americans have completely soured on her. The freaks who idolize her make a lot of noise, and the media is enchanted by their circus acts and twenty vehicle pile-ups, but a new CNN poll shows that only 39% of Americans have a favorable opinion of her. She's lost 7 point since May.

A 39 percent favorable rating makes it that much tougher for Palin to become president should she decide to run in 2012. Her favorable rating is almost identical to the numbers that former vice president Dan Quayle got just after leaving office in 1993... Quayle formally declared himself a presidential candidate in 1994 but withdrew from the race in 1995.