Rush, Newt &Palin supported death panels

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-30-2002
Rush, Newt &Palin supported death panels
12
Fri, 08-14-2009 - 5:32pm

too. More to be revealed I guess.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20090814/cm_thenation/15462437


The Nation The Nation – Fri Aug 14, 10:09 am ET


The Nation -- Attention, townhall protesters: Guess who else wants to pull the plug on granny and kill Sarah Palin's baby? In some knock-out reporting, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow showed Thursday night that not long ago Rush Limbaugh promoted death panels on his own radio show, Newt Gingrich sung their praises in the pages of the Washington Post, and, as the half-term governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin actually proclaimed an official Death Panel Day for her state!





Now, I wonder how long it will be before this must-see hypocrisy is featured on the nightly news and Sunday talk shows? Especially on your shows, Brian Williams and David Gregory, since you are, like Maddow, part of the "NBC family." Surely you're not going to ignore this major story at the heart of the health care debate, are you?


And for more must-see health care hypocrisy, viddy this: Glenn Beck on the Best Health Care in the World, from The Daily Show, aired the same night.


-----------------------------


A little on Alaskas healthcare under Palins guard. 


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/32365438#32380403


 




Edited 8/14/2009 6:16 pm ET by hottllipps


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Registered: 03-18-2000
Sat, 08-15-2009 - 8:24am

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sat, 08-15-2009 - 9:24am

The "Death Panels" Are Already Here

Sorry, Sarah Palin -- rationing of care? Private companies are already doing it, with sometimes fatal results


http://informationclearinghouse.info/article23250.htm

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Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Mon, 08-24-2009 - 7:44pm

It's been noted before that insurance companies have refused to cover therapies which they consider unduly expensive and/or experimental. True life and death decisions by other than the affected individual. Not sure whether a panel makes the decision or whether a single individual is responsible. Stats on the practice are probably not going to be readily available since I cannot imagine that the insurance companies would tattle on themselves. But anecdotal evidence certainly exists. Here's one of the stories:


Woman with fatal disease finds relief in treatment no longer paid for



Journal--> 2009 href="http://www.albuquerquejournal.com">Albuquerque
Journal--> By Joline Gutierrez Krueger

Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer

Jabberwocka

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-30-2002
Mon, 08-24-2009 - 11:02pm

Rituxan is the same chemotherapy drug the VA has kept my dad, with lymphatic cancer, alive with for years. I had no idea it cost so much because he never sees it costed out through the VA. He gets it every 6 weeks to 3 months



iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Tue, 08-25-2009 - 12:56pm

There is no "logic" in the actions of people who are fighting health care reform. They're being emotionally played like out-of-tune and screeching violins by those who have a vested interest in either seeing Obama fail and/or maintaining the status quo.

The strategy was perfected by Republicans under the aegis of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist and all their ilk who had a self-serving agenda. Tell lies, repeat them often, enhance them with more lies, instill fearful doubt, keep your partisan loyalties paramount and hide the facts from the citizens. Tah-dah: WMD in Iraq and a need for "pre-emptive war".

All the posturing now is simply variations on the same theme. Scare people, anger them, feed emotional knee-jerk reactions and keep them from engaging in thoughtful critical debate. Tah-dah: No health care reform and we keep the same expensive, inequitable, inefficient and broken system. Mission accomplished.

We NEED reform based on reasoned debate. Lies, deceptions, denials.....they stymie that discussion. I loathe people who cultivate such a gross miscarriage of democracy.

Jabberwocka

Community Leader
Registered: 04-05-2002
Wed, 08-26-2009 - 8:40am

"We NEED reform based on reasoned debate. Lies, deceptions, denials.....they stymie that discussion. I loathe people who cultivate such a gross miscarriage of democracy."

Well said. Health care can't continue as is but I see problems w/ what has been proposed (a big one is the escalating cost that we can't afford). Irrelevant meaningless points about Obama being Hitler, death panels, book of death, fear of discussing death, etc. takes everyone's eyes off the ball. It's like watching a game of tennis, with spectators throwing in different balls to distract the play. Pointless and distracting and ruins the whole game. It's an important issue, not one that should be swept under the table because of lies.











Community Leader
Registered: 04-05-2002
Wed, 08-26-2009 - 7:00pm

This is the issue that Michael Gerson addressed on health care and how all the focus on these diversions with the town hall loonies (THL) and people who compare Obama to Hitler or talk about death panels are taking away the real focus of the problems with the health care package. The THL are a small vocal group but there is a large group of people who don't believe in the health care as proposed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081302897.html

At the Town Halls, Trivializing Evil
By Michael Gerson
Friday, August 14, 2009

During live television coverage of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, novelist Gore Vidal famously called William F. Buckley a "crypto-Nazi." To which Buckley famously replied (in addition to other choice words), "Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the (EXPLET. DELETED) face and you'll stay plastered."

Buckley later apologized. He also explained: "Can such men understand the causes of anger in others? Understand the special reverence we need to feel for that which is hateful? I do not believe that anyone thought me a Nazi because Vidal called me one, but I do believe that everyone who heard him call me one without a sense of shock, without experiencing anger, thinks more tolerantly about Nazism than once he did, than even now he should."

In recent weeks, left and right have employed the Vidal tactic. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused town-hall protesters of "carrying swastikas," leaving the impression they were proud Nazis -- when, in fact, a few protesters carried signs accusing Barack Obama of having Nazi aims (bad enough). Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) declared the protesters guilty of "Brownshirt tactics." Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) compared America under Obama to Germany in the 1930s. Rush Limbaugh talked of "similarities between the Democrat Party of today and the Nazi Party in Germany."

The accusation is a staple of American T-shirt and bumper-sticker political culture, found too often at liberal antiwar protests and conservative tea parties. Anyone with a black felt pen and the ability to draw a Hitler moustache on a poster can make this witty, trenchant political statement. Michael Moore compared the USA Patriot Act to "Mein Kampf." Al Gore warned of "digital Brownshirts."

This rhetorical strategy is intended to convey intensity of conviction, as in, "I am very, very, very serious, you Nazi jerk." Actually, it is a lazy shortcut to secure an emotional response. Worse than that, it is an argument that puts an end to all argument. What discourse is possible with the spawn of Hitler? And when someone is unjustly accused of Nazi tactics or sympathies, what response can we expect other than Buckley's outrage? Let the head knocking begin.

Worst of all, the Vidal tactic does undermine the "special reverence we need to feel for that which is hateful." Nazism is not a useful symbol for everything that makes us angry, from Iraq to abortion. It is a historical movement, unique in the ambitions of its cruelty. Those who doubt this uniqueness should read Saul Friedlander's "Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 2: The Years of Extermination," which records the Nazi terror with the same meticulousness that the Germans displayed in producing it. Nazism was the "beard game," in which the beards and sidelocks of Jews were pulled off or set afire before audiences of cheering soldiers. It was the practice of making elderly Jews dance around a fire of burning Torah scrolls. It was whole orphanages deported to death camps, and pits full of corpses, and ancient communities erased from human memory, and death factories issuing a thick smoke of souls, and a mother trading her gold ring for a glass of water to give her dying child.

Many who study these events think silence the only appropriate response. "There is nothing," says scholar Lawrence Langer, "to be learned from a baby torn in two or a woman buried live."

But it is our nature to attempt to wrestle meaning from catastrophe. So we draw lessons about the poison of racism, the dangers of blind obedience to authority, the corruption of grand schemes of social purity, the shallowness of civilization in "civilized" nations, and the hatred hiding within ordinary men and women.

These lessons are relevant to politics. But they are trivialized when applied to Obama's health insurance reform plan or the conduct of disorderly town-hall protesters. The burning of the Reichstag and Kristallnacht are not arguments against a single-payer health plan or against the Patriot Act.

For the survivors of Nazism, memory is a kind of sacred duty. The Vidal tactic desacralizes those memories -- shrinking them to the size of our political agendas and robbing them of their power to shock and teach. The history of those times should be approached with fear and trembling, not mocked with metaphor.











iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Thu, 08-27-2009 - 12:17pm

Gerson apparently didn't read the piece in his own paper which reported the swastika episode :
"The great majority of the crowd was screaming and waving signs attacking the Obama health-care proposals in graphic terms. At several booths, people handed out opposition literature, T-shirts and signs and enrolled attendees in various organizations. Cars and SUVs drove by honking their horns, seemingly in support. Signs showed President Obama with a Hitler-like mustache. Signs showed swastikas and bore messages describing Obama's health-care plan as euthanasia, socialism and a tax scam. Some messages accused members of Congress of giving themselves special consideration, others described "death panels" that would sentence parents or children. It was remarkable how uniform both the spoken and written messages appeared to be, almost as though some organization or rehearsal had occurred beforehand."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/15/AR2009081502564.html

Baird apologized for the Brownshirts reference, at least twice. http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_baird_town_hall.html Can the same be said of DeMint or Limbaugh? Just wondering.

Those points made, I liked your earlier analogy: "It's like watching a game of tennis, with spectators throwing in different balls to distract the play. Pointless and distracting and ruins the whole game." Indeed.

Edited to correct statements based on my misunderstanding of event sequence.




Edited 8/27/2009 12:21 pm ET by jabberwocka

Jabberwocka

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Fri, 08-28-2009 - 8:58am
Op-ed: Mad, bad and dangerous to know

Conservatives in America are playing with fire by inciting violence against the country's first black president


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/aug/24/healthcare-town-halls-obama-racism



"Does the sun ever shine during a Democratic administration?" asked Jon Stewart on a recent edition of The Daily Show, in a nod to the rightwing hysteria over the current White House incumbent. "With Obama in office now, when babies laugh do you hear only the sound of kittens drowning?"


Stewart is a comedian, but this is no laughing matter. The lies perpetrated against Obama – that he is a foreigner, a Marxist, a Nazi, a racist, intent on interning the elderly and euthanising the disabled – and the ensuing hatred and virulence, have reached fever pitch.


I could only rub my eyes in disbelief when I saw footage of one protester standing outside an Obama town hall meeting in New Hampshire with a loaded handgun strapped to his leg, holding a placard proclaiming: "It is time to water the tree of liberty," in reference to the Thomas Jefferson quote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots." In Maryland, one man went even further, holding up a sign saying: "Death to Obama" and "Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids".


This militant, rightwing craziness comes on the back of the now-infamous ad published in a Pennsylvania newspaper in May, calling for Obama to be assassinated – and, of course, in the wake of a presidential election campaign in which crowds at Republican rallies shouted "Kill him!", as well as "Treason!" "Terrorist!" and "Off with his head!"


Less than a year on, and under the spurious guise of a "row" over healthcare, we are left, in the words of investigative journalist Chip Berlet, with "a very dangerous situation that can spin off 'lone wolf' individuals who decide now is the time to act against people they see as an enemy."


So why are Republican politicians fanning the flames with talk of "death panels" and Nazism? Why are pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh indulging in what the historian Richard Hoftstader described as the "paranoid style" in American politics? Do they really not understand that this hysterical wave of hatred and fury against Obama goes beyond healthcare reform, or party politicking, or even the country's so-called "culture wars", and now threatens the life of their elected head of state? Do they want to be held responsible, through their extreme and dishonest rhetoric and hate-filled divisiveness, for the death of America's first black president?


Critics might accuse me of being alarmist, not to mention tasteless. To even speculate about the assassination of the president is deemed crass and unseemly. They might point out that this is 2009 and not 1962, and a lone gunman stands little chance against the modern might of the United States Secret Service.


Perhaps. But federal agents are concerned about a rise in the number of heavily armed militia groups springing up around the country. A report this month from the veteran civil rights organisation, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, claimed 50 new extremist militia groups had formed in less than two years, driven by distrust of the government and now angered at having an African-American in the White House. A spokesman cautioned that the groups had not yet reached the point of violent anti-minority, anti-government attacks, "but we seem to be getting there". The report also quoted one senior federal law enforcement official, Bart McEntire, as saying: "You're seeing the bubbling right now. You see people buying into what they're saying. It's primed to grow."


Where will it end? Watching television footage of deranged US conservatives screaming hysterical threats at their elected representatives in town hall meetings across America, some turning up to the protests carrying assault rifles, I can't help but be reminded of similar scenes from Israel in the mid-1990s.


In those days, peace-making premier Yitzhak Rabin could not go out in public without being booed or heckled. He was vilified by the Israeli right in public demonstrations and portrayed as a Nazi and accused of treason by the settler movement. Members of his party were physically harassed and had their lives threatened. Sound familiar?


The mainstream Israeli right was, in the words of Middle East analyst Geoffrey Aronson, "content to lend its aura of respectability to many of these incidents, some of which occurred, without condemnation, during rallies addressed by party officials. Netanyahu … saw political advantage in the increasingly poisonous atmosphere."


Rabin, as we know, was eventually assassinated, despite all his security – killed by a lone gunman. But his widow Leah never forgave Netanyahu or the Israeli right for indulging the vitriolic rhetoric of the settlers and fostering the hate-drenched atmosphere that led to her husband's murder.


You might argue that the analogy is flawed and that America is not Israel. Indeed. Israel has lost only one of its leaders to an assassin's bullet. The US has lost four. If, God forbid, Obama were to go the way of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy, as that Pennsylvania newspaper ad demanded, 21st-century America would be engulfed by violence and protests on a scale not seen since the 19th-century civil war. The country would tear itself apart.


Republicans should beware. They are playing with fire.

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Photobucket&nbs

Community Leader
Registered: 04-05-2002
Fri, 08-28-2009 - 9:26am
I'm not going to defend Gerson since I don't often agree with what he says. But, I did agree w/ that article I posted that we're taking our eyes off the main problem of health care. I do believe the town hall crazies are the scarily vocal minority, or maybe it's wistful thinking on my part.










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