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Jebus. Marsha Blackburn won't pull back from the fear mongering on "death panels" and it's even too much for Joe Scarborough to take. Blackburn actually says " but to have that heavy, long arm of the Federal government reach into something that is a very, very personal, personal decision is distasteful to me, and I think it is distasteful to our nation's seniors".

I've got two words for you Marsha. Terri Schiavo.

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Johnny Isakson actually took into account the Terri Schiavo fiasco and wanted to put an end to most of it when he added his "living will" provision. He didn't realize that it would lead to the Palin's to cry Obama's got death panel's and the new health care bill will kill old people. Who's fault is that? he even responded to Ezra's intervieww by saying these people were acting like nuts over the issue. Well, President Obama talked about the nonsense at the NH town hall yesterday and Isakson probably felt like he had to save face with his teabagger pals and issued this statement.

“This is what happens when the President and members of Congress don’t read the bills. The White House and others are merely attempting to deflect attention from the intense negativity caused by their unpopular policies. I never consulted with the White House in this process and had no role whatsoever in the House Democrats’ bill. I categorically oppose the House bill and find it incredulous that the White House and others would use my amendment as a scapegoat for their misguided policies,” Isakson said. “My Senate amendment simply puts health care choices back in the hands of the individual and allows them to consider if they so choose a living will or durable power of attorney. The House provision is merely another ill-advised attempt at more government mandates, more government intrusion, and more government involvement in what should be an individual choice.”

Riiight. It's Obama's fault that the kooks got a hold of it and are lying about his amendment to turn old people off to any health care reforms. What a shock. it's too late for Isakson to blast the White House. he needs to go on TV and explain himself because the words that he wrote are being turned into a hot, heaping pile of dog poo.

Have you wondered who started the whole euthanasia talking point going? Where did it originate and why was it put there? Of all the silly things.

It was Republican Johnny Isakson from Georgia who introduced the Soylent Green amendment in the Senate bill because he learned his lessons well from the Terri Schiavo incident. And he's shocked that conservatives have taken his amendment and made a mockery of it.

The most awesome Digby has the story:

Ezra found a semi-sane Republican on the "The Dingoes Want Moy Bayby" controversy. He's Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who turns out to be the guy who put the Soylent Green amendment in the Senate bill:

Is this bill going to euthanize my grandmother? What are we talking about here?

What we're talking about in the health care debate mark-up, one of the things I talked about was that the most money spent on anyone is spent usually in the last 60 days of life and that's because an individual is not in a capacity to make decisions for themselves. So rather than getting into a situation where the government makes those decisions, if everyone had an end-of-life directive or what we call in Georgia "durable power of attorney," you could instruct at a time of sound mind and body what you want to happen in an event where you were in difficult circumstances where you're unable to make those decisions.

This has been an issue for 35 years. All 50 states now have either durable powers of attorney or end-of-life directives and it's to protect children or a spouse from being put into a situation where they have to make a terrible decision as well as physicians from being put into a position where they have to practice defensive medicine because of the trial lawyers. It's just better for an individual to be able to clearly delineate what they want done in various sets of circumstances at the end of their life.

How did this become a question of euthanasia?

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.

You're saying that this is not a question of government. It's for individuals.

It empowers you to be able to make decisions at a difficult time rather than having the government making them for you...read on

Keep reading the piece to find out Why is the state of Georgia trying to kill your grandmother? Where will it end?
Why haven't the media interviewed Johnny Isakson dozens of times so the truth can get out to America? Instead, we have crazy people yelling Beckerwocky and shouting down the town halls.

Good job, Ezra, for going to the source. Your pals at the WaPo can learn something.

The health-care deniers are out in full force now since the feckless members of Congress decided to pack it in until September and these lying liars are scaring the elderly as much as they can. I wonder how many heart attacks these cretins are causing with their fearmongering tactics. But it's not surprising at all since we've seen this same flick over and over again. The Religious Right/Right-to-Life/Conservatives make this crap up all the time. They failed during the Terri Schiavo fiasco, but they are like ants. They always come back and find the cat food dish.

Digby explains.

I'm a little bit surprised that everyone's so gobsmacked about the right wing's ability to spread the alarm about Obama's alleged intention to turn all the old people into Soylent Green. How it became such an article of faith on the right is no mystery: it's a fundamental part of the Right To Life agenda and it's been going on for a long time.

Here's the NRLC in 2007:

How Medicare Was Saved from Rationing — And Why It’s Now in Danger

By Burke J. Balch

Editor’s note: Since its inception, the National Right to Life Committee has been equally concerned with protecting older people and people with disabilities from euthanasia as with protecting the unborn from abortion. We have recognized that involuntary denial of lifesaving medical treatment is a form of involuntary euthanasia, and therefore have opposed government rationing of health care. In 1997 and 2003, NRLC successfully fought to amend Medicare by allowing older people the right to use their own money to obtain unrationed care; shockingly, under the new leadership of Congress that right is now at risk. Here’s the background:

Most people are aware that Medicare—the government program that provides health insurance to older people in the United States—faces grave fiscal problems as the baby boom generation ages.

Medicare is financed by payroll taxes, which means that those now working are paying for the health care of those now retired. As the baby boom generation moves from middle into old age, the proportion of the retired population will increase, while the proportion of the working population will decrease. The consequence is that the amount of money available for each Medicare beneficiary, when adjusted for health care inflation, will shrink.

Three alternatives exist. In theory, taxes could be increased dramatically to make up the shortfall. Few knowledgeable observers consider this likely, regardless of which party is in power in Washington.

The second alternative—to put it bluntly but accurately—is rationing. Less money available per senior citizen would mean less treatment, including less of the treatments necessary to prevent death. For want of treatment, many people whose lives could have been saved by medical treatment will perish against their will.

The third alternative is that, as the government contribution decreases, the shortfall is made up by payments from older people themselves, so that their Medicare health insurance premium is financed partly by the government and partly from their own income and savings.

It goes on to promote that last as the best way to insure that the elderly will not be euthanized. Here's their earlier argument when Bush was pushing his prescription drug plan in 2003:

The news has been full of the Republican proposal to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. What Americans might not realize is that the bill as currently drafted could lead to involuntary euthanasia through the rationing of
health care...read on

Read the whole piece, because she links up more sickness that's actually making me want to euthanize myself right now.

UPDATE: Pat Buchanan brings us more Nazi analogies with article entitled, "Time To Go, Grampa." There is a separate place in Hell for the Buchanans of the world.

If nothing else, Republican Senator John Cornyn is an irony producing machine. During the Terri Schiavo affair, the former Texas Supreme Court Justice was at the forefront of the GOP campaign to intimidate and threaten judges. Now after his fierce defense of President Bush's regime of illegal NSA domestic surveillance, Cornyn is comically warning that the Obama administration has launched a sinister "data collection program" to promote health care reform.

Back in December 2005, Cornyn dismissed the New York Times' revelations of the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program. Regurgitating the same "Give Me Death" defense offered by colleagues Pat Roberts (R-KS) and Jeff Session (R-AL), Cornyn sneered:

"None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."

Alas, that was then and this is now. Now, there's a Democrat in the White House, one who's trying to overcome Republican obstructionism on health care reform.

When the Obama White House on Tuesday asked Americans to help fight the disinformation campaign ("If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov"), Cornyn was quick to suggest a dark plot was afoot. As The Hill reported:

"By requesting citizens send 'fishy' emails to the White House, it is inevitable that the names, email, addresses, IP addresses and private speech of U.S. citizens will be reported to the White House," Cornyn wrote in a letter to Obama. "You should not be surprised that these actions taken by your White House staff raise the specter of a data collection program."

Cornyn asked Obama to cease the program immediately, or at the very least explain what the White House would do with the information it collects.

"I am not aware of any precedent for a President asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White House for pure speech that is deemed 'fishy' or otherwise inimical to the White House's political interests," Cornyn said.

Of course, this is just the latest data collection myth spawned by the right-wing noise machine this week.

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Mel Martinez is taking over for Ken "The Talking Point" Mehlman at the GOP. Hmmm...Mel was the guy that passed out talking points on the floor on how to use the Terri Schiavo affair for political gain.

The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last night.---Martinez, a freshman who was secretary of housing and urban development for most of President Bush's first term, said he had not read the one-page memo. He said he inadvertently passed it to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who had worked with him on the issue. After that, officials gave the memo to reporters for ABC News and The Washington Post.

Remember how the wingnuts were so intense on calling these talking points forgeries? And not surprising---Power line led the way.

 Bill Maher was on Scarborough Country last night and talked about Bush's incompetence, the labeling of Nancy Pelosi as an "arch-liberal" and Barack Obama's 2008 aspirations.

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I agree with Bill that someone like Tom Delay is far more extreme right than someone like Nancy Pelosi is left. Conservatives like Bill O'Reilly and Newt Gingrich try to paint (read: smear) Pelosi as some sort of screaming liberal with "San Francisco values" (whatever that means) but the fact is her "first 100 hours" agenda is very much in line with mainstream America.

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Raw Story

The former Missouri senator shortlisted to be then-Governor Bush's running mate in the 2000 presidential election -- said to have been second choice only to Vice President Cheney -- will come out vehemently against administration and Congressional Republican policy in a book to be published next week.[..]

John Danforth, who retired in 1995 after four terms in the Senate, briefly served as Bush's ambassador to the United Nations but resigned after Condoleezza Rice was tapped to be Secretary of State.[..]

In Faith and Politics, to be released Tuesday, [ordained Episcopal minister] Danforth blasts the alignment of the Republican Party with the Christian right, lays out his most aggressive pro-gay stance to date and attacks the handling of the Terri Schiavo case. Read on...

This isn't the first time that Danforth has denounced the GOP for moving so far to the right or cozying up too close to fundamentalist extremes.  

You can read an excerpt from the book here.  And if you order Faith and Politics here, your purchase will help out C&L too.

Judge Anna Diggs Taylor will receive some of the same kind of treatment that Circuit Court Judge George W. Greer in Pinellas County, Fla, did during the Terri Schiavo saga.

Greer has been described as a "compassionate conservative" and a deeply religious man — yet he has become the radical anti-abortion movement's public enemy number one. He has been at the center of controversy for seven years now because the case involving Terri Schiavo happened to end up in his court. The New York Times ran a front-page piece on Greer the other day. This is a judge who has been forced to make some tough decisions. Throughout the ordeal, one never got the impression that his opinions were anything but carefully weighed and deliberated. He has always treated both sides with civility and respect. And although he must be frustrated over the Florida legislature's constant grandstanding over this issue, Judge Greer has remained cool and calm on the bench.

Randall Terry, an anti-abortion activist who has a very dark past (Read WOC for background) said that Judge Greer just wanted Schiavo dead. So I'm sure that's what we'll be hearing about Judge Taylor.

Greenwald has compiled some of the right wing vitriol directed at Diggs Taylor in his last update:

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Carla-Sauer-Iyer might lose her license as a nurse because she appeared on Hannity & Colmes last year and offered up completely fabricated evidence about Michael Schiavo's treatment of Terri.

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Hannity shamelessly camped out at Terri's hospice for almost two weeks and allowed his guests to mercilessly attack Michael endlessly. When all the evidence came back that supported Teri's diagnosis, Hannity never offered up an apology for his behavior. In this segment he tries once again to smear Michael by asking Carla if he was the one that started this investigation. Her own actions speak to the issue. As far as I'm concerned she couldn't be booted out of the medical field fast enough.

Last year Hannity was busted by Harry Shearer coaching the nurses before they went on camera. (see video ) Here's a video segment on H&C (with Malkin) when all 89 complaints against Michael were found to be false. They also tried to blame Terri's condition on Michael which also was proven to be false.

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It's an election year, and the GOP apparently hasn't run out of red meat to throw to its base. First it was an anti-gay constitutional amendment, then it was permanent repeal of the estate tax. A vote on an amendment to ban flag burning, of course, is on the way. 'What's next? Apparently, the Republicans are now targeting assisted suicide and euthanasia. The Terri Schiavo tragedy wasn't enough; the GOP is coming back for more.

-- Guest Post by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report

Howard Kurtz, the Power Line guys, and the Schiavio Memo

Eric Boehlert brings us back to the time when Kurtz was rolling over for the Power Line guys. They claimed the Terri Schiavo GOP talking points memo was fake....read on"

Atrios: "Boehlert brings us back to when the right wingers were obsessed with another "forged" memo. What he leaves out is that Howie Kurtz had invited Assrocket to come on his show to discuss this theory, though the Pope's death bumped him. Generally, Kurtz heavily promoted Assrocket's "theory" in his WaPo column.."

When Mel Martinez admitted the memo was real, I did a big round up (at the time I was fairly new in the blogosphere) called: Worst Blog of the Year: Power Line.  

Armando was hip to Kurtz's role also: Egg on his Face: Kurtz Burned by Powerline.

To this day, Howard Kurtz still has Hinderaker on his CNN show "Reliable Sources."  How reliable of him.