So now the Repugs are calling it euthanasia?

:wtf:

Linda Vester, sycophantic sleazeball on Faux News' Dayside (a pathetic ripoff of CNN's Talkback Live), is now bringing in experts on euthanasia and is using that word to describe the situation in Florida.

I tried the best I could to stay out of this Schiavo mess, but I have to apologize. It makes me sick.

The very idea that these people would compare this to assisted suicide is just insane. Where did all this "we value life" bullshit come from anyway, when everyone knows that if Schaivo didn't have the money to stay on life support the hospital would have let her die years ago. And not a single person would care.

Sometimes, when I think that I am so jaded that nothing can surprise me anymore, these Republicans find a new way to astonish and horrify me.

What's next? The end of living wills?

You are kept a vegetable until you can't pay anymore, and then suddenly your life is worthless? All life is sacred, unless you're poor.

The act or practice of ending the life of an individual suffering from a terminal illness or an incurable condition, as by lethal injection or the suspension of extraordinary medical treatment.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=euthanasia

Why prolong suffering and misery? Its Sad and horrible that a person must die but if its like this situation...so be it. Perhaps its sooner the better so that she might be in Heaven enjoying the fruits of a new life? Who knows. ...?

Refusing medical treatment...

... I know if someone walked in and Gave Terri Schiavo an injection of potassium and she died it would be euthanasia ... It might just be semantics, but I really don't believe it's euthanasia to refuse (or have your advocate refuse on your behalf) medical treatment,even when it results in death.

that term before.

She isn't suffering from this shit. It's someone exercising their right to fucking die with dignity.

I switched when I saw your post.

instance--The disability folk, who have done excellant work for many disable have teamed up with Right folk on this case.

... that allowing someone in a pvs to cease receiving medical intervention, will lead to disabled people being euthanized for other being disabled.

and pro choice. Could it be that some of the disabled are speaking out because of their anti-choice views, and just double-speaking, phrasing it as a disabled issue? I cannot believe that sound-minded disabled people would make the leap from Terri's condition to their own.

My country is dead. No real media like they have in the rest of the modern world. Just lying prostituting trash.

Death is a difficult issue for anyone to deal with. It's so loaded with fear and dogma that it's rarely discussed openly and when people are confronted with it, they are devestated since they were so unprepared for what happens.

I'm sure I wouldn't be so wrapped up in this story had I not experienced death up close and personal...having to make similar decisions as Mr. Schiavo and also feeling the total frustration all family members have when a loved one goes through such an ordeal.

The thing that makes this more ominous, obviously, are the agendas of others who have hijacked this personal family tragedy and are exploiting it for their own means or 15 minutes of fame. These people hide behind victims like these and play sanctimonius goons, trampling over remaining civil liberties in their zeal to dominate and manipulate.

I hope this message is starting to get through to others. My wish is that, quietly, millions are watching this circus play out and see the harsh, strident antics of the far right and can relate how dangerous these people are to their own lives. Maybe, just maybe, minds will open to wider issues...will the Democratic party be there to provide alternatives?

is the language of nazi germany 1933. It was only a matter a time before this would come about. What makes it strange, is supposedly the neocons are against it. Or seem to be. Thats why it seems upside down to me. The neocons are social darwin (big fish eat small fish), even when they say they are 'creationists'. Look at the policy positions against all government social programs.

Maybe what we are seeing is a false arguement against mercy killing, to make it seem Democrats and the courts are for nazi tactics. Make the pro choice position a pro nazi position. They know they will lose, but make the opposition into nazi's, from the poor in their base. Does this make sense?

Just because the Nazi's misused a word, doesnt make the word automatically facist.

Actual Euthanasia has nothing whatsoever to do with Nazi's and is very much hated by the Christian right because anyone who chooses to die is committing suicide which is a sin on the same level as murder. You have no right to kill God's property even if it is yourself.

Its just another wedge issue and has nothing to do with state executions.

And actually the Nazi's didnt really argue Euthenasia, they made no bones about thier malice towards the groups they murdered.

...totally separate from the Holocaust and the persecution of "non-Aryans."

The first euthanasia program killed Germans, mainly those with congenital and incurable deformities, mental illness, and the like.

According to Nazi propaganda, the father of a disabled boy wrote to Hitler in 1938 and asked if the government could mercifully end his son's suffering.

This led to the euthanasia program, which operated under the code name "T-4." (After Tiergartenstrasse-4, the address of SS General Philip Buehler, who Hitler put in charge of the project.)

When word got out about this program, there was a huge public outcry. Some clergymen denounced the "mercy killings" from the pulpit. Ordinary Germans spread rumors that soon wounded soldiers returning from the front would be euthanized.

The Nazi government quietly discontinued the program around 1941. By then, they had developed some horrendous technologies they would use later, such as mass killing by poison gas.

A google will tell you a lot more.

Oh, and for a good film treatment, see the Costa-Gavras movie Amen. It's based on the life of a German SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, whose mentally retarded niece was killed in the T-4 program. Gerstein later tried to warn the Vatican and the West in general about the death camps in Poland.

The doctors, nurses, and hospice workers of euthansia in a case like this.

but as for the American psychiatrists, a little research will disclose the Nazi's took from these Americans the playbook for euthanasia and forced sterilization and mercy killing. After it came out what the Nazi's had done, the various American foundations and associations for euthanasia quickly dropped from public view and changed names to things like, genetics.

Forced sterilizations for those 'unfit' to pass their genes to future generations was the agenda, and euthanasia for some also deemed to not have any chance for a good life, like the mentally ill, the elderly without family and those socially unfit, you know, criminals and drunks. And who made these decisions about who was fit? Take a guess, and you can bet none of the shrinks or doctors or any of the wealthy behind this were ever deemed 'unfit'. Of course, they were the masters of this world, like the monarchy in ages past.

It was profitable too. The money spent on health care could be better spent on needed things, like building tanks.

Even though these people have been debunked by history the agenda is still identical, that is to 'weed' the poor stock from human reproduction pool. Now the Catholic church has been fighting these Nazi's all along, but 'reframing' the issue has cloaked what the real issue is all about.

This is what I mean about the confusion about what is happening.

Today, we have no trouble whatsoever deciding 'phrenology' is pure bullshit yet people have no idea what is going on inside the mind, and some people with the same fervent belief that used to be placed on phrenology, place their faith in a 'science' that is really little more than phrenology.

We even allow these people to test our children, as for their future 'potential'. And after testing the children are placed in various academic programs that have the effect of making those prophesies into reality. Yep, you tested that you will shove axles at a automobile assembly plant, so why spend the money to train you in algebra. Sure enough, after passing though the system, guess what? You end up shoving axles at the Ford Sterling assembly plant. It's like stamping fenders, but society, or rather those giving the tests decide who is fit and who is unfit for opportunities. And we cannot understand why blacks are pissed-off?

This isn't all private funding. If Terri wasn't a white girl, we wouldn't have heard a word about it.

And yes, living wills have pretty much ended in Texas. The hospital decides there, that's a real problem and yet we aren't hearing a word about it. Because that's a problem where these same fundies aren't going to want their tax dollars keeping those gubmint freeloaders alive. I cannot understand why the Not Dead Yet people aren't in the right state.

Geoff Fieger, Dr. Kevorkian's attorney, was debating Joe Scarborough last night. When Joe complained about the "barbarism" this type of death entailed, Geoff pointed out that when Kevorkian was on trial for providing people a safe, painless death, the Christian Right argued that the starvation method was "God's way." Joe brushed it off and refused to even discuss it.