Pennsylvania: Sarah Palin

I'm being as charitable as possible when I say to the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Please! Put down the crack pipe!

Last week the P-G endorsed Lil Mayor Luke for the first time ever and now this week they've endorsed Judge Joan Orie Melvin, a Republican from Western PA, over Judge Jack A. Panella, a Democrat from Eastern PA.

In their endorsement, the P-G says:
Both have risen through the legal ranks, both have had distinguished careers and both are ranked highly recommended by the Pennsylvania Bar Association. In truth, either one would make an excellent Supreme Court justice.
So why do they give the nod to Orie Melvin? They chalk it up to wanting a judge from the West and say that they're "strike[ing] a small but important blow for gender balance by keeping the number of female justices at two.

Thought I'd spend a little time fact-checking Jerry's NightTalk appearance. First on the so-called "Death Panels."

Jerry, as you may recall, said that Sarah Palin was "sort of onto something" regarding the death panels.

Uh, no. Politifact.org, a fact-checking subsidiary of the St Petersburg Times has found this to be such a huge lie, they use their "Pants on fire" label:
We have read all 1,000-plus pages of the Democratic bill and examined versions in various committees. There is no panel in any version of the health care bills in Congress that judges a person's "level of productivity in society" to determine whether he or she is "worthy" of health care.

But the real news of this week's column is how Jack Kelly uses this whole set-up to plant the idea that it's possible that the "death panel" stories might be true just because he's "proven" that Obama lied about the health care plan. He begins with a dangerous statement (for Jack, that is - it's sentences like these that usually come back to haunt):
People who lie about some provisions in the health-care bill will lie about others.
This, of course, is true. But then Jack defends as possible Sarah Palin's "death panel" lie.
"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care," former Alaska Gov.

Just stumbled over this at thinkprogress.

Yesterday nascent Anti-Christ and Sarah Palin's baby's would-be executioner President Barack Obama said this of Senator Chuck Grassley, God-fearing Republican of Iowa:
Now, I think that there are some of my Republican friends on Capitol Hill who are sincerely trying to figure out if they can find a health care bill that works — Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, Olympia Snowe from Maine have been — yes, I got to admit I like Olympia, too. They are diligently working to see if they can come up with a plan that could get both Republican and Democratic support.