If you somehow missed Grassley's remarks (say, if you had taken a trip to Mars last week, or were in a coma and so didn't turn on the tv), check out the link above or click here for CBS's take on it - CBS did fact check the claims - or here for the Fox News article, which you'll notice made no effort to provide an accurate rebuttal to Grassley's claims (yeah, I know, big surprise).

Predictably, Grassley's comments were all over the news. News junkies like me saw the comments repeated ad nauseum for a couple of days. Any sane person clearly realizes that the claims are entirely bogus, but although there were some news outlets that tried to fact check the claims, as CBS did, the damage was done. In the House, the sponsor of the amendment, which actually concerned only a plan to pay doctors, on a purely voluntary basis, when they provide end-of-life counseling, was forced to withdraw it, lest the astroturfed outrage over the issue (or, to be more accurate, non-issue), fed in no small part by the non-stop press coverage of Grassley's remarks, provide too large a distraction from the real issues of health care reform.

That's bad enough.

But this morning Greg Sargent, at the Plumline, made a very interesting observation. The press had been all over Grassley's "pull the plug on Grandma" comments, but had completely overlooked the news that Grassley has now retracted the statements.

From Sargent's article:

This passed unnoticed, but it’s a big deal: Over the weekend, and very quietly, Senator Chuck Grassley completely retracted his widely-reported claim last week that people have "every reason to fear" that the House health care proposal would create a "government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma." The retraction was buried deep in this Washington Post article on Grassley’s role, with a spokesperson admitting Grassley doesn’t really believe what he said about "grandma": Grassley says he opposes that counseling as written in the House version of the bill, but a spokesman said the senator does not think the House provision would in fact give the government such authority in deciding when and how people die. The House bill allows patients to decide for themselves if they would like such counseling. Let’s be clear: By clarifying that Grassley doesn’t think the House bill would "give the government such authority in deciding when and how people die," his spokesperson completely repudiated his widely discussed claim. This goes much farther than Grassley did in a statement released Friday clarifying he’d never used the words "death panel" and was merely worried about "unintended consequences."

All of this is even worse than it seems at first glance, because Sen. Grassley is part of the six-Senator (3 Dems /3Republicans) group that Sen. Baucus has assembled from the larger Senate Finance Committee, to work out the Senate bill. And yet he's helping to disseminate information to the public to essentially torpedo reform!

What I want to know is: Why should someone so irresponsible as Chuck Grassley essentially hold the fate of health care reform in his hands?

AND, Where Is the Press????

It's Greg Sargent who deserves the credit for finding this (Thanks, Greg!), and I don't generally ask for recs, but this time, I'm asking. Not for me, but in the hopes that Grassley's retraction will get noticed and receive the attention it deserves in the news.

UPDATE: Make sure to check out BarbinMD's excellent front page story on Grassley's recent antics too. She references Sargent's article, so I just wanted to say that I had started to write this diary before I saw her article (I've been trying to get the Sargent article noticed over at reddit all day).