Sharron Angle’s Death Panel

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Does Sharron Angle want to set up her own death panel?

Angle, a tea party-backed ultraconservative who’s taking on Sen. Harry Reid in Nevada, tried mightily to avoid media scrutiny. But journalists dug up her extreme views and statements anyway. Last week, The Huffington Post found her suggesting that a 13-year-old girl who had been raped by her father make “a lemon situation into lemonade” instead of getting an abortion. Her latest is a real doozy:

[Angle] claimed last night that [77-year-old] Senator Robert Bennett, who was ousted by the Tea Partiers last month, had “outlived his usefulness.”

The Reid campaign and the Democratic National Committee are jumping on the quote. Here’s DNC spox Hari Sevugan, to the Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent:

While ‘death panels’ were nowhere to be found in the health insurance reform bill, it looks like Sarah Palin can find a one-woman version of one in Nevada where Sharron Angle thinks people who criticize her political positions should die. Her sentiments are sick, but that fact that Republicans endorse, as their standard bearer in Nevada, someone who wishes death upon her critics and calls for `Second Amendment remedies’ to deal with her political opposition is just as disturbing.

An unpopular incumbent in a state with 14 percent unemployment vs. perhaps the most extreme (and loose-lipped) Senate candidate in recent memory? This is going to be a fun race.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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