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Ben Carson Says Something Reasonable — Has To Take It Back

Ben Carson Says Something Reasonable — Has To Take It Back

Dr. Ben Carson has landed in another controversy — and this time it’s over a very old controversy.

In comments published this past weekend, Carson was asked about the case of Terri Schiavo in Florida, the woman in a persistent vegetative state whose life support was withdrawn after a protracted legal battle between her husband and her immediate family — as well as the political involvement of then-governor Jeb Bush and President George W. Bush.

The view of medical authorities, as later confirmed by Schiavo’s autopsy, was that she had no remaining faculties of thought or awareness, and that this condition had been irreversible. Her parents and siblings, however, continue to maintain that she still had the abilities to think and communicate with others.

“We face those kinds of issues all the time,” Carson told the Tampa Bay Times last Friday. “And while I don’t believe in euthanasia, you have to recognize that people that are in that condition do have a series of medical problems that occur that will take them out. And your job is to keep them comfortable throughout that process and not to treat everything that comes up.

Q: Did you think it was appropriate for Congress and the legislature to—

CARSON : —I don’t think it needed to get to that level. I think it was much ado about nothing. Those things are taken care of every single day just the way I described.

This then triggered a round of outrage against Carson from Schiavo’s brother Bobby Schindler. “As both a Christian and a world renowned neurological surgeon, Dr. Carson owes every pro-life advocate an apology,” Schindler said in a press release. “At best, he spoke from a perspective of personal prejudice and ignorance. At worst, he truly shares the perspective of so many euthanasia activists.”

Schindler even warned that Carson might bring about a truly horrific new world of medicine:

“If we get a President Carson, conservatives won’t need to fear Obamacare’s so-called death panels, because Dr. Carson would himself represent a one-man death panel, content to ration care and decide who deserves a chance at life based on a warped sense of the ethics of medicine and humane law.

The press release was subtly titled “Ben Carson Voices Support for Deliberately Starving and Dehydrating Brain-Injured Patients.”

And so on Wednesday, Carson backed off drastically, in comments given to an anti-abortion site:

“I am steadfastly opposed to euthanasia. I have spent my entire career protecting life, especially the life of children,” Dr. Ben Carson told LifeSiteNews exclusively.

“I regret that my recent comments about Terri Schiavo have been taken out of context and misinterpreted,” he continued.

“When I used the term ‘much ado about nothing,’ my point was that the media tried to create the impression that the pro-life community was nutty and going way overboard with the support of the patient,” Dr. Carson told LifeSiteNews.

Carson also told the site: “When the patient is not terminal, as Terri Schiavo was not, the treatment plan should be determined on the basis of the consensus between the family and the healthcare providers.”

However, Bobby Schindler is not convinced, writing in a new column at LifeSiteNews on Thursday:

I have deep respect for the accomplishments and commitment Dr. Carson has shown for life. But our family remains deeply troubled that in seeking to clarifying his remarks, he has not unequivocally condemned what happened to my sister. In fact, his suggestion that simple “consensus” among family members and healthcare providers could justify what happened to my sister is problematic. If I had agreed with Michael Schiavo to starve and dehydrate my sister to death, would that have made it right?

This is not the first time Carson’s medical expertise has collided with his presidential aspirations.

During the anti-vaxxing hysteria earlier this year, Carson was a rare voice of reason in his party, urging that vaccines were vital to public health and personal well-being. By the time the issue came to the fore in a GOP debate, the doctor had wavered, alluding vaguely to a “multitude of vaccines” regularly administered to children that may not be necessary, and saying that parents should have “discretion” over this undefined set of vaccines.

Just as when he initially voiced support for fetal tissue research, leveraging his expertise as a medical authority in order to explain the processes — only to then back off soon afterward — Carson started out by giving a view of the 2005 case that accorded with medical consensus.

Let this be a lesson for Carson: When scientific knowledge collides against political passions, sometimes there cannot be any reconciliation of the two.

Photo: Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson pauses as he speaks to the media following a fundraising luncheon in La Jolla, California, November 17, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Blake

4 Things To Remember About Jeb Bush

4 Things To Remember About Jeb Bush

After six months of coyly “considering a run,” during which time he raked in uncounted millions in donations, former Florida governor Jeb Bush is set to formally announce his candidacy for president Monday at a rally in Miami.

During his candidacy limbo, Bush asserted that he would be his “own man,” separate from both the troubled legacy of his brother and the congested field of GOP candidates already in the running.

As he strives to revamp his image in the long campaign ahead, Bush will stretch himself pretty thin in order to appeal to the far-right Tea Partiers who booed him at CPAC and the old guard GOP, of which he is a conspicuous member, and which doesn’t have many other credible options.

Here are four things to remember about Jeb that he would probably just as soon forget.

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1. Miguel Recarey

Jeb Bush, while his father was vice president, lobbied on behalf of a man later found to be the mastermind behind one of the largest Medicare frauds ever, possibly helping him to defraud the government out of millions.

In 1985, Jeb, then a real estate businessman and entrepreneur, was paid $75,000 by Miguel Recarey, the head of health maintenance organization International Medical Centers (IMC) for real estate work. The only problem is IMC never actually purchased a building from Bush, who claimed to not know of Recarey’s shady past. Known for having ties to the Miami mafia, Recarey had participated in the Mob assassination plot against Fidel Castro in the early 1960s and failed to file income tax returns in 1969 and 1970, serving a short time in prison.

Instead, Jeb phoned Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler to see whether IMC, the largest recipient of federal Medicare funds at the time, could get a special exemption regarding the balance of customers. So instead of having a 50/50 balance of Medicare patients and private (paying) customers, IMC could get more Medicare money, which they did — in 1986, with 80 percent of its customers Medicare beneficiaries, the company was collecting over $30 million a month in Medicare payments, eventually totaling $1 billion.

Although Bush denied contacting her, Heckler confirmed to the Huffington Post in 2012 that he “indeed lobb[ied] her personally, and that his input played a major role in her thinking.” Two other HHS officials, including Heckler’s chief of staff, confirmed during congressional testimony in 1987 that Bush did indeed call Heckler on behalf of Recarey.

An investigator from HHS and eventually two members of Congress, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA), launched an investigation into Medicare fraud, which led eventually to the shutdown of his company and a Federal indictment charging Recarey with bribery and fraud.

Recarey fled the country in 1987 to Caracas, Venezuela, but only after he received a $2.2 million income-tax refund. He was taken into custody in Spain in 1993, but released a year later when the country rejected the extradition request, according to a 1994 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

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2. Orlando Bosch

The anti-Castro Cuban militant Orlando Bosch—who was responsible for multiple terrorist attacks in Latin America in the decades following the 1959 revolution, including the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner which killed all 73 onboard—found an unlikely advocate in Jeb Bush.

In 1989 Bush was a Florida real estate businessman, in thrall to Miami’s Cuban-American population, whose support he would rely upon in his first run for governor in 1994. And while then-attorney general Dick Thornburgh called Bosch an “unrepentant terrorist,” Cuban exiles in Miami, where the city commissioners once officially declared an Orlando Bosch Day, considered him a hero.

After Bosch was detained by the Justice Department on an immigration violation, Bush successfully lobbied his father, George H. W. Bush, for a presidential pardon. Bosch had safe haven in America until his death in 2011.

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3. Bush v. Gore 

Governor Jeb Bush was hardly an innocent bystander in the fracas that led to his brother becoming the 43rd president. Florida, then and now a critical electoral state, had a Republican governor and legislature in 2000 — it was well suited to support George W. Bush.

Despite recusing himself from any role involving the recount, Jeb allowed many staffers — including much of his legal team — to take unpaid leave to work on his brother’s campaign.

But the state was dealing with much tougher, granular issues — who was “allowed” to vote. Most of the policies perpetuated by the Bush administration targeted minorities and the poor. One controversy involved convicted felons. Following state law, these felons aren’t allowed to vote, and so must be purged from voting rolls. As governor, Jeb Bush passively allowed the backlog of ex-felons to grow — up to 62,000 as of 2002 — which also included a growing list of small offenses that disproportionally affected the urban poor, like cashing unemployment checks after a person has started a new job.

But the rolls were known to have serious errors — mixing up first and middle names and confusing similar-sounding names and nicknames were only two of the problems, as detailed by Vanity Fair in its 2004 recounting of Florida’s voting procedures four years earlier.

Because there were so many errors on the voting lists, each county handled its rolls in different haphazard fashions. Some counties threw out the list. Some scrupulously checked, while others took it at face value. Miami-Dade county sent out letters informing people they could come in for a hearing. The problem was that many of the addresses were outdated, so people were never notified. Even as late as 2004, many of those wrongly listed as being ineligible to vote had never been reinstated. Just in time for Bush’s re-election.

A 2001 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report on the 2000 election found that Florida’s voting system was seriously flawed, with systematic discrimination reaching back long before the election.

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4. Terri Schaivo

As Florida governor, Jeb Bush used his power to intervene in the tragic dispute between the husband and parents of Terri Schiavo, a St. Petersburg, Florida resident who had been in a persistent vegetative state for over a decade.

In 2003, Bush used a hurriedly passed law (“Terri’s Law”) to grant himself the authority to reinsert Schiavo’s feeding tube, against the wishes of her husband, Michael Shiavo.

Along with obstructing Michael’s right as Terri’s legal guardian, Bush installed a neurologist at Schiavo’s hospice to “deduce and represent” her “best wishes and best interests” — which is to say the best interests of a governor pandering to his conservative base — and report them to him.

A court eventually ruled Terri’s Law to be unconstitutional, and Schiavo passed away shortly after her feeding tube was removed in 2005 — but not before becoming a pawn in a widely publicized national battle between “right-to-life” conservatives and disability rights activists, thanks to Governor Jeb.

Photo: Jeb Bush, via Facebook

Did Jeb Bush Go Far Enough To Try To Save Terri Schiavo To Save His Iowa Chances?

Did Jeb Bush Go Far Enough To Try To Save Terri Schiavo To Save His Iowa Chances?

By Michael Bender, Bloomberg News (TNS)

Standing at the pulpit of his Sioux City, Iowa, mega-church a decade ago, the Rev. Cary Gordon wept over the death of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman who had her feeding tubes removed more than 1,500 miles away in Florida. Now, the politician mostly closely associated with trying to keep her alive is coming to the state searching for support for his prospective presidential bid.

To much of the world, it appeared as if Jeb Bush, then the governor of Florida, stood his ground against those who wanted to take Schiavo off life support. But that’s not the picture that emerged for some in a crucial constituency in the state with the first presidential nominating contest.

“I’m displeased with Governor Bush,” Gordon said in an interview this week. “He could have informed law enforcement, called up the National Guard, or told the county sheriff’s office not to let it happen.”

Bush is campaigning in Iowa on Friday and Saturday, his first trip to the state in three years. Polls show tough sledding ahead for Bush as conservatives look askew at the former governor’s support for legalizing undocumented workers and his backing for the academic standards known as Common Core. Bush’s two-day swing includes a fundraiser for U.S. Rep. David Young, private meetings with conservative activists, and campaign-style events at an agricultural summit in Des Moines, a barbecue restaurant in Waukee, and a pizza place in Cedar Rapids.

Theoretically, Bush’s actions in the Schiavo case were supposed to be an antidote to his troubles with the conservative base. The strategy, as Bush and his allies have said, is to remind voters of his record in Florida, where he enjoyed strong approval ratings while implementing one of the most conservative agendas of any big-state governor.Much of that record should play well among born-again or evangelical Christians, who accounted for almost three of every five Iowa Republican caucus-goers in 2012.

As governor, Bush approved a partial-birth abortion ban, and a requirement for parental notification before terminating some pregnancies. He signed into law the National Rifle Association’s first stand-your-ground law allowing deadly force in self-defense.

But the issue that would seem to resonate most with Iowa social conservatives is his showdown with the state court system over a law to reinsert Schiavo’s feeding tubes. The debate over Schiavo’s life, during which Bush’s advisers included one of Mother Teresa’s attorneys, received the attention of newspapers and television stations across the country. The Vatican weighed in, as did and then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a physician who watched a videotape of Schiavo and gave his diagnosis from the chamber floor. Schiavo’s fate has been a topic in Republican presidential primary debates in the 2008 and 2012 cycles.

“Every caucus-going Republican over 30 is going to know the Schiavo story, and certainly our Christian evangelicals are going to be incredibly interested,” Iowa Republican Chairman Jeff Kaufmann said in an interview. “And they’re going to want more detail about that.”

Getting that message out is crucial for Bush. His allies were privately thrilled with tough stories recently in the Tampa Bay Times and Politico that revisited the family tragedy, showing how the hard-charging Bush combined policy with his religious and moral beliefs to nearly lead the state into a constitutional crisis. At the Conservative Political Action Conference last week outside of Washington, Bush told the crowd he had no regrets over the fight.

“Here was a woman who was vulnerable,” Bush said. “And the court, because of our laws, they were going to allow her to be starved to death. So we passed a law, Terri’s Law, that was a year later ruled unconstitutional. I stayed within the law, but I acted on my core belief that the most vulnerable in our society should be in the front of the line. They should receive our love and protection, and that’s exactly what I did.”

But that may not be enough for some social conservatives in Iowa.

“Just because a judge wants to kill somebody, that doesn’t give them the authority to do it,” said Brian Rosenor, a former chairman of the Woodbury County, Iowa Republicans. “Two state troopers in front of her door would have saved her life. Jeb Bush could have done more.”

Bush faced similar calls in 2005, after exhausting legal options. “I would have gone to the clinic myself, with the state troopers, and I would have talked to the folks there, saying, ‘We’re going to put the tube back in,'” Pat Buchanan said on MSNBC in 2005. “She’s going to be fed, and she’s going to be given water.”

Schiavo was diagnosed as being in a “persistent vegetative state” after her heart stopped beating in 1990. With no legal will in place and a million-dollar medical malpractice settlement, the family was divided over treatment. The case gained national attention as court rulings favored Michael Schiavo, Terri’s husband, who maintained that his wife would not have wanted to be kept alive with feeding tubes. Bush sided with Schiavo’s parents, who argued their son-in-law was an unfit guardian.

In 2005, the state sought court approval to take custody of Schiavo. Rumors circulated that Bush would use state lawmen to remove her from the hospital, so doctors could reinsert her feeding tubes. As lawyers for Schiavo’s husband equated such a move to kidnapping, Florida Circuit Judge George Greer, a Republican, issued an injunction, saying that it appeared state action was “imminent.” “I don’t want this thing turning into a donnybrook,” Greer said at the time. Bush abided by that decision.

Marlys Popma, a prominent right-to-life activist in Iowa, said she wanted to hear directly from Bush before coming to any conclusions.

“I prayed for her when she was going through that and her parents,” Pompa said in an interview. “We’re talking about life and death, and how far some is willing to go to protect that is really important.”

Photo: Former Governor Jeb Bush speaks at the 42nd annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Feb. 27, 2015 in National Harbor, Md. Conservative activists attended the annual political conference to discuss their agenda. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/TNS)