Calm Down at Town Halls: Palin

(NEWSER) - The “wild-eyed rants” reverberating through town hall meetings are pretty amusing. But do Republicans “really think the country is dopey enough to mistake microwave mobs staging Potemkin village protests” for actual American rage, asks Scot Lehigh of the Boston Globe. “If so, they’re delusional.” These crowds are lobbyist-generated Astroturf, coordinated by the same firms that once drubbed up “grassroots” support for energy deregulation on behalf of Enron. More»

She even used a semicolon—it can't possibly be her

(NEWSER) - Sarah Palin came out swinging on Facebook last night, responding to criticism of her infamous “death panels” comment in a 1,000-word, point-by-point rebuttal, complete with footnotes. There’s only one problem, notes Cajun Boy on Gawker: “There’s no way in hell Sarah Palin wrote it.” Why not? It's completely cogent, linear, packed with actual information. The piece argues that the end-of-life consultations provided for, while voluntary, are alarming in the context of a bill aiming to cut costs. More»

... they're being run by insurance companies

(NEWSER) - Sarah Palin thinks health care reform will bring with it “death panels,” collections of bureaucrats who will ration care, deciding whose life is and isn’t worth saving. The flaw in that logic? “That’s not the future of health care—it’s the present,” writes Mike Madden for Salon. According to the AMA, the country's biggest insurance companies denied 2% to 5% of claims last year, often with heartbreaking or outrageous results. More»

(NEWSER) - So now Sarah Palin alleges that President Obama's "death panels" might have killed Trig had they been in place. "Where to start?" wonders Joan Walsh in Salon. "Palin's entire statement is so ignorant, so bollixed rhetorically and morally, it hurts to read it." Most "health care screamers are sadly uninformed," she writes. But unlike most, Palin was a candidate for vice president, which "shows the Republican Party has arrived at a point of abject shame." More»

(NEWSER) - Sarah Palin has denounced the Obama administration's plans for health care reform as "downright evil" in a posting on her Facebook page, TPM reports. "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," Palin wrote. More»