GOP Sen. Slams Prez's Town Hall 'Shout-Out'

Obama to add end-of-life planning to Medicare

(NEWSER) - Sarah Palin's "death panels" are back. The brouhaha surrounding end-of-life counseling forced Democrats to cut it from health care reform, but now President Obama is quietly adding the same policy to Medicare by rewriting regulations, reports the New York Times . Under the new policy, beginning Jan. 1 the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive measures. More»

Consequences will be felt in November midterm elections

(NEWSER) - The midterm elections are poised to shake up the political landscape, a consequence that Peggy Noonan traces directly back to the volatile town hall meetings of last summer. "Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats saw it coming," she writes of the movement. "But it was a seminal moment, and whatever is coming in November, it started there." Noonan goes so far as to liken the activity to Iranian unrest, given that most of the coverage came on the web and YouTube. More»

(AP) - Former President Jimmy Carter says Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during President Obama's speech last week was an act "based on racism." Carter says Wilson's comment was part of an "inherent feeling" of some that a black man should not be president. In responding to a question at a town-hall meeting at his presidential center in Atlanta, Carter also called Wilson's comment "dastardly" and said the president should be treated with respect. More»

(NEWSER) - To listen to the Obama camp and the liberal media, the anti-Obamacare protesters at last month’s town halls are a grave threat to our way of life, Mary Katharine Harn writes in the Weekly Standard. But “the climate of paranoia and violence that enveloped our political system this August was largely a creation” of the people who railed against it (think Olbermann and Matthews). In more than 400 meetings, “there were fewer than ten documented incidents that could be described as violent.” More»

Let's reform health care, as long as it can stay the same

(NEWSER) - If you listen to pandering politicians or ranting radio hosts, you’d think Americans want big, far-reaching change right away. They might disagree on what change, but nobody likes the way things are. Well, you’d be wrong, writes Michael Kinsley for the Washington Post. As the health care debate so vividly demonstrates, once change becomes a concrete possibility, Americans panic. More»