Sarah Palin is a Superstar

Article here:

On Dec. 5, I had the privilege of attending my first tea party at the Arizona Market Place.

The Colorado Tea Party, who organized this meeting, did a great job of lining up speakers. Russ Clark was the master of ceremonies. There were between 300-400 people in attendance.

One doctor was talking about health care reform now before Congress. He said Sarah Palin was right about "Death Panels." The cheer of the day was when he mentioned Sarah's name.

Common people relate to her like a friend next door, not a politician who says one thing and does another. People are tired of politicians not doing what the people want them to do. It is time to vote out all incumbents and replace them with people who do what the people want.

Gov. Palin just finished up a 33-city book tour. With book sales of over 1 million copies in the first two weeks, people waited in lines for hours overnight in freezing temperatures, just for a few seconds to meet someone that they think can turn this county around.

There is no doubt that Sarah Palin is a superstar.

Death Panels, Tammy Bruce, and another Hawaii Pic

Here's the last pic of Palin in Hawaii that I could find, for now anyway. I see that the Globe gossip rag has a story on how the trip saved the Palin's marraige. LOL! Just tabloid trash. Like how the Obama's are constantly on the verge of divorce, and then not, etc....

The Cypress Times has an awesome article on Palin's "Midnight" op-ed here.

Have you all seen the vids of Tammy Bruce at the Tucson Tea Party? I'd heard her 4th of July podcast, of course. That podcast is why I'm a Tam, but I never saw the vids until I ran across them last night. They're really good. She talks about Sarah half the time. The end of the first vid goes crazy about twenty seconds before the end, but it's awesome anyway. They're all good:

Anybody else think Palin needs to shut up and do her homework?

Just because the mainstream media isn't talking about it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Countless articles screaming that Sarah Palin has no substance don't make her Facebook posts that reach over a million people disappear. Here's the latest from the LOTUS:
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Last weekend while you were preparing for the holidays with your family, Harry Reid’s Senate was making shady backroom deals to ram through the Democrat health care take-over. The Senate ended debate on this bill without even reading it. That and midnight weekend votes seem to be standard operating procedures in D.C.

No one is certain of what’s in the bill, but Senator Jim DeMint spotted one shocking revelation regarding the section in the bill describing the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (now called the Independent Payment Advisory Board), which is a panel of bureaucrats charged with cutting health care costs on the backs of patients – also known as rationing. Apparently Reid and friends have changed the rules of the Senate so that the section of the bill dealing with this board can’t be repealed or amended without a 2/3 supermajority vote. Senator DeMint said:

“This is a rule change. It’s a pretty big deal. We will be passing a new law and at the same time creating a senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law. I’m not even sure that it’s constitutional, but if it is, it most certainly is a senate rule. I don’t see why the majority party wouldn’t put this in every bill. If you like your law, you most certainly would want it to have force for future senates. I mean, we want to bind future congresses. This goes to the fundamental purpose of senate rules: to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of the minority or of future congresses.”

In other words, Democrats are protecting this rationing “death panel” from future change with a procedural hurdle. You have to ask why they’re so concerned about protecting this particular provision. Could it be because bureaucratic rationing is one important way Democrats want to “bend the cost curve” and keep health care spending down?

The Congressional Budget Office seems to think that such rationing has something to do with cost. In a letter to Harry Reid last week, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf noted (with a number of caveats) that the bill’s calculations call for a reduction in Medicare’s spending rate by about 2 percent in the next two decades, but then he writes the kicker:

“It is unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accomplished through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care.”

Though Nancy Pelosi and friends have tried to call “death panels” the “lie of the year,” this type of rationing – what the CBO calls “reduc[ed] access to care” and “diminish[ed] quality of care” – is precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.

This health care bill is one of the most far-reaching and expensive expansions of the role of government into our lives. We’re talking about putting one-seventh of our economy under the government’s thumb. We’re also talking about something as intimate to our personal well-being as medical care.

This bill is so unpopular that people on the right and the left hate it. So why go through with it? The Senate is planning to vote on this on Christmas Eve. Why the rush? Though we will begin paying for this bill immediately, we will see no benefits for years. (That’s the trick that allowed the CBO to state that the bill won’t grow the deficit for the next ten years.)

The administration’s promises of transparency and bipartisanship have been broken one by one. This entire process has been defined by midnight votes on weekends, closed-door meetings with industry lobbyists, and payoffs to politicians willing to sell their principles for sweetheart deals. Is it any wonder that Americans are so disillusioned with their leaders in Washington?

This is about politics, not health care. Americans don’t want this bill. Americans don’t like this bill. Washington has stopped listening to us. But we’re paying attention, and 2010 is coming.

- Sarah Palin

The "Death Panel" Lie

I was reading one media outlet's version of events - "There is no language in the bill setting up death panels..."

I swear, it's like beating your head against a brick wall. That's like if they came out after Churchill's Iron Curtain comments and said, "That's just ridiculous. There is no thousand mile curtain made of iron blocking off the Soviets from the rest of the world. What a liar!"

Grrrrrrrrrrrr.....I mean she put it quotation marks, for Pete's sake....(mumble, grumble).

How do you even respond to such ignorance? Can these people not think beyond the end of their noses? I can't even address it anymore. To borrow a Glenn Beck phrase, blood shoots out of my eyes. So I'll let Levin and Rush do the talking for me. These clips are flashbacks from when this issue was still hot:








And while we're on the subject of lies, how about the idea that this health care bill will reduce the deficit? How about any number of times that the actual President of the United States has lied right through his teleprompter-teeth?





The public option as such isn't in the current version of the bill anymore, but the system they've got set up to replace it is arguably worse. Oh, well. Let's ignore that and bash Sarah Palin, shall we?

How about a few gaffes to leave us all on a happy, fun note:

Mark Levin on Rationing and Death Panels

My really bad attempt at a video. Mark Levin said this, I believe last week. I thought it was appropriate considering that Palin's death panel comments have been dubbed the lie of the year:

America Under Barack Obama

Great interview with Nat Hentoff by John W. Whitehead found here. I don't agree with everything in it. For example, while I don't believe that Bush was evil, I was never under the illusion that he was remotely conservative. He was just better than any of the alternatives. And I don't believe he was ruled by Cheney:
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....A self-described uncategorizable libertarian, Hentoff adds he is also a “Jewish atheist, civil libertarian, pro-lifer.” Accordingly, he has angered nearly every political faction and remains one of a few who has stuck to his principles through his many years of work, regardless of the trouble it stirred up. For instance, when he announced his opposition to abortion he alienated numerous colleagues, and his outspoken denunciation of President Bill Clinton only increased his isolation in liberal circles (He said that Clinton had "done more harm to the Constitution than any president in American history," and called him "a serial violator of our liberties.")......

John W. Whitehead: When Barack Obama was a U.S. Senator in 2005, he introduced a bill to limit the Patriot Act. Now that he is president, he has endorsed the Patriot Act as is. What do you think happened with Obama?

Nat Hentoff: I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had. An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system. If the American people have their health care paid for by the government, depending on their age and their condition, they will be subject to a health commission just like in England which will decide if their lives are worth living much longer.

[Hmmmmm, can you say, "Death Panels?" Moving on....]

In terms of the Patriot Act, and all the other things he has pledged he would do, such as transparency in government, Obama has reneged on his promises. He pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated. Why is Obama doing that if he doesn't want torture anymore? Throughout Obama's career, he promised to limit the state secrets doctrine which the Bush-Cheney administration had abused enormously. The Bush administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the case should not be continued. Obama is doing the same thing, even though he promised not to.

So in answer to your question, I am beginning to think that this guy is a phony. Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to. His only principle is his own aggrandizement. This is a very dangerous mindset for a president to have.

JW: Do you consider Obama to be worse than George W. Bush?

NH: Oh, much worse. Bush essentially came in with very little qualifications for presidency, not only in terms of his background but he lacked a certain amount of curiosity, and he depended entirely too much on people like Rumsfeld, Cheney and others. Bush was led astray and we were led astray. However, I never thought that Bush himself was, in any sense, "evil." I am hesitant to say this about Obama. Obama is a bad man in terms of the Constitution. The irony is that Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing weakens the Constitution.

In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now. The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency. The NSA has the capacity to keep track of everything we do on the phone and on the internet.

Obama has done nothing about that. In fact, he has perpetuated it. He has absolutely no judicial supervision of all of this. So all in all, Obama is a disaster.

JW: Obama is not reversing the Bush policies as he promised. But even in light of this, many on the Left are very, very quiet about Obama. Why is that?

NH: I am an atheist, although I very much admire and have been influenced by many traditionally religious people. I say this because the Left has taken what passes for their principles as an absolute religion. They don't think anymore. They just react. When they have somebody like Obama whom they put into office, they believed in the religious sense and, of course, that is a large part of the reason for their silence on these issues. They are very hesitant to criticize Obama, but that is beginning to change. Even on the cable network MSNBC, some of the strongest proponents of Obama are now beginning to question, if I may use their words, their "deity."

JW: Is the so-called health commission that you referred to earlier what some people are referring to as death panels? Is that too strong a word?

NH: That term was used with hyperbole about the parts of the health care bill where doctors are mandated, if people are on Medicare and of a certain age or in serious physical condition, to counsel them on their end-of-life alternatives. I don't believe that was a death panel. It was done to get the Medicare doctors to not spend too much money on them.

[Wait, how is that not a death panel? I agree that end-of-life counseling is not the be-all end-all of the death panel issue (I was an early advocate that Palin expand the argument beyond that one clause), but it's still euthanasia by default.]

The death panel issue arose with Tom Daschle, who was originally going to be the Health Czar. Daschle became enamored with the British system and wrote a book about health care, which influenced President Obama.

In England, you have what I would call government-imposed euthanasia. Under the British healthcare system, there is a commission that decides whether or not, based on your age and physical condition, the government should continue to pay for your health. That leads to the government not doing it and you gradually or suddenly die. The present Stimulus Bill sets up the equivalent commission in the United States similar to that which is in England.

The tipoff was months ago on the ABC network. President Obama was given a full hour to describe and endorse his health plan. A woman in the audience asked Obama about her mother. Her mother was, I believe, 101 years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor didn't want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation. He said I would advise her to take a pain killer. That is the essence of the President of the United States.

JW: Do you think Obama is shallow?

NH: It's much worse than that. Obama has little, if any, principles except to aggrandize and make himself more and more important. You see that in his foreign policy. Obama lacks a backbone—both a constitutional backbone and a personal backbone. This is a man who is causing us and will cause us a great deal of harm constitutionally and personally. I say personally because I am 84 years old, and this is the first administration that has scared me in terms of my lifespan.

JW: But he is praised for his charisma and great smile. He can make people believe things just by his personality.

NH: That was a positive factor in his election. A good many people voted for Obama, and I'm not only talking about the black vote. A lot of people voted for Obama because of our history of racial discrimination in this country. They felt good even though they didn't really know much about him and may have had some doubts. But at least they showed the world we could elect a black president. And that is still part of what he is riding on. Except that, too, is diminishing. In the recent Virginia election, the black vote diminished. Now why was that? I think a lot of black folks are wondering what this guy is really going to do, not only for them but for the country. If the country is injured, they will be injured. That may be sinking in.

JW: One of the highest unemployment rates in the country is among African-Americans.

NH: Not only that, the general unemployment rate is going to continue for a long time and for all of us. I have never heard so many heart-wrenching stories of all kinds of people all across the economic spectrum. As usual, the people who are poorest—the blacks, Hispanics and disabled people—are going to suffer more than anyone else under the Obama administration. This is a dishonest administration, because it is becoming clear that the unemployment statistics of the Obama administration are not believable. I can't think of a single area where Obama is not destructive.

JW: A lot of people we represent and I talk to feel that their government does not hear them, that their representatives do not listen to them anymore. As a result, you have these Tea Party protests which the Left has criticized. What do you think of the Tea Party protests?

NH: I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them. That is what is happening with the Tea Parties.

I wrote a column called "The Second American Revolution" about the fact that people are acting for themselves as it happened with the Sons of Liberty which spread throughout the colonies. That was a very important awakening in this country. A lot of people in the adult population have a very limited idea as to why they are Americans, why we have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights.

JW: Less than 3% of high school students can pass the immigration test while over 90% of people from foreign countries can pass it. The questions are simple—such as, "What is the supreme law of the land?" or "Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?" Civic education in the United States is basically dead.

NH: I have been in schools around the country, and I have written on education for years. Once, I was once doing a profile on Justice William Brennan and I was in his chambers, and Brennan asked, "How do we get the words of the Bill of Rights into the lives of the students?" Well, it is not difficult. You tell them stories. When I speak to students, I tell them why we have a First Amendment. I tell them about the Committees of Correspondence. I tell them how in a secret meeting of the Raleigh Tavern in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who did not agree with each other, started a Committee of Correspondence.

Young people get very excited when they hear why they are Americans. It is not hard to do. We hear talk now about reforming public education. There are billions of dollars at stake for such a reform. But I have not heard Arne Duncan, who is the U.S. Education Secretary, mention once the civic illiteracy in the country.

JW: Adults are constitutionally illiterate as well.

NH: A few years ago, I was lecturing at the Columbia Journalism School of Education. I asked them about what was happening to the Fourth Amendment. I said, "By the way, do you know what is in the Fourth Amendment?" One student responded, "Is that the right to bear arms?" It's hard to believe these are bright students.

JW: I ask law students who attend our Summer Internship Program to name the five freedoms in the First Amendment. I have yet to find one who can.

NH: That is a stunner.

JW: You lived through the McCarthy era in the 1950s. Is it worse now than it was then?

NH: McCarthy's regime was ended by Senators who realized that he had gone too far. What we have now may be more insidious. What we have now in America is a surveillance society. We have no idea how much the government knows and how much the CIA even knows about average citizens. The government is not supposed to be doing this in this country. They listen in on our phone calls. I am not exaggerating because I have studied this a long time. You have to be careful about what you do, about what you say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with McCarthy, but the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious.

JW: You don't sound very optimistic.

NH: If James Madison or Thomas Jefferson were brought back to life and they looked at television and read the papers, they would not recognize the country.

The media has been very bad about informing us about what is going on. They focus on surface things. They do not focus enough on the fact that the Fourth Amendment is on life support and that we need a return to transparency in government. The media ignores what is really going on.

But I am optimistic. I have to be optimistic, as I know you are. That is why you keep writing and keep doing what you do. You have to do this because we have been through very dark periods before. There are enough people who are starting to be actively involved that we can turn things around. And we need to encourage others to become involved.

Can Anyone Say "Death Panels?"

From Pajamas Media:

Health Care vs. the Value of Human Life

Under the Democrats’ proposed health care reform legislation, we know that the government will have to determine some sort of rationing system in order to control costs. We are aware that part of the rationing will be absorbed in the discrimination that the bill inflicts upon the elderly; we know that it cuts $500 billion from Medicare. What has remained puzzling is how exactly this rationing will be determined for the rest of us. Similarly elusive is how the new Health Benefits Advisory Committee will decide whether or not you get certain medical treatments, regardless of the opinion of your doctor. After all, how do you put a dollar value on a human life?

If you think there is no answer to that question, you are way behind the progressives. In fact, most countries with socialized medicine, including Britain, are already using a mathematical formula that expresses the numerical value of one year of a human life in a measurement called the QALY, or “quality-adjusted life year.” In terms of determining medical care, the mathematical formula of the QALY is based on both how much a treatment may lengthen your lifespan and the quality of the life you will be living.

Basically, if you are in optimal health, the QALY of one year of your life is 1.0. But if you have any underlying conditions, like asthma or muscular dystrophy, your QALY is much lower. Under the QALY system, the blind are worth less than those with sight, as those who can walk are worth more than those in wheelchairs. Sound like discrimination against persons with disabilities? It gets worse.

In a paper entitled “Cost-Effectiveness and Disability Discrimination,” the director of the Division of Medical Ethics at the Harvard Medical School, Dan Brock, argues “prioritizing health care resources by their relative cost-effectiveness can result in lower priority for the treatment of disabled persons than otherwise similar non-disabled persons.” He says that type of system not only “implies that disabled persons’ lives are of lesser value than those of non-disabled persons,” but it also “conflicts with equality of opportunity; it conflicts with fairness, which requires ignoring (some/most) differential impacts of treatment; it wrongly gives lower priority to disabled persons for equally effective treatment; it conflicts with giving all persons an equal chance to reach their full potential; and, it is in conflict with giving priority to the worse off.”

Don't believe the left would cut medical costs by rationing care? Check out their formulas to calculate your life's value.

The “double jeopardy” scenario that describes how the disabled are not only already suffering with an illness or disability, but are also given a lower priority of health care treatments to preserve or improve the quality of their lives, has been widely debated in countries with universal health care. It does little good to pass health care reform that restricts denying insurance to those with underlying conditions when treatment is still withheld from these individuals as an inherent flaw within the system.

As if that’s not bad enough, the health advisor to the president, Ezekiel Emanuel, is proposing a system even more deleterious. His system, similar to the QALY, is “the complete lives system,” which not only allows for discrimination against the elderly and disabled, but also targets the very young, i.e., our children.

Emanuel says of his system: “When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”

Leave it to American progressives to take the QALY one step further by defining quality of life as how useful you are to society — that is, how likely you are to increase the government’s tax revenue, hence the emphasis on those between ages 15 and 40. Health care gets a lot cheaper by rationing care to all non-taxpayers.

According to Emanuel, “The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a two-month-old girl.” I doubt the parents of the two-month-old agree.

And, if you are a child with disabilities, the government has already completely given up on you. Emanuel believes “services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed.” What’s worse, since he does not believe in “guaranteeing neuropsychological services to ensure children with learning disabilities can read and learn to reason,” once the public option puts the private sector out of business, these types of life-changing services for children will no longer exist.

Years of research in treating children with autism, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and dyslexia are in jeopardy of being rendered null and void. Years of progress in passing anti-discrimination laws may be undone in one single bill.

Sick to Death of Death Panels

I don't know about you, but I'm sick to death of death panels. Not just the topic itself, but the continued mischaracterization of Sarah Palin's original statements. One Alaskan hockey mama's opinion of the healthcare bill grew legs of its own and has been a thorn in Obama's side ever since. While I would love to let it fester there and just move on, the topic keeps on rearing its controversial head, and so I must address some of the latest developments.

1. Someone finally interprets Sarah Palin's Facebook statement accurately.

Matthew Continetti wrote an article in the Weekly Standard last Monday called "Technocracy in America" in response to Obama's healthcare address:

The partisan and misleading speech that President Obama delivered to a joint session of Congress last week revealed the president's preferences--more government mandates, regulations, and taxes--when it comes to refashioning the American health care system....Why do more Americans disapprove than approve of the president's approach to health care? Why did Obama's approval rating drop steadily--among independents, precipitously--throughout the summer?

The answer, he said, is "all the misinformation that's been spread over the past few months." There is no legitimate basis for opposition. There are only lies. "Americans have grown nervous about reform," the president continued. "Prominent politicians" whose "only agenda is to kill reform at any cost" have spread "bogus claims" about his health care plan, scaring a gullible public into disapproval. For example.....the idea that "we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens" is a "lie"....."If you misrepresent what's in this plan," Obama said, "we will call you out.".....

The president was correct when he said that his proposals do not include "panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens." But that is not quite what the "prominent politician" was saying when she wrote, Democratic health care proposals would lead to rationed care; that the sick, the elderly, and the disabled would suffer the most under such rationing; and that under such a system these "unproductive" members of society could face the prospect of government bureaucrats determining whether they deserve health care."

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, someone finally correctly interpreted Sarah Palin's original Facebook statement about the death panels. Matthew goes on,

Indeed, in his speech last week Obama said himself that his plan will "eliminate" the "hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud" in Medicare and "create an independent commission of doctors and medical experts"--a panel, if you will--"charged with identifying more waste in the years ahead." It is no stretch of the imagination to think that one man's "waste" might one day turn out to be a senior citizen's preferred medical treatment.

Like it or not, Sarah Palin is making an argument about the possible tradeoffs and unintended consequences of Obamacare. Hers is an extrapolation based on an analysis of the facts. It is not a "lie," unless "lie" suddenly means "an argument with which I disagree."

I must point out that Matthew Continetti said there were no death panels in terms of bureaucrats deciding who lives and who dies, and then went on to highlight one said panel, but no matter.

I also have to include a conversation on C4P:

Doug Brady: "Are you not familiar with the term "metaphor"? When Winston Churchill talked about the "iron curtain", he didn't mean there was an actual two thousand mile long curtain made of iron. You are aware of that, right?Was Churchill wrong too?"

Uffda: "Okay, one more time....Death panels is a term. Get it? A TERM. She put it in quotation marks, for Pete's sake. Doug's analogy of the Iron Curtain is right on. I can just see the media today: "Who is this loon? He thinks there's a curtain made of iron? Liar!"

Uffda: (My spin on what the AP might have said if Churchill were alive today) "The AP: "Churchill's Iron Curtain remarks which have been widely debunked by members of his own party, for some reason still seem to resonate with many Americans...."

Narciso: "It's an interesting comparison, Churchill had been out of national office, for a year, roughly when he remarked about the Iron Curtain. Most of foreign policy was still organized under the aegis of theUS/Soviet rapprochement. It was probably considered unnecessarily provocative for many, yet he was ultimately right."

Uffda: "Here was the actual reaction to the iron curtain remark: "At first, many countries in the West widely condemned the speech. Much of the Western public still regarded the Soviet Union as close allies, in context of the recent defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan. Many saw Churchill's speech as warmongering and unnecessary. In light of the now public Soviet archives, many historians have now revised their opinions." Notice that many historians have now revised their opinions. Hmmm.... perhaps the past will repeat itself?"

2. The new defense: Palin introduced her own death panels!

Now, I would like to point out that end-of-life decisions are a separate topic and I have no problem with those things being addressed. It's not "end of life counseling" that I have a problem with, it's the idea of it being tied to a big government structure that has to keep down costs and that has philosophies like those of Ezekiel Emanuel. It's the unintended consequences. When it comes to life and death, are we not better off safe than sorry?

Anyway, Axlerod went on Bill O'Reilly after Obama addressed the joint session of Congress and said that Palin herself set up death panels. Palin's response on Facebook:

"Last year, I issued a proclamation for “Healthcare Decisions Day.” The proclamation sought to increase the public’s knowledge about creating living wills and establishing powers of attorney. There was no incentive to choose one option over another. There was certainly no financial incentive for physicians to push anything. In fact, the proclamation explicitly called on medical professionals and lawyers “to volunteer their time and efforts” to provide information to the public.Comparing the “Healthcare Decisions Day” proclamation to Section 1233 of HR 3200 is ridiculous. The two are like apples and oranges. The attempt to link the two shows how desperate the proponents of nationalized health care are to shift the debate away from the disturbing details of their bill."

Meg Stapleton, Palin's spokesperson, later commented:

"Palin’s office told KGW that comparing Alaska’s Healthcare Day proclamation with the House end-of-life provision was "hysterically funny" and “desperate.”

“The Healthcare Day proclamation did not evaluate whether your life is worth surgery, a pill, or maybe even death,” a possible result of Portland’s provision, Palin spokesperson Meghan Stapleton told KGW. "Gov. Palin signed a proclamation raising awareness on an issue, asking knowledgeable Alaskans to volunteer their time to help fellow Alaskans with answering any questions they may have on end-of-life issues," she added."

Again, I say the problem is not being informed on living wills and other end of life issues, the problem is having those things attached to a big government bureaucracy that's running low on resources and could be tempted to see people in terms of dollar signs and not their intrinsic value as human beings, kinda like the baby in England that doctors refused to treat simply because he didn't fall into their NHS mandated guidelines of a child worth saving. Do we have problems in our healthcare system? Yes. Mostly in terms of affordability. But not being able to afford care or going into debt to pay for it is not the same as the government telling you point blank you cannot have it. With one you'll most likely get the care anyway, we just have to find a way to pay for it. With the other you won't get it period, whether you can pay for it or not.

3. Out of desperation, some Obama-zombies are trying to make the case that death panels are a good thing.

Hey, if you can't convince people you weren't really trying to kill somebody, convince them that killing the person is the right thing to do.

Again, I say they're missing the point, like in this Newsweek article. It's not about whether or not you want to be resuscitated, it's about putting the government in a position of having too much power to the point where you won't be resuscitated whether you want to be or not. It's not about choosing palliative care, it's about getting to a point where you have to take it whether you want it or not. It's not a debate about end of life issues themselves, it's that those issues should be nowhere near Washington, D.C. Either they're evading the issue, or they really don't understand the problem we have with this aspect of the bill in the first place.