GretaWire slide show

Fox News Tries To Rehabilitate Palins Discredited Death Panels Smear
As The New York Times reported yesterday, the Obama Administration has enacted Medicare Regulations to include an end-of-life planning provision similar to one struck out of the Health Care Reform Bill after Sarah Palin “touched off a political storm over ‘Death Panels.’” Palin’s “death panels” accusation wasn’t just a lie, it was PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year for 2009. But good ol’ Fox News resuscitated the lie and gave it new life by j...

Obama's stealth end-of-life regulation: Palin's 'death panels' made Dems do it
"If you can't legislate it, enforce it," says Tucker Carlson, sitting in for Sean Hannity on Fox , as he slammed the Obama Administration for dishonesty - specifically  sneaking back into ObamaCare  what Sarah Palin labeled  the 'Death Panel's'" end-of-life planning. At that time, Sarah Palin warned of a slippery slope to euthanasia for the elderly, the sick and the disabled and America's response echoed Palin's "Not no, but hell no!".  Now it's back. As per the New York Time...

Obama Brings Back End of Life Counseling
When it was discovered that ObamaCare included funding for end of life counseling, Controversy erupted and that language had to be stripped from the bill Obama eventually signed. So, how is it that end of life counseling is now being funded by the Federal Government? Through Regulation, of course. The New York Times reported that this is the way President Obama will operate for the next two years. The final version of the Health Care Legislation, signed into law by President Obama in March, a...

White House attempts to clarify President Obama's Michael Vick remarks
Today one tweet from one Sports Illustrated reporter created a Controversy that the White House was forced to respond through a statement.  The tweet in question came from Peter King of Sports Illustrated.  King tweeted, "Yes, Obama called Eagle owner Jeffrey Lurie to praise the Eagles for giving Vick a chance. Said too many Prisoners never get fair 2d chance." The tweet was in reference to an earlier interview King had given in which he mentioned that President Obama had expressed gra...

Senator-elect Marco Rubio meets Greta Van Susteren in DC
I know that I posted this in the forum section a while back but I decided to post it here as my inaugural front page post at Freedoms Lighthouse. During the video above, newly elected Florida senator Marco Rubio tells Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren about his activities during his first days in Washington after the election. I originally posted it on November 17th. Rubio discusses his plans before his swearing in ceromony on January 5th 2011. Although I concern myself with Florida politics,...

Good Morning FishbowlDC Readers
Last night… Fox News contributor and President George Bush’s Press Secretary Dana Perino filled in for FNC’s Greta Van Susteren , who said she was going  over to PR maven Tammy Haddad’s place to celebrate her birthday. “Now my wife’s vacuuming. So much for attempting to transcribe audio.” — Conservative Blogger and former TWT’s Robert Stacy McCain in a Monday tweet. The saga concerning author C.S. Lewis started like this: Politico‘...

Jesus would be a liberal, right?
On Thursday night I appeared on “The Ed Schultz Show” on MSNBC, answering Newt Gingrich's latest attack on the jobless by suggesting Newt watch “It's a Wonderful Life” and reread the teachings of Jesus, which I offered to send him as my Christmas Present. President Obama is a man of quiet but deep Christian faith. Isn't it odd that every time the president quotes Scripture, he is met by angry rightists who seem to hate (hate is not too strong

Media amnesia on "death panels" myth
One of the most frustrating aspects of the media's coverage of politics is the way they treat deceptive factual claims. As I've often pointed out, these claims are often reported in a "he said," "she said" format that provides readers with no indication that the statement in question is misleading or false. And even when reporters do characterize these statements accurately, it rarely creates a lasting precedent within their news organization. Instead, these outlets typically suffer a sort of ...

White House May Reintroduce 'Death Panels'
The Obama Administration has restored one of the most Controversial provisions of the new Health Care law. The New York Times reported the new policy will let the government pay doctors for end-of-life counseling. That counseling could include doctors discouraging patients from trying everything medically possible that might keep them alive. "The infamous Section 1233 is still alive and kicking," said Elizabeth Wickham, Executive Director of LifeTree, a pro-life Christian educational ministry....

Twitter roundup
BrendanNyhan Dec 28, 2010 at 1:01pm As predicted (https://j.mp/c9Fe3v), overemphasis on Obama staff as cause of/solution to structural political problems https://j.mp/gYxThi Blaming staff for structural problems - Brendan Nyhan Back in January, I predicted a rash of process-based explanations of President Obama's declining political fortunes in 2010: During the next eleven months, it will become increasingly obvious th... Obama's insular White House worries his allies - latimes.com Bren...

Slide Show: Blizzard Cartoons
The Boxing Day Blizzard of 2010 has stranded travelers across the country, knocked out transit service in much of the Northeast, and extended the holiday weekend for many workers in the New York area. With the hope of alleviating cabin fever and departure-delay anxiety, here is a selection of snowy cartoons from our archive. By Opie Everett, January 13, 1962. By Whitney Darrow, Jr., January 13, 1968. By Donald Reilly, February 4, 1974. By Robert Weber, February 18, 1974. By Gahan Wilson, Februar...

Hot Airs top 50 posts in 2010: 41-50
The number-crunchers at the Home Office have given us the list of the most-read posts at Hot Air over the past year, thanks to a little wizardry from the database geeks (of which I proudly count myself a member).  Over the next five days, I’ll roll out the list in blocks of 10 as we march through the rest of the year and link back to these posts.  That, of course, will make them even more widely read, but also will give us a chance to look back at some of these issues in perspective. #...

Headline of the day
From the Hill: “White House Tries To Smother New ‘Death Panel’ Talk.” Worthy of the New York Daily News. Hell, it is worthy of the New York Post. ...

End-of-life counseling part of new Medicare policy
The New York Times reported over the weekend that a provision of Health Care reform Legislation that was abandoned after it became the focus of conservative outrage is making a return, this time as part of a new policy outlined in a Medicare Regulation. Voluntary counseling on end-of-life decisions was attacked by conservative pundits and politicians throughout the debate over Health Care reform, eventually labeled as “Death Panels.” The service would require Medicare to pay for end-...

Berwick Sets Up Death Panels By Fiat
"If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." -- Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol Sarah Palin was right. John Boehner -- make that Speaker-elect of the House John Boehner -- was right. While Americans were busy celebrating with family and friends and presumably not paying attention to the news, the New York Times, in a story ironically dated Christmas Day -- a holiday celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace -- reported the foll...

THE HILL: White House Tries To Smother New Death Panel Talk. Get that pillow off of my face!
THE HILL: White House Tries To Smother New “Death Panel” Talk. Get that pillow off of my face! ...

North Carolina editorial roundup
If you're over 65 and want to consult with your doctor about which life-prolonging medical treatments you'd want or not want if you were incapacitated and dying, should Medicare pay your doctor for offering that medical advice? If you've ever watched a spouse, son or daughter struggle with decisions about what an aging, comatose or terminally ill patient would want — feeding tube? ventilator? resuscitation? — then you know the importance of the patient himself or herself thinking thr...

Sneaking end-of-life consultations into Obamacare
Jae C. Hon/AP Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin made the term"Death Panels"famous during the debate over ObamaCare last year. A new Regulation has revived the debate. During the debate over ObamaCare last year, Controversy erupted over a Medicare provision related to end-of-life consultations with doctors. Following well-publicized criticism from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin concerning government "death panels," the provision was promptly dropped. But now the New York Times reports that it has be...

'Death panels' controversy: Is Obama avoiding Congress?
President Obama talks with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in the Oval Office Nov. 4. Health and Human Services has included expanded 'voluntary advance care planning' consultations in the rules it is writing for the health-care reform law. Critics deride the idea as 'Death Panels.' In a move that could resuscitate the partisan battle over what Sarah Palin dubbed "death panels," the Obama Administration is set to implement a Controversial federal health-care provi...

Backdoor Death Panels?
When the Health Care overhaul was stumbling its way through Congress early this year, Sarah Palin was excoriated by Democrats for suggesting that the nascent law included “Death Panels” for the elderly in order to save costs of treating the oldest and Most Expensive patients. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Palin wrote that Obama had asked Congress to create an independent Medicare Advisory Council--an unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. She p...

The Paulding County brief political frets of the day
Paulding County, Georgia - While the Paulding County Political Bytes of the week will continue on a periodic basis, it is time to ratchet it up a bit and present a few government absurdness during the week. Democrats just love unions. Why? An average stagehand at Lincoln Center in NYC makes $290K a year. Any union members at the Dallas Theater? Would you allow your mother to be treated this way? Courtesy of MEMRI, the Middle East Research Institute released a disturbing video of a woman in...

The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired
In June, I examined the long, strange, and multi-layered relationship between Poulsen and Lamo, and in that piece raised the issue of Wired's severe journalistic malfeasance in withholding these chat logs.  But this matter needs to be re-visited now for three reasons... - Whew! We Survived Christmas! Please read our About Page, our Disclaimer, and our Comments Policy. Please note: InformationLiberation is neither liberal or conservative. When one takes the time to research the "li...

MSNBCs Rachel Maddow Beats Fox On A Fairly Meaningless Holiday Night
Cable news Ratings, December 23, 2010: •The Rachel Maddow Show-on an otherwise asterisk-worthy pre-holiday night, with most shows running taped fare and/or helmed by fill-in hosts-pulled out a rare win over Hannity, beating out the usual Fox News timeslot winner by 11,000 viewers 25-54. •On CNN, another rarity: the top performing show of the night was the first hour of Situation Room, which posted 166,000 viewers 25-54 and beat CNN’s next-best performing show, Parker Spitze...

The Calm Before the Storm in Sacramento
The day after the Budget is presented, the battle will begin. This year as a result of Proposition 25 which passed last November with solid margins will allow the Legislature to pass a Budget with a simple majority vote. This means the Republicans cannot stall the Budget as they have in the past ten or so years and use that obstruction as a tool for their own policy agenda. On the surface one might say, great. The State will get a Budget on time. Wow. Hold that thought. What happens when one pol...

Obama's Birth certificate: Hawaii Governor Abercrombie's Birther mission
Birthers are a group of wacky Conspiracy theorists that claim President Barack Obama was born on foreign soil, usually Kenya. Birthers claim Obama's Birth Certificate, or more exactly his certificate of live birth, is a forgery. Birthers claim Obama is an illegitimate president because he is not an American Citizen. Governor Abercrombie is initiating a process to make policy changes that would allow Hawaii to release additional evidence that Obama was born in Honolu...