CNN's Kurtz beclowns himself while trying to cheap shot Gov. Palin

Health care mandates are distinctly different from auto insurance mandates
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NewsBuster Noel Sheppard caught CNN's Howard Kurtz in the act of trying to cheap-shot Governor Palin with a tweet:

Unfortunately, the joke's on him for his mocking of the former vice presidential candidate conveyed to his 73,000 followers his own total ignorance of insurance mandates:

How addle-minded.

What folks like Kurtz conveniently ignore is states that have car insurance mandates don't require all of their citizens to own cars.

As such, it is not a mandate to purchase car insurance. It is a mandate to purchase car insurance only if you own and drive an automobile.

This is a distinction media members like Kurtz for some reason can't grapple with.

Beyond this, in states with such requirements, the car owner is mandated to purchase liability insurance only. This insures that if the driver inflicts medical or property damage upon another individual with his/her automobile, he/she has insurance to cover those damages.

However, states do not require car owners to purchase collision or comprehensive insurance which covers damages to one's own health and property.

This is another important distinction, for the individual mandate associated with ObamaCare is a requirement for people to insure health risks to themselves not others.

[More]

We love the smell of media hubris in the morning. It smells like... victory!

- JP

Gov. Palin: 'Seriously, this is corrupt'

-by Josh Painter
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Commenting on news that about one fifth of all Obamacare waivers granted last month went to more than three dozen businesses in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s district, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told The Daily Caller tat the waiver process is “corrupt.” According to the Obama Administration's Department of Health and Human Services, the businesses in the former Speaker's district are mostly restaurants and cafes, plus a few upscale hotels and clubs.

“Unflippingbelievable! No, wait, it is believable,” Palin said in an email to TheDC. “Seriously, this is corrupt. And anyone who still supports the Pelosi-Reid-Obama agenda of centralized government takeovers of the free market and the corresponding crony capitalism is, in my book, complicit.”

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner told TheDC this is another “backroom sweetheart deal” for Obamacare:

“It looks like ObamaCare’s backroom sweetheart deals didn’t end when it became law,” Steel said in an email to TheDC. “Remember when former Speaker Pelosi said we needed to pass the bill to find out what was in it? I guess once they found out, the high-end eateries and spas in her Congressional District weren’t big fans.”

Sister Toljah has more commentary on this revolting development here.

- JP

Mark Levin: IAPB is the death panel Sarah Palin warned about

"Sarah Palin was exactly correct when she called this a death panel."
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h/t: theblogprof

- JP

Jeannie DeAngelis: Pelosi Proves Palin's Point

The former Speaker is Washington's newest Death Panel Diva
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At the American Thinker Blog, Jeannie DeAngelis is the latest to point out that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have unwittingly proved Gov. Palin's original point that the Democrat's idea of health care reform policy is more of a threat to Americans than disease itself:

When the health care debate was raging, one of arguments from ObamaCare opponents was that an eventual shortage of government monies would result in lost lives. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was mocked and disparaged as a fool for warning Americans that ObamaCare would usher in "death panels" where, due to budgetary restrictions, the aged and chronically ill would be denied care.

Even President Barack Obama joined smarmy liberal comedians like Bill Maher to publicly scoff at the idea of "death panels." The left condemned what they called outlandish scare tactics employed by conservatives attempting to stop a policy that would provide coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans, but in effect would put the government in control of life and death issues.

Fast-forward to 2011 and the very people who condemned Sarah Palin and the Republicans for being over-the-top on the anxiety chart became the harbingers of imminent death panels, only this time the fatalities would be driven by budget cuts.

Take for example Nancy Pelosi saying that the budget bill would starve six million seniors to death and that impoverished children would be jettisoned out of the Head Start program. Worse than that, Nancy said that Republicans, led by Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), were declaring an all-out "war on women."

[...]

According to Nancy, even modest spending cuts would result in a nation of unemployed, underpaid, uneducated, penniless, sick females unable to retire. Pelosi predicted American women would be destined to roam the streets like zombies, riddled with cancer and missing womanly parts of their anatomy, all victims of "the ideological old style agenda of the Republicans."

This is the woman who "called out former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) for having made the ‘lie of the year' for claiming the healthcare bill would set up ‘death panels.'"

[More]

- JP

Day By Day (February 5, 2011)

Sleeping with the...
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Good morning! It's a wonderful life if we just take it Day By Day:



Please support Chris Muir's pro-Palin Day By Day.

- JP

Day By Day (February 4, 2011)

True Colors
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Good morning! It's a wonderful life if we just take it Day By Day:


Please support Chris Muir's pro-Palin Day By Day.

- JP

Don Surber: Obama hare, Palin tortoise

The death panels idea is not far-fetched
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Our out-of-touch president could lose all 50 states to Sarah Palin next year, comments the Charleston Daily Mail's Don Surber, who says Obama is the hare, and Gov. Palin is the tortoise:

Sarah Palin learned first-hand as a governor that “government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost.”

Medicaid — run by the states but funded in large part by Congress — pays as little as 70 cents on the dollar for services rendered. That unpaid 30 cents is passed on to privately insured patients, who then see their premiums soar. This then gets twisted into the government making the case for government-run health care since it saves money.

The death panels idea is not far-fetched.

Britain calls its death panel NICE. It denies drugs for sick patients saying Avastin and other medications are too expensive.

Obama already is playing NICE by revoking approval of Avastin retroactively — based on price, and not on the safety or the competence of the drug.

That is a death panel, plain and simple.

Of course, most conservatives knew this. Why credit Sarah Palin?

Because she got attention.

And she roped-a-doped the president.

[...]

So the president and his smug buddies — Rahm, Axelrod and Gibbs — went after Sarah Palin tooth and tong, rather tackle the legitimate criticisms and worries. People who have lived through the Depression and World War II know that money is not unlimited. Talk of “saving” $500 billion from Medicare comes out of their hides. Instead of reasoning with them, Obama mocked their concerns.

[ More]

- JP

James Taranto: 'Death Panels' Revisited

How Sarah Palin helped defeat ObamaCare's deceptive advertising
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The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto argues that U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson's recent ruling declaring The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would have been a more difficult judicial decision had ObamaCare been politically popular:

But it did not and does not. Americans never bought the bill of goods that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and their supporters in the formerly mainstream media tried to sell. A good deal of the credit goes to Sarah Palin, for coining the phrase "death panel" in an August 2009 Facebook post.

Four months later PolitiFact.com, a project of the left-leaning St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, named the phrase "lie of the year"

[...]

In truth, PolitiFact was more vulnerable to the charge of lying than Palin was, for its highly literal, out-of-context interpretation of her words was at best extremely tendentious.

[...]

Palin put the term "death panel" in quotes to indicate that she was using it figuratively. She was not lying but doing just the opposite: conveying a fundamental truth about ObamaCare. Proponents were describing it as a sort of fiscal perpetual-motion machine: We're going to give free insurance to tens of millions of people and reduce the deficit! As a matter of simple arithmetic, the only way to do that is by drastically curtailing medical benefits.

"Health care by definition involves life and death decisions," Palin wrote. ObamaCare necessarily expands the power of federal bureaucrats to make such decisions, and it creates enormous fiscal pressures to err on the side of death. Whether it establishes literal panels for that purpose is a hair-splitting quibble. By naming this "lie of the year," PolitiFact showed itself to be less seeker of truth than servant of power.

President Obama, meanwhile, treated Palin's criticism as a joke. As we noted at the time, he told a New Hampshire town meeting: "The rumor that's been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for 'death panels' that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we've decided that we don't--it's too expensive to let her live anymore." The transcript records that the audience laughed at this callous "joke."

The perpetual-motion claim wasn't the only deception at the heart of the argument for ObamaCare...

[More]

h/t: Benyamin Korn

- JP

NY Sun: The Palin Patch

Palin wins again
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Excerpted from today's editorial in The New York Sun:

Hats off to President Obama for what the New York Times reports this morning is a reversal of course by which the administration will drop the use of a regulation to cover under Obamacare end-of-life planning that the Congress had specifically declined to provide via the legislative process. One could call it the “Palin Patch,” after the former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, whose warning that this kind of planning, when funded by the government, could lead to what amount to “death panels.”

It happens that we are not against end-of-life planning.

[...]

It also happens , however, that we share Mrs. Palin’s concern, particularly when the counseling is coming from doctors rather than sages. Covering such counseling via a government program that is also paying for the medical treatment seems all too likely to lead to the kind of death panels of which Mrs. Palin warned, which is no doubt why congress took the funding out of the Obamacare bill in the first place. Better to leave such matters, which involve the nexus of medicine and religion and ethics, in private hands.

That wasn’t what moved the Obama administration to make the Palin patch. According to the Times report — in a story by Robert Pear, who also broke the story of administration’s attempt to sneak end-of-life counseling into use by regulation after Congress had refused to do it by legislation — the administration had come to recognize the procedural error and “political concerns were also a factor.”

[More]

Meanwhile, Politico's Ben Smith was more succinct:

"Palin wins again"

- JP

Jeffrey Lord: Berwick Sets Up Death Panels By Fiat

"Governor Palin has been vindicated"
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It's about much more than just death panels, as if they aren't dangerous enough, explains Jeffrey Lord at American Spectator. The more disturbing issue -- and a threat to the American idea of freedom and liberty -- is the manner in which the Obama Administration intends to implement death panels. They will be forced on an unwilling citizenry by "a central government of rule-making un-elected bureaucrats":

Sarah Palin was right.

John Boehner -- make that Speaker-elect of the House John Boehner -- was right.

[...]

In other words, the 2009 charge leveled by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and the then-House Minority Leader Boehner that Obama fully intended to set up what Palin termed government "death panels" -- panels that Boehner said would set the government on the road to euthanasia -- is no longer a charge.

It's reality. By executive fiat -- in this case a new Medicare rule issued by Obama Medicare chief Dr. Donald Berwick.

Palin, who made the charge on her Facebook page on August 7, 2009 during the health care debates, came under a fusillade of scornful and demeaning political attacks from political opponents after pointedly saying this about the prospect of death panels:

And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. 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. Such a system is downright evil.

Her famous sharp criticism was enough for the plan to be quickly dropped by Congress.

Now, with Americans absorbed in a festive holiday and ignoring Washington momentarily, the Obama administration has found a way to achieve its death panel goal anyway...

[...]

Governor Palin has been vindicated. Speaker Boehner has been vindicated.

And Palin's critics in particular now have more than holiday eggnog all over their faces. Obama's Dr. Berwick has re-ignited one of the most hotly controversial issues of the entire health care debate just as a conservative ascendancy prepares to take power in the next Congress. With no less than Boehner himself taking the gavel from Nancy Pelosi as the new Speaker of the House.

What does this new rule say and do, exactly?

It inserts the federal government in end-of-life planning, precisely as Palin said was Obama's intention. Not, as was true of its original legislative formulation, every five years. But annually. No one of any sense objects to an individual and doctor having end-of-life discussions about living wills and such whenever they wish. Only the Obama administration and its obsession for control wants the government to incentivize the issue so that doctors must raise it annually, a system that on its face pressures the most deeply vulnerable of Americans in the most Orwellian of terms to end their lives.

Control and pressure. Pressure and control. This is the only two-step philosophical/political dance liberals know. It is, as it were, primal. And the Berwick Medicare rule, constructed in secret and released on Christmas Day when it no one is looking, is a perfect example -- if hardly the only example -- of how the Obama Administration views its role. Control and pressure. Pressure… and control.

Versus the conservative concept (shorthand version) of liberty and freedom.

And Palin's critics in particular now have more than holiday eggnog all over their faces.

[More]

This Orwellian nightmare serves to remind us, Lord points out, that Governor Palin took almost all of the heat for taking this issue, buried deep as it was in thousands of pages of obscure legislative doublespeak, and raising it to the national consciousness. Her critics have been proven wrong by Berwick, Reich and other authoritarian leftists. Knowing the Palinophobes as we do, no one expects them to own up and give her due credit for being right.

But nothing they say or do can change the fact that Gov. Palin clearly has demonstrated real leadership on this issue -- leadership which Lord suggests is of presidential caliber -- by sticking to her guns on a matter which "is now coming back to bite the American people in the form of a new Medicare rule on death panels -- reported of all days on Christmas day."

Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.

- JP

NY Sun: Gov. Palin's beat on ‘Death Panels’ is confirmed by NY Times

Is she smarter than the media and the Congress, or just more honest?
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Sarah Palin scooped the corrupt media in August, 2009 with a series of Facebook statements warning that the Obama administration intended to ration health care. Now, sixteen months later, we learn that since Obama won't be able to achieve rationing by legislative means (since the next House of Representatives with its Republican majority, would never go along with it) , it will do so through regulation. An editorial in today's New York Sun credits the New York Times with confirming Gov. Palin's warnings:

At the time, Mrs. Palin’s prophecy touched off an enormous hue and a cry among the liberal intelligentsia, so much so that the scheme was dropped in Congress. Yet even though it was dropped by Congress the New York Times is reporting that “the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation” and will start doing so January 1. The Times says that the government “will now pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.”

It seems to be the administration's conception of democracy that after the Congress so pointedly left this out of the Obamacare legislation the scheme can be advanced by regulation. The point is underscored in Robert Pear’s dispatch in the Times, which quotes one of the congressmen originally advocating for the so-called death panels, Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, as saying of the regulatory approach, “we won’t be shouting it from the rooftops because we aren’t out of the woods yet” and warning that the regulation could yet be “modified or reversed.”

No doubt the defenders of Obamacare will argue that this kind of advance directive is hardly a death panel. Participation is voluntary; it’s but “advice.” However, since the “aggressive life-sustaining treatment” being decided upon would be paid for by the same government that is funding the advice on whether to go for it, one can see that this is a step toward exactly the kind of death panel that Mrs. Palin warned about. She used as a proxy for all of us the fate of down-syndrome children like her own son Trig.

So how was Gov. Palin able to see this coming when so many others could not and many more were in denial? The Sun's editors say it doesn’t matter:

It’s enough that she was just ahead of the others, and the point is one to mark. She has become, at a relatively young age and by whatever means, a savvy woman. We noticed it, say, when she suggested the best way to handle the question of the West Bank settlements was to let the Israelis decide, a policy the administration is now following. We noticed it when she went to Hong Kong and warned about the collapse in the value of the dollar and spoke of the importance of gold.

It was apparent when she dove in before other politicians and the intelligentsia and warned about the dangers of the Federal Reserve’s second round of quantitative easing. And when, in advance of the BP oil-spill disaster, she’d been campaigning to develop our onshore energy resources. And when she began branding as her own the idea of commonsense, conservative constitutionalism — a year before a resurgent GOP is preparing to open the 112th Congress with a reading of the entire text of the Constitution.

Even though Sarah Palin was not the first politician to discuss these issues, The Sun's editors point our that she did manage to elevate a number of them to the national debate. Gov. Palin, who earned a degree in journalism, say the editors, understands one of journalism’s core principles: "It’s not a scoop until it’s played like a scoop."

- JP

Day By Day (December 8, 2010)

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Good Morning! It's a wonderful life if we just take it Day By Day.



Support Pro-Palin Day By Day

- JP

Sarah Palin was right: Krugman calls for 'Death Panels'

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Lefty economist Paul Krugman would never overtly admit that Sarah palin has been right all along about Death Panels, but his Freudian slip on network television Sunday was tantamount to such an admission. NewsBuster Noel Sheppard reports:

Although he was likely taking a swipe at former governor Sarah Palin with the reference, Paul Krugman on Sunday recommended "death panels" as a means of helping to balance the federal budget.

In a Roundtable discussion on ABC's "This Week," the New York Times columnist said of what recently came out of the President's deficit commission, "Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes"

KRUGMAN: No. Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes. It's going to be that we're actually going to take Medicare under control, and we're going to have to get some additional revenue, probably from a VAT. But it's not going to happen now.

After he realized what he had said, Krugman later tried to clarify his remarks:

By trying to clarify, Krugman seems to be digging himself deeper into a hole, for "how much we’re willing to spend for extreme care" was part of Sarah Palin's point when she first wrote about this at Facebook in August 2009.

[...]

In the end, Krugman's attempt at being "deliberately provocative" was really him saying in front of the cameras what Palin and others warned was the danger of allowing further government intrusion into healthcare.

If only such dangers were better explained to the public before Congress voted on this bill in March.

Rush is all over this.

We love the smell of liberal hubris in the morning. It smells like... vindication!

- JP

Sarah Palin: 'This is not a time to compromise our principles'

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Sarah Palin, on Laura Ingraham's radio talk show today, took issue with Republicans who say that only bits and pieces of the unpopular ObamaCare bill should be repealed. Saying that conservatives should not compromise their principles, she insisted that the entire measure must be sent to the scrap heap instead:


Help Palin TV acquire more Sarah Palin videos. Contribute here

- JP

Sarah Palin: 'Tomorrow it’s our turn'

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On Facebook Monday, Gov. Palin reminded voters that Congressional Democrats went against the will of the American people and voted for ObamaCare 30 weeks ago. Tomorrow, she encouraged them, it's our turn:

Tomorrow Is Freedom Day!

Tomorrow is Election Day. Before you head to the polling place, take a moment to remember March 21st, when the Pelosi Congress cast its vote for Obamacare. The enduring image of that day is one of Congressional Democrats arrogantly dismissing the pleas of thousands of Americans gathered outside the Capitol Building begging them not to inflict this disastrous bill on us.

In the end this bill wasn’t about health care reform; it was about control and government mandates and fines for not purchasing a government-approved insurance plan. The bill jeopardizes the very thing it was supposed to reform. Every day we hear about doctors leaving the Medicare system; increased premiums with talk of price controls; rationing becoming standard practice; and panels of faceless bureaucrats deciding which categories of treatment are worthy of funding based on efficiency calculations (which I called a “death panel”).

The morning after this terrible bill was passed by the House, I wrote that “we will remember the corrupt deals, the corrupt process, the lack of transparency, the deceptive gimmicks to game the CBO score, and the utter disregard for the will of the American people.”

They voted against our will that day. Tomorrow it’s our turn to vote against them and put our government back on the side of the people. This is our chance to rebuke their big government power grab, reject their unwanted “fundamental transformation” of America, and start the process of repealing this bill before it buries us under a mountain of debt.

So let’s fire Pelosi, retire Reid, and send all those who were responsible for that disgraceful bill a message that America is still about “We the People.”

Tomorrow is our Freedom Day.

Enshrined in our Constitution is the process for the peaceful transfer of power. Our revolution continues each election at the ballot box, and tomorrow we will renew the spirit of the American Revolution once again. Let freedom ring!

- Sarah Palin

- JP

Gov. Palin tells Greta how the Tea Party movement intimidates both the GOP and Dems

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More video from Sarah Palin's Monday night guest spot with Greta was aired on Tuesday's show.

Part 3: Who's More Rattled By the Tea Party?



- JP

Video: Sarah Palin 'On the Record' with Greta, 9/27/10

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Part 1: ObamaCare and Taking Back the 20:


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Part 2: The GOP & the Tea party movement, endorsements, Bristol on DWTS:



- JP

Sarah Palin: It’s time to make a stand! Let’s take back the 20!

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Now that the primaries are over, Gov. Palin is taking the great political debate to the next level, starting with a new website, announced via Facebook and Twitter:

Lies, Damned Lies – Obamacare 6 Months Later; It’s Time to Take Back the 20!

It’s now six months since President Obama took control of one-sixth of the private sector economy with his health care “reform,” and the first changes to our health care system come into effect today. Despite overwhelming public dislike of the bill, we were told that D.C. knows best, and there was nothing to worry about, and we’d be better off swallowing the pill called Obamacare; so, in defiance of the will of the people, the President and his party rammed through this mother of all unfunded mandates. Nancy Pelosi said Congress had to pass the bill so that Americans could “find out what is in it.” We found out that it’s even worse than we feared.

Remember when the president said, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”? Not true. In Texas alone a record number of doctors are leaving the Medicare system because of the cuts in reimbursements forced on them by Obamacare! The president of the Texas Medical Association, Dr. Susan Bailey, warns that “the Medicare system is beginning to implode.”

Remember the Obama administration’s promise that Obamacare would cut a typical family’s premium “by up to $2500 a year”? Not true. In fact, fueled by reports that insurers expect premiums to rise by as much as 25 percent as a result of Obamacare, Senate Democrats are contemplating the introduction of price controls.

Remember when the president said in his address to Congress that “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions”? That turned out to be yet another one of those “You lie!” moments. We found out that Obamacare-mandated high risk insurance pools set up in states like Pennsylvania and New Mexico will fund abortions after all.

Remember the promise that Obamacare would “strengthen small businesses”? Not true either. The net result of Obamacare is that small businesses will face higher health care costs, new Medicare taxes, and higher regulation compliance costs, while the much-hyped health care tax credit for small businesses turns out to be almost impossible to obtain.

Remember the president’s promise that his bill would ensure “everyone [has] some basic security”? False again. Besides the great uncertainly that Obamacare hampers businesses with, companies now find it is actually cheaper to pay the $2000 per employee fine imposed by Obamacare than to keep insuring their workforce. This leaves millions of American workers at risk of losing their employer-provided health insurance.

And remember when the Obama administration said they would not be “rationing care” in the future? That ol’ “death panels” thing I wrote about last year? That was before Obamacare was passed. Once it passed, they admitted there was going to be rationing after all. There has to be. The reality of Obamacare is that it enshrines what the New York Times called “The Power of No” – the government’s power to say no to your request for treatment of the people you love. The fact that the president used a recess appointment to push through the nomination of Dr. Donald Berwick as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services tells you all you need to know about this administration’s intentions. After all, Berwick is the man who said, “The decision is not whether we will ration care – the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

By the way, when the administration was talking about that independent board that has the statutory power to decide which categories of treatment are worthy of funding based on efficiency calculations (that, again, sounded to me like a panel of faceless bureaucrats making life and death decisions about your loved ones – which, again, is what I referred to as a “death panel”), it was another opportunity for Americans to hear the truth about Obamacare’s intentions.

So, yes, those rationing “death panels” are there, and so are the tax increases that the president also promised were “absolutely not” in his bill. (Aren’t you tiring of the untruths coming from this White House and the liberals in Congress?) When the state of Florida filed a challenge to Obamacare on the basis that the mandates in the bill are unconstitutional, the Obama Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss the suit by citing the Anti-Injuction Act, which blocks courts from interfering with the federal government’s ability to collect taxes. Yes, taxes! Once the bill was passed it was no longer politically inconvenient for the Obama administration to admit that it makes no difference whether the payment is a tax or a penalty because it’s “assessed and collected in the same manner.” The National Taxpayer Advocate has already warned that “Congress must provide sufficient funding” to allow the IRS to collect this new tax. Pretty soon we’ll be paying taxes just to make it possible for the IRS to collect all the additional taxes under Obamacare! Seems as if this is another surprise that the public found out about after the bill was rammed through.

But perhaps the most ridiculous promise of all was the president’s assurance that Obamacare will lead to “bending the curve” on health care spending. Yes, rationing is a part of the new system, and yes, Obamacare does raise taxes. But because the new government managed system is so incredibly complicated and expensive to run, health care spending will actually rise instead of fall. Don’t believe me? Then take a look at the Congressional Budget Office’s admittance that the CBO’s original estimate of the total costs of the bill were off by around $115 billion. Its new estimate is now above $1 trillion, and even that may be way too low. A more realistic figure calculated by the Pacific Research Institute puts the number at $2.5 to $3 trillion over the next 10 years! This is probably what President Obama was referring to when he admitted recently that he had known all along that “at the margins” his proposals were going to drive up costs. Give us a break! Only in this administration would they refer to a $3 trillion spending increase as “marginal.” Next time he comes to us with another one of his harebrained proposals for a budget-busting federal power grab, let’s make sure we remember the president’s admission that he was lying all along when he told us his health care plan was going to cut costs. He is increasing costs. He admits it now. Period.

Higher costs and worse care – is it any wonder why people are overwhelmingly in favor of repealing and replacing Obamacare? Politicians who have vacillated on this issue need to be fired. Candidates who don’t support “repeal and replace” don’t deserve your support. No amount of money spent on Washington’s “government-wide apolitical public information campaign” (otherwise known as “propaganda”) will convince Americans that this awful legislation is anything other than a debt-driven big government train wreck. We need to repeal and replace it, and that can only happen if we elect a new Congress that will make scrapping Obamacare one of its top priorities. We can replace it with pro-private sector, patient-oriented reform that the GOP has proposed.

On March 23, when Obamacare was signed into law, I launched my “Take back the 20” campaign, focusing on 20 congressional districts that John McCain and I carried in 2008 which are or were represented by members of Congress who voted in favor of Obamacare. They need to be held accountable for those votes. They voted for Obamacare. Now we can vote against them. We need to replace them with representatives who will respect the will of the people.

That’s why today I’m launching a new Take Back the 20 website at www.takebackthe20.com!

TakeBackthe20.com provides information about the candidates in these 20 districts who are committed to repealing and replacing Obamacare. It has links to their personal websites and their donation pages. It allows you to read up on them, and then support them in their race to defeat those who gave us this terrible bill.

We have to send Washington a message that it’s not acceptable to disregard the will of the people. We have to tell them enough is enough. No more defying the Constitution. No more driving us off a financial cliff. We must repeal and replace Obamacare with patient-centered, results-driven, free market reform that provides solutions to people of all income levels without bankrupting our country.

It’s time to make a stand! Let’s take back the 20!

- Sarah Palin

- JP

WSJ Opinion Journal Live: Palin Wins, ObamaCare Loses

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Senior editorial writer Joseph Rago and OpinionJournal.com assistant editor Allysia Finley analyze an election shocker in Alaska:



- JP

Video: Gov. Palin talks domestic policy on 'Hannity'

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From TheRightScoop:



- JP