Thursday Open Thread

It’s open thread time – time to talk about whatever you like. Feel free to drop links in the comments or just comment on the weather. Nothing is off-topic!

Here’s something to talk about, Joe Biden talked to Jon Stewart on Tuesday.

Part 1

Part 2

Sarah Palin and “death panels:”

The former half-term governor was asked by ABC News about her use of the phrase “death panels,” which is generally considered one of the more ridiculous lies of the health care debate. In response, Palin told Barbara Walters that she wasn’t being literal, and compared her choice of phrases to Reagan referring to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.”

“It’s kind like what Reagan used to do, though, when he talked about, say, the ‘evil empire.’ You’re never going to find the evil empire on a map of the world.

“And yet [Reagan] talked about that, in terms that people could understand — kind of rationing down, not complicating the issue. But he, with the issue of the evil empire at the time, used those two words to get people to shake up, wake up, find out what’s going on here. Now, had he been criticized and, and mocked, and, and condemned for ever using a term that wasn’t actually there on a map, or in documents, we probably would never have succeeded in, in crushing the evil empire, and winning that.”

Specifically on the notion of “death panels,” Palin added that President Obama is “not lying” because “those two words will not be found in any of those thousands of pages of different variations of the health care bill,” but she nevertheless thinks the president is being “disingenuous” because there will be “bureaucrats” who “will be able to call the shots, based on somebody’s subjective judgment of productivity, of somebody’s life, who will receive the health care that needs to be rationed, and who will not.”

I can’t really make hide nor hair of that explanation except that Sarah Palin doesn’t know what she’s talking about.