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In our number three most viewed C&L video of 2011, Karoli reminds us of why we can all be thankful that Sarah Palin is not a contender in the current field of GOP presidential candidates, although I'm sure the comedians out there are sorry she's not providing them with more material as she did here.

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Let's begin the debunking of this shameless exercise in lying to the American public with this: the so-called 'cuts' to Medicare in the Affordable Care Act were really an end to the Bush-era effort to privatize it. Subsidies were eliminated and/or phased out over time, forcing insurers to compete with traditional Medicare. This means they don't get guaranteed profits, courtesy of the American taxpayer and so they have turned to their bought-and-paid-for senators to distort the truth and erode growing support for "Obamacare". In fact, they're so intent on perpetuating these mythical cuts that they have written a competing Medicare handbook to the official government version.

From the transcript:

VAN SUSTEREN: The government has Medicare new 2012 book out. And you guys have a competing Medicare 2012. This is your book. Is this a parody?

SEN. TOM COBURN, R-OKLA.: You might consider it. It's much more truthful than the other one.

VAN SUSTEREN: In what way?

COBURN: In terms of describing what the Obamacare legislation has done to Medicare patients.

BARRASSO: How they took $500 billion away from our seniors on Medicare not to save and strengthen Medicare but to start a whole new government program for other people, how they will have unelected bureaucrats decisions about who gets what care and how much the government pays for it. You can go item by item why Medicare is more at risk now in terms of going bankrupt than it was before Obamacare passed.

What follows is an effort to spark an inter generational war. In addition to being dishonest, it's nothing more than yet another cynical attempt to pit youngers against elders for votes and support, something Republicans can't find much of these days.

VAN SUSTEREN: So if I am clear, we were on an unsustainable path before President Obama's national health care. Then he shepherded through the national health care and we are still in the unsustainable path. But you say $530 billion was taken out of Medicare. Where -- what was it taken from? And where did it go?

COBURN: It's going to go for a innovation council, $10 billion. It will go to subsidize the state exchanges, mandated care that all of us will have to buy if we don't -- can't demonstrate that we have it. So there is a subsidy there.

So we are taking money that people have paid into Medicare, taking it out of Medicare and subsidizing the care for people who have not paid into Medicare.

COBURN: That's part of it. But the vast majority is going into other programs for other people for health care that Medicare dollars weren't paying for to begin with.

Got that? All the Medicare withholdings from your paychecks are counted as 'not paying' by Senator Coburn. Leave it to Greta to just let him go on and on over it too with no challenge.

The next statement is so outrageous he ought to be tried for it:

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Sarah Palin thinks it's all the media's fault that there has been so much intraparty squabbling among Republican candidates so far -- because they just want to make the GOP look bad.

So of course, this then gave her leeway last night on Greta Van Susteren's Fox show to launch into a nasty bit of payback directed at Newt Gingrich, who back in January warned Palin to "be more careful" with her words. From Lexis/Nexis:

PALIN: I think the principles in the Republican Party are sound. The planks in our platform are great. The idiosyncrasies of some of the characters within the party are -- you know, they are what they are. And the mainstream media really likes to capitalize on some infighting and some mistakes made within the party so they exacerbate it and make it sound worse than it is. But the planks and the platform are right for America.

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, isn't it our job, though, in the media to challenge the candidates, maybe put them in -- I'm not talking about being personal, but I mean, really grill them on some of the things they say about policies, even perhaps even the missteps or at least what is later called a misstep because sometimes those are the true intentions or the true views and someone after 24 hours has sort of rethought it after getting some heat.

PALIN: Absolutely. That is the media's appropriate role in holding an official or a potential candidate -- holding their feet to the fire, not playing the personal gotchas, but making sure that the record is clear regarding what it is that they say or the content, the context of what it is that they're saying. Yes, that's the media's role. If the media doesn't play that role, then they're not a cornerstone of the democracy that we would like to believe that they are.

VAN SUSTEREN: Do you think that the challenge that -- in the last 24, 36 hours, or 48 hours, there's been a challenge -- Speaker Gingrich for what he said about Congressman Paul Ryan's bill in terms of dealing with entitlements -- do you think the challenge of him by the media and everyone going after him was right or wrong or someplace in between?

PALIN: Well, I think that the media -- that we all have a right to ask Speaker Gingrich, what in the heck did you mean that Paul Ryan's budget plan is radical or social engineering? No, what is radical is not proposing a plan to counter Obama's budget plan that has us on the road to bankruptcy.

What Paul Ryan's plan does -- not only does it tackle the Medicare problems that are -- we're going to face just smack-dab in our face very shortly and allow for a safety net to be provided our seniors with health care coverage down the road, but Paul Ryan's plan saves us $1.2 billion a day, as compared to Obama's big government overspending, debt-induced budget plan that he's rammed down our throats.

VAN SUSTEREN: Yes, I thought it was sort of interesting, though, in this sort of whole exchange, I thought to myself, If I were Senator Rick Santorum, I would send flowers to Speaker Gingrich because Senator Santorum making the remark about your former running mate, John McCain, something about him not understanding or knowing torture and what -- something -- some reference to that because that's a question -- you never get near Senator McCain (INAUDIBLE) because he does know torture more than anybody else. I thought that he sort of -- he was sort of unscathed as much as he could be, that the fuss over Speaker Gingrich overshadowed him.

PALIN: You know what I thought after the whole Newt Gingrich thing in these last 24 hours, Greta, was, Bless his heart and every other good ol' boy's heart that's in that political game there in the Beltway. They don't really know any more than the rest of us. Greta, it was Newt Gingrich who told me in January of this year, Sarah Palin needs to slow down and really think through what it is that she has to say. Well, you know, he stumbles, too. We all stumble. We all have our strengths and our weaknesses.

Of course, if the media report this little kick in the nuts to Gingrich, it'll be their fault that voters might think there's some infighting going on over there in Republicanville.

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Yesterday the Supreme Court declined to fast track the Virginia challenge to the Affordable Care Act, which has Greta Van Susteren in a tizzy over those lazy Supreme Court justices who dare to take their three-month break while the health of America teeters in the balance.

Ken Cuccinelli was happy to oblige her, jumping right in with his assessment that states will spend "millions before taxpayers even see a band-aid or any health care", due to the cost of setting up exchanges in advance of implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

If their estimate is correct and June 2012 would be the earliest a Supreme Court decision would be made on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, that throws it right into the middle of the 2012 general election, which could really be a political neutron bomb. If the Supreme Court decision were a 5-4 ruling it unconstitutional, for example, it could play right into the hands of conservatives who will then begin touting their market-based reforms, a la Ken Cuccinelli at the end of this clip.

Maybe I'm just being cynical here, but I don't see the decision to delay it as particularly good news. It feels just as political as a decision to fast-track it would have been, delaying the outcome until we're right in the thick of the 2012 general election.

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Ann Coulter had an interesting theory about Donald Trump's Birtherism, which she explained last night to Sean Hannity. It seems that it's all a plot by the liberal media to discredit conservatives:

COULTER: Well, I think maybe I've been watching too much Charlie Sheen, because Donald Trump seems perfectly sane to me. Um, I don't know where he gets this two million dollars Obama has spent to keep his birth certificate quiet -- he posted his birth certificate on his Web page.

I am glad that Donald Trump is bringing it up, so that people who haven't really been paying attention and don't know that the American Spectator, Human Events, Fox News, ummm -- you know, every conservative outlet has already shot down this rumor -- which, by the way, was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Now they will have a chance to find out this is Donald Trump's Pierre Salinger moment -- you can't believe everything you read on the Internet, Obama has produced his birth certificate, there were announcements that ran in two contemporaneous Hawaiian newspapers at the time, the head of the Hawaiian medical records has announced, 'I have seen the long form you all want,' um -- I don't know why the long form is considered more credible than the short form, they're both from the same office.

The State Department accepts the short form -- or as we call it, the birth certificate. Hawaii accepts the birth certificate, short form -- so it is a conspiracy theory that won't die on the Internet, but every responsible conservative organization to look at it has shot it down. Which is why you normally hear it being talked about exclusively on the liberal cable stations.

HANNITY: Well, it's an interesting point, and one of the main people demanding it be released is, interestingly, thrill-up-our leg Chris Matthews ... why don't they just release it? It does raise a question. But you bring up good points, not the least of which -- we're going to talk to Donald Trump on this show later this week, we'll ask him -- I think a broader, bigger issue here is that, all of a sudden an issue that was on the periphery a little bit, he hits it, hits it hard, and people take note. So what is it about him that, you know, when he speaks, people listen -- and you know, those issues resonate.

COULTER: Well, two things. I think the main thing is, no conservative who talks on TV or has a column or has a magazine has mentioned the birth certificate, because we've looked at it and have discounted it. You have people who want to get hits to their Website or want to get listeners to their radio show will keep ginning people up about this. But it is one of the rare conservative con -- well, I suppose it's more conservative than liberal, only because it's anti-Obama, but I don't even know that these are conservatives promoting it. As I say, this came out of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

So Donald Trump is the only person who would be invited on a TV show who is pushing the Birther thing. That's why it's getting attention and of course, liberals are delighted. I know Obama is delighted.

...

No, you'll notice who's asking him about it -- it's the liberal media. They want to keep talking about it because it helps discredit all opposition to Obama. There are a lot of reasons to think Obama is a very bad president who is doing very bad things to this country. The idea that he was born in Kenya is not one of them. But it allows liberals, the mainstream media, the White House itself to go, well, the opposition is these crazy birthers.

Well, no it isn't. You haven't heard that on Fox News. You haven't heard it in Human Events and National Review or American Spectator -- all of which have shot it down.

Too bad that the right-wing media themselves kinda shoot down Coulter's theory.

You'll notice, for instance, that Coulter conspicuously omits from her list of "responsible" right-wing news organs WorldNutDaily, the center of the Birther Universe and -- last we checked -- a self-proclaimed "conservative" outlet. Indeed, its writers regularly appear on, you guessed it, Sean Hannity's show.

Oh, and they also publish Coulter's syndicated column.

Indeed, all this rant really proves is that Coulter doesn't watch Fox. Because if she did, she would know that Trump has been given free rein to spout his theories on Fox.

And as if to drive that point home, who should appear on Fox the very next hour? Donald Trump, phoning in to Greta Van Susteren's show and trumpeting his Birther theories yet again -- with only murmurs of contradiction from Van Susteren.

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Greta Van Susteren last night painted the Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge election today as being "twisted" because of the reaction the state has had to Gov. Scott Walker's outrageous agenda. In her slanted version of the election, she describes the "Big Union bosses" as the ones spending gobs of money against meek little Prosser -- but on the flip side, only "special interest" groups are donating to his side. Can Greta please explain to me why she failed to mention that her heartthrob from Alaska and bigwig electioneer, Sarah Palin, has been tweeting up a ton of support for the reelection of Prosser?

Well, Republicans are always the victims on Fox. A one-sided slant as usual. Tea Party groups are also spending a ton of money supporting him.

Four conservative groups, including the Tea Party Express, have combined to spend $1.2 million so far on pro-Prosser ads, according to a media-tracking group.
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One conservative group, the California-based Tea Party Express, is aiming to spend up to $200,000 on an ad that paints Kloppenburg as unqualified for a judgeship and a puppet of union bosses.

JoAnne Kloppenburg declined to go on the show, but let's face it. Greta knew that she would decline to do an interview with a network that is hostile to her and that Prosser would jump at the chance of getting his free ad space from Fox in hopes of ginning up more support for himself from the Tea Party crowd and throw as much dirt at JoAnne as possible.

I think it's inappropriate and unethical for Fox News to have candidates for public office on the night before an election, because it's a clear attempt to manipulate the election results. Prosser gets to throw bricks at Kloppenburg for free -- including defending himself on accusations that he failed to prosecute a child-abusing priest. The judge says that he was very sensitive to the family over the abuse, but thought the evidence was ambiguous and the two young boys didn't have the credibility to stand up to a well-established priest. What did he do? He got the priest banished from the area and asked to get him treatment because he never suspected him to be a serial abuser because, get this, back then nobody knew about those things? Huh? Two boys... How many boys have to be abused before they would get prosecuted by Prosser?

Greta brought up the dirty story of Prosser calling the Chief Justice of the Wisconsin court a "bitch' and threatening to "destroy her". Watch how she phrases the events. Calling the Chief Justice a bitch is not as bad as having somebody snitch on you. ya know. It was all a TRAP to ensnare him! Right.

VAN SUSTEREN: Justice Ann Walsh Bradley confirming that a fit of temper that you had by calling her a bitch and wanting to destroy her sent it not just to you, but to others and then she later released it to the newspaper. What in the world is going on in the WI Supreme Court that you're saying that kind of stuff to each other and snitching on each other and giving emails out and disclosing the private conversations of the State Supreme Court? What is going on?

PROSSER: Wow, there's a lot to try and untangle there. We're talking about an incident that occurred more than a year ago...( See, there's a statute of limitation on threatening and calling a female judge a bitch.) We're talking about multiple controversies that came to a head at the same time. It was an explosive situation. I said something I should not have said and that I regret and I apologize for, on the other hand (she really was a bitch and I did need to destroy her) I want people to know that I simply didn't go into it, a private conversation and suddenly pop out with this ill advised statement without any provocation.....

VAN SUSTEREN: At that point I think they were trying to trap you. I mean I'm not trying to defend you calling a Supreme Court Justice a bitch, but the fact that they memorialized it meant they were setting the trap on you on that one.

PROSSER: They were not only setting the trap, they were massaging the record, changing the record. I have to say it wasn't good behavior on my part, but, [sigh] this was not all my fault. There was some provocation here.

Yeah, just like a mouse looking for some cheese. OK, Greta ruled the nasty name-calling a trap in the first place, and he says Justice Abrahamson deserved it. Good job, Fox News. Greta has figured it all out. She never did get to the part where he said he wanted to destroy her. Does that have a statute of limitations too if he said it way back in 2010?

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Donald Trump was interviewed by phone by Greta Van Susteren yesterday and doubled down yet again on his Birtherism:

TRUMP: What does this have to do with race? This has absolutely nothing to do with race. The fact is that if you look at what's happened with respect to this birth certificate issue, he doesn't have it, he's spent millions of dollars on lawyers trying to get out of the issue, they give what's called a certificate of live birth, which doesn't even have a signature on it -- and anybody can get a certificate of live birth -- it's nothing to do with a birth certificate. And they are really reeling!

Now, they talk all sorts of things. You don't have a doctor or a nurse -- this is the president of the United States, and no doctor, no nurse, nobody's come forward saying, 'I delivered that beautiful baby.' There's so many things!

Even if you look at the newspaper, the so-called newspaper article in Hawaii -- that was days after he was born! So, that wasn't like when he was born! And if you really think about a couple of things -- whoever took a newspaper advertisement -- now these were poor people. These aren't rich people. Whoever took a newspaper advertisement to announce the birth of your baby? Now, I don't think you know of anybody, and I know of nobody -- and I know poor people and rich people, but I've never heard of taking a newspaper ad to advertise that you have a baby.

All Trump is really doing is proving his stupidity and gullibility -- not exactly desirable qualities in a president. At the very least, he's demonstrating how clueless and out of touch a rich guy he really is. Here's the newspaper birth announcement in question:

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This is from FactCheck.org, which explains that a pro-Hillary/anti-Obama blogger first dug this up from the Honolulu Advertiser's archives of Sunday, Aug. 31, 1961.

This isn't an advertisement -- rather, this is a standard newspaper birth announcement. You see, in the old days, before large corporations took over newspapers and forced them to gradually eviscerate their newsgathering functions, newspapers sent out their cops-and-courts reporters about once a week to collect all the previous week's birth listings from local hospitals. (This practice has long since fallen by numerous newsroom-budget-cutting waysides.) In other words, the Advertiser announcement was collected by the paper itself and stands as independent corroboration that Obama was born in a Honolulu hospital.

The fact that Trump doesn't know of anyone who has their birth listed in the paper by anything other than an ad indicates how out of touch this rich man really is.

And while we're mentioning the young couple's poverty ... does Trump really believe that both Barack Obama Sr. and a very pregnant Stanley Ann Dunham-Obama were able to make what was in 1961 a long and difficult and expensive journey to Kenya for young Barack's birth, and then return in time for Barack Sr. to resume his fall classes in Hawaii?

As for why no doctor has turned up claiming to have overseen Obama's birth, well, that would be because he is dead. The doctor in question was Dr. Rodney T. West, a since-deceased obstetrician who told his friends about Obama's birth at the time in a memorable fashion -- memorable enough that they wrote it down, like his friend Barbara Nelson:

“I may be the only person left who specifically remembers his birth. His parents are gone, his grandmother is gone, the obstetrician who delivered him is gone,” said Nelson, referring to Dr. Rodney T. West, who died in February at the age of 98. Here’s the story: Nelson was having dinner at the Outrigger Canoe Club on Waikiki Beach with Dr. West, the father of her college friend, Jo-Anne. Making conversation, Nelson turned to Dr. West and said: “‘So, tell me something interesting that happened this week,’” she recalls.

His response: “Well, today, Stanley had a baby. Now that’s something to write home about.”

The new mother was Stanley (later referred to by her middle name of Ann) Dunham, and the baby was Barack Hussein Obama.

“I penned the name on a napkin, and I did write home about it,” said Nelson, knowing that her father, Stanley A. Czurles, director of the Art Education Department at Buffalo State College, would be interested in the “Stanley” connection.

She also remembers Dr. West mentioning that the baby’s father was the first black student at the University of Hawaii and how taken he was by the baby’s name.

“I remember Dr. West saying ‘Barack Hussein Obama, now that’s a musical name,’” said Nelson, who grew up in Kenmore and went to Hawaii in 1959 to be in Jo-Anne’s wedding party. When Nelson was offered a job as a newspaper reporter and photographer at her friend’s wedding reception, it led to her living in Hawaii for 47 years. She returned to Kenmore in 2006.

As for the "Certificate of Live Birth" Obama has presented since 2008, Trump is simply lying when he claims that "anybody can get" one; the state of Hawaii, in fact, only hands them out to people it can certify were born there. (The lack of a signature is utterly insignificant; many -- in fact, most -- states feature no signatures on their birth certificates.)

As we explained to Sean Hannity:

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Madam Malaprop, thy name is Sarah Palin. Whether by design or accident, she never fails to drop some tidbit that sends the idiocy scale off the charts. Called in by Fox News to deconstruct President Obama's speech, she wonders aloud whether the Libya action is a war, an intervention or a "squirmish".

The balance of her "opinion" is to be expected, but at the end, just after the "squirmish" drop, she goes on some weird tangent about the North Star and how it's a guide.

Just imagine this woman as your President. What a nightmare.

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Of course you knew that no matter what President Obama did in regards to Libya, right-wingers were going to slam him for it -- damned if he did, damned if he didn't. But few have been quite as naked in their two-faced hypocrisy as Newt Gingrich.

Via George Zornick at ThinkProgress, here's Gingrich giving Greta Van Susteren his prescription for dealing with Libya two weeks ago, on March 7:

Exercise a no-fly zone this evening. Communicate to the Libyan military that Gadhafi is gone, and that the sooner they switched sides the more likely they were to survive. Provide help to the rebels to replace him. I mean, the idea that we're confused about a man who has been an anti-American dictator since 1969 just tells you how inept this administration is. They were very quick to jump on Mubarak, who was their ally for 30 years, and they're confused about getting rid of Gadhafi. This is a moment to get rid of him. Do it. Get it over with.

… We don’t need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we’re intervening.

Then there he was last night on Fox News with Sean Hannity:

HANNITY: So, did he make a mistake by not seeking Congress' authorization, and do you view that as a violation of the War Powers Act?

GINGRICH: Well, no, the War Powers Act technically gives him 45 days. But it's a violation of common sense.

And then he went on Today this morning with Matt Lauer and actually said he wouldn't have intervened:

GINGRICH: The standard [Obama] has fallen back to of humanitarian intervention could apply to Sudan, to North Korea, to Zimbabwe, to Syria this week, to Yemen, to Bahrain. … The Arab League wanted us to do something. The minute we did something, the Arab League began criticizing us doing it. I think that two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a lot. I think that the problems we have in Pakistan, Egypt — go around the region. We could get engaged by this standard in all sorts of places. I would not have intervened. I think there were a lot of other ways to affect Qaddafi. I think there are a lot of other allies in the region we could have worked with. I would not have used American and European forces.

Of course, what else do you expect from Newt Gingrich? If nothing else, we can always count on him to explore new depths in naked hypocrisy.

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Occasionally Greta Van Susteren earns her keep, at least as it pertains to legal issues. She interviewed Wisconsin GOP Leader Scott Fitzgerald and grilled him on why he's persisting with a court action when he could simply give 24-hour notice and call a vote.

I have long thought the reason for the cramdown of the vote on this wasn't because of Democrats, but because of Republicans. I think their unity was fracturing and with each passing day, public pressure and disapproval was growing to the point where at least three Republican Senators were in danger of defection.

Fitzgerald seems to think so too. After being pressed by Greta, who quite reasonably points out that all he'd have to do is comply with the 24-hour notice requirements to get his law passed and published even as the old one "meanders in the courts", he says this:

Greta, you know that the legislature is always very tentative, and you may have the votes on one day and then you don't on the next.

He goes on, but that right there says it all.