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A prominent liberal columnist’s admission that the “death panels” Sarah Palin warned about really are and always have been a part of Obamacare caused a blowup Tuesday on Fox’s “The Five,” when host Eric Bolling said “liberal royalty” owes Palin an apology. Bolling was referring to a statement by Time magazine columnist and passionate Obama fan Mark Halperin, who told Newsmax TV on Monday that health-care rationing was an inseparable part of Obamacare’s takeover of the U.S. health system. Halperin himself didn’t use the term “death panels,” but the point was clear enough from the clip. It wasn’t clear enough...

Mama Grizzly warned us this would happen. Under Obamacare, the sick and weak and old would stand before death panels of bureaucrats to be granted life or death. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was laughed out of town for making four years ago what we now know is a prescient prediction. Perhaps she is one of the few who actually read the health care bill before it passed. “And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course,” she wrote on her Facebook page in 2009. “The America I know and

I'm curious to know if anyone saw the Hannity panel with college students last night and what you thought of it.

Don’t you feel more confident in our NSA overlords already? ABC and the Washington Post finds a number of familiar names on the panel created by Barack Obama to review the surveillance activities of the NSA and American intelligence in general. In fact, you could call them the usual suspects: A group of veteran security experts and former White House officials has been selected to conduct a full review of U.S. surveillance programs and other secret government efforts disclosed over recent months, ABC News has learned. The recent acting head of the CIA, Michael Morell, will be among what President...

The White House dismissed the bulk of President Barack Obama’s premier panel of outside intelligence advisers earlier this year, leaving the blue-ribbon commission largely vacant as the public furor built over the National Security Agency’s widespread tracking of Americans’ telephone calls. The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board stood 14 members strong through 2012, but the White House website was recently updated to show the panel’s roster shrinking to just four people. In the past four years, the high-powered group has waded into the implications of WikiLeaks for intelligence sharing, and urged retooling of America’s spy agencies as the United States withdraws...

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved Samantha Power, President Barack Obama's nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations, clearing the way for a vote in the full 100-member Senate. All but three of the panel's 18 members voted in favor of Power, who was expected to win confirmation easily by the full Senate. Venezuela said last week it was ending efforts to improve ties with the United States after Power vowed during her confirmation hearing to oppose what she called a crackdown on civil society in the "repressive" OPEC nation. In an echo of the many...

President Obama’s Friday meeting with a newly reformed privacy watchdog panel will take place behind the closed doors of the White House Situation Room, according to administration officials. It’s the president’s first sit-down with the recently constituted and little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created nearly a decade ago but dormant for the entirety of the Obama presidency. The White House released few details on the meeting agenda other than to say it will be held at 3 p.m. and will include the discussion of classified information such as the National Security Agency’s data and telephone record collection efforts,...

The government investigative committee that was set up to determine the truth of allegations that IDF soldiers killed 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura during the "Second Intifada" have determined that not only were the allegations – and a report by French television purporting to show IDF soldiers shooting and killing the boy – a lie, but that the al-Dura may not even be dead. ..... ....The fact that he was still alive at the end of the French television video, after the gunfire had stopped, could mean that the boy is alive even now. “Since this issue was first raised there have...

See report below from my FNC colleague Chad Pergram: Fox has obtained three letters, sent to the top legal counsels at the CIA, Pentagon and State Department, about getting clearance to interview witnesses from those agencies/departments about Benghazi. These are from the House Oversight Committee. I am told there are whistleblowers who are willing to talk to Congressional investigators but are worried about getting clearances, et al. Links to letters are below…full text of one letter is below (letters are the same). In the letters, the House Oversight Committee asks for a pledge that those departments/agencies will not “take any...

The fact there is no love lost between Attorney General Eric Holder and House Republicans was on clear display again Thursday afternoon at a stormy House appropriations panel hearing which culminated with the subcommittee´s chairman declaring he´d given up on Holder and his stewardship of the Justice Department. "Forget it. Forget it. Forget it. Forget it. Forget it," an exasperated Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) declared after Holder refused to commit to a deadline to answer 91 questions Wolf had prepared. The lawmaker, who heads the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Justice Department, said he planned to forego

The White House announced Thursday the formation of a nine-seat Presidential Commission on Election Administration tasked with recommending changes to states’ election laws by the end of September. “The Commission shall identify best practices and otherwise make recommendations to promote the efficient administration of elections in order to ensure that all eligible voters have the opportunity to cast their ballots without undue delay, and to improve the experience of voters facing other obstacles,” said Obama’s executive order, issued March 28. State elections are conducted by states, usually under state laws. However, the federal Congress has the constitutional authority to “any...

On Fox News this afternoon, Megyn Kelly and her panel took on the media controversy over Salon editor-at-large Joan Walsh decrying the media’s lack of respect for the Obama daughters while having written, in the past, about the Bush daughters being possible alcoholics. After a Breitbart.com writer revealed the location of the Sasha and Malia Obama‘s vacation stay in the Bahamas, Walsh took to her site to slam the right-wing site as “racist” for its reporting; she also called for more “decency” towards the First Daughters when reporting on their private affairs. Our own columnist A.J. Delgado, however, pointed out...

Federal Drug Administration advisers voted today to restrict access to certain kinds of prescription drugs in an effort to fight drug abuse. The vote had experts divided over the risk of drug abuse as weighed against the risk of increased pain or difficulty for patients on the medication. “It will have an impact on a lot of patients who have been receiving them for some time for legitimate purposes,” Dr. Lynn Webster, president-elect of the American Academy of Pain Medicine, said per Health Day News ahead of the vote. The FDA rule change is designed to implement

Democrats: Put Obama's Medicare board on the tableBy Elise Viebeck - 12/15/12 10:05 AM ET The healthcare law's controversial Medicare board should be on the table in deficit-reduction talks, House Democrats said this week. Killing the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which Sarah Palin decried as a "death panel" in June, could ease Republican concessions as part of a year-end deficit deal, Dems said. "I think everything has to be on the table," said Rep. Dan Boren (Okla.), one of healthcare reform's most consistent Democratic opponents. "Anything that could help along the way to get some agreement," said Rep. David...

A panel at the recent Netroots Nation event, a gathering of liberal and pro-abortion bloggers and activists, is getting not-so-flattering attention for giving a standing ovation to women who had abortions. The panel reportedly focused on the bogus “War on Women” allegations — where conservatives and pro-life advocates are accused of opposing women’s rights because they stand up for de-funding the Planned Parenthood abortion business or conscience rights for religious groups — and it featured Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. Melissa Clouthier, a conservative blogger, attended the panel and reported on how one member urged attendees to applaud women...

Average life expectancy is one of two statistics commonly used to compare the health-care systems of different nations. (The other is infant mortality.) One of the puzzles about the U.S. system is that we spend far and away the most money per capita for health care, but we rank 50th in average life expectancy ― after Macau, Malta, and Turks and Caicos, among others. We are all familiar with statistics about how much of health-care spending takes place in the last year of life, and with stories about old people who are tortured with costly treatments they don’t want and...

Pressure is on Senate after House kills healthcare law's ‘rationing board’By Julian Pecquet - 02/29/12 08:35 PM ET The Senate is under increasing pressure to bring up legislation repealing a key part of President Obama’s healthcare law. A House subpanel on Wednesday easily approved a measure to repeal a Medicare cost-cutting panel derided by Republicans as a “rationing board.” Two Democrats — including the panel’s ranking member — crossed the aisle and joined Republicans in voting to nix the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). The lopsided 17-5 vote underscored the bipartisan support for repealing the board, which Obama has made...

A clean-energy firm led by a member of President Obama's jobs council has a stake in projects that have reaped nearly $2 billion in loan guarantees from Washington, a case that has raised conflict-of-interest concerns as the same jobs council pushes for more "government-backed" investment in renewable energy. The company, NextEra Energy, secured a loan guarantee in August for a solar project in California. An affiliate has taken over another California project that won a separate guarantee in September. The firm is no lightweight -- NextEra Energy Resources, the subsidiary working on both solar projects, is the biggest producer of...

Deficit super panel is not yet at square oneBy Alexander Bolton - 10/12/11 05:20 AM ET The congressional supercommittee, tasked with reducing trillions of dollars from the nation’s record debt, can’t agree on how to count. Negotiations within the 12-member panel have been slowed down by an intense debate over the basic question of how to count the savings from any potential deficit-reduction deal. With only weeks left before the bipartisan panel hits the congressionally mandated deadline for reporting its recommendations, lawmakers have yet to resolve the thorny question of what kind of baseline to use to score a deal,...

Finding could lead to new photodetectors or energy-harvesting devices.Graphene, an exotic form of carbon consisting of sheets a single atom thick, exhibits a novel reaction to light, MIT researchers have found: Sparked by light’s energy, the material can produce electric current in unusual ways. The finding could lead to improvements in photodetectors and night-vision systems, and possibly to a new approach to generating electricity from sunlight. This current-generating effect had been observed before, but researchers had incorrectly assumed it was due to a photovoltaic effect, says Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, an assistant professor of physics at MIT and senior author of a...