Sarah Palin won Politfact's "Lie of the Year" for her claim that the health-care reform bill would set up "death panels," which would decide whether elderly people were worth further medical care or not:

Her assertion — that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care — spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, "Death panels? Really?"

I'm not sure why this didn't become a big story given the media's tendency to make everything Newt Gingrich says news: Back in November at David Horowitz's "Restoration Weekend" conference, Gingrich called for Attorney General Eric Holder to be impeached over bringing Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators to New York for trial (via Andrew Sullivan):

Robert Samuelson is the archetypal Washington columnist, who's managed to write about federal politics for years without learning a thing about it. He's also got the cliches down, one of which is the "to be sure" paragraph, where editors ask writers to stick the strongest counter to their own argument; it usually comes at the end of a piece. The Post's editors had Samuelson stick his "to be sure" in the fourth paragraph, and it's a doozy. Here's what we're talking about:

Barack Obama's quest for historic health-care legislation has turned into a parody of leadership. .... of course, it is about him.

• John Judis examines the danger U.S. presidents court when they refer to foreign threats as "evil" and determines that using it as a justification for war unnecessarily raises the stakes in a given conflict. Insofar as the point of referencing evil is to rally people to your crusade, I'm hard-pressed to disagree. But I wonder if the tendency of conservatives constantly pointing out the existence of evil in order to make themselves feel morally superior has reduced the potency of referencing evil to the point where it's simply commonplace to hear it in presidential discourse.

The new Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Thomas Perez, blasted the Bush administration's stewardship of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department today at an American Constitution Society event, reprising the "buffet line" quip he used yesterday but far more directly.

With Joe Lieberman's desire to prevent real reform satisfied -- for now -- the final obstacle to health-care reform in the Senate is Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson, who has yet to promise his vote for cloture.