Palin took to Facebook in August to warn of a system "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." And she warned of "the Orwellian thinking of the president’s health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel." Not two months earlier, a leading LaRouchite described Emanuel -- who's actually a leading medical ethicist and staunch advocate for those approaching the end of their life -- as "President Obama's leading representative on a Federal 'death council' drawing up a list of medical procedures to be used to deny care to elderly, chronically ill, and poor people, whose lives are considered of less value."

Ultimately, the genesis of the whole "death panel" idea didn't matter, at least not nearly as much as the notion itself. It had been bubbling up on the right before Palin got to it, coming from every conservative's favorite source for completely distorted information about healthcare reform, Betsy McCaughey, not to mention from Republicans who warned of "euthanasia" – much of the hysteria based on an innocuous provision that would have ensured coverage for completely voluntary counseling about end-of-life decisions, which middle class and wealthy families routinely obtain.

Luckily for the right, the press was there to help them spread this message. Some media outlets were better on this story than others, pointing out that what Palin and others had said was flat-out wrong, but the story was irresistible fodder for many, especially on television. The amount of coverage granted to the claims only added to the insanity, whether there was a debunking included or not. Television news was, of course, the worst offender -- CNN, for example, did fact-check the allegations at times, but because it was covering the story so often, there were also all too many times when what Palin had said was just reported as news; the actual facts weren't included. On the night that the former governor debuted the "death panel" term, CNN anchor Campbell Brown said only: "The debate over healthcare reform getting ugly. Tonight, Sarah Palin posted a long statement on her Facebook page calling the Obama plan, quote, 'downright evil.' She says it would force her disabled son to stand in front of an Obama death panel in her words."

Meanwhile, prominent conservatives were doing their level best to promote the idea of death panels as real. On his radio show, Glenn Beck said, "I believe it to be true." Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich went on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" and backed Palin, saying, " You are asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there are clearly people in American who believe in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards." And Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley stole the spotlight for himself when he said, "We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma."

The influence this kind of coverage had was unmistakable. One poll conducted less than two weeks after Palin popularized the term found that 86 percent of Americans had heard about "death panels," and 30 percent -- including 47 percent of Republicans and 28 percent of independents -- believed the claims about them.

Those numbers were disturbing by themselves. But the saddest part is that all this hubbub obscured one simple truth: There aren't any death panels in the Democrats' legislation -- but private insurance companies ration care all the time, and sometimes the results are fatal.

Everybody understands that these things couldn't happen. That when it comes to serious scientific endeavor, years of study and professional apprenticeship are required. In a word, expertise.

Ex-beauty contestants, drive-time DJs, TV sports announcers, hairstylists, newspaper columnists -- basically anybody whose math skills topped out in the 10th grade -- rarely have anything substantive to add to the sum of technical and scientific knowledge. That's what they most resent about it.

It's not impossible that such persons could educate themselves sufficiently to have an informed opinion, but it's rare. Most of us, most of the time, are like historian and blogger Josh Marshall: "The fact that the vast majority of people with specialized knowledge in the field think there's a problem is good enough for me," he wrote. "I can't be knowledgeable about everything. And I'm comfortable with the modern system in which the opinions of really knowledgeable people with expertise counts more in cases like this than people who know nothing at all."

Unless and until, that is, scientific endeavor impinges upon either A) religious belief, or B) the ability of tycoons to keep making money in precisely the way they or their ancestors have always made their money. Then it's every man and woman a climatologist, and every genuine expert an "elitist" enemy of God and the American way -- creationism with a thermometer.

Charles P. Pierce describes what he calls the "three great premises" of talk-radio populism in his acerbic book "Idiot America":

First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it moves units ... Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough ... Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.

So it was after thousands of private e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit in England emerged via the right-wing noise machine into the British and American press. Caught red-handed acting like, well, like professors -- ambitious, idealistic, petty, egotistical, dogged and pedantic -- climate researchers soon got caught up in a media storm rivaling that surrounding golfer Tiger Woods.

Within days, representatives of various Exxon- and Koch Industries-funded propaganda shops like the Heritage Foundation and Competitive Enterprise Institute started braying about "Climate-gate." Fox News headlined "Global Warming's Waterloo." Hannity told viewers, "Now we find out that this institute is hiding from the people of Great Britain and the world that, in fact, climate change is a hoax, something I've been saying for a long time."

Taking time off from her book tour, Sarah Palin wrote a Washington Post piece charging the "e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals."

Note the scare quotes around "experts." Palin's evidence for this conspiracy? Here's the worst of it: A 10-year-old e-mail from professor Phil Jones to Penn State colleague Michael Mann. You've seen it 10 times on television. "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years ... to hide the decline."

Read it twice. So Jones brags about hiding a decline in global temperatures by "adding in the real temps"? The allegation's nonsensical on its face. If you read the entire message, Jones is talking about plotting a more accurate graph by throwing out inferential evidence from tree ring studies known since the 1960s to be less reliable. There's an elaborate scientific debate about why. Not one reputable scientist who's looked into this matter has judged otherwise. What's crucial to understand is that if Jones were proved to be faking data, his scientific career would end at once, along with that of anybody who helped him.

Scientists can be jerks too. However, the kind of worldwide conspiracy conjured by global climate change deniers like Palin, Hannity and the rest -- that is, as an evidence-free, religio-political cult that's the mirror image of their own movement -- simply can't exist in a scientific context. Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice is vanishing, glaciers melting, sea levels rising, droughts and floods increasing, and the past decade -- according to the World Meteorological Organization -- was the warmest in recorded history.

But hey, look over there: some elitist e-mails!

© 2009 Gene Lyons. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association

It's sad that so many people have come to believe this because, of course, the evidence is indisputable: Obama was born in Hawaii. And no matter how hard the Birthers might try, no matter how many lawsuits Taitz and others bring, the courts are going to leave the man in his rightful place as president.

But Taitz doesn't just believe Obama is ineligible to serve as president, no: She also believes that he's hired goons to try to kill her, that he has killed others, that he's gotten Google in on his plot against her, that he's overseeing a plan to put untold numbers into camps run by FEMA, that he and others have conspired to use the swine flu vaccine for god knows what sorts of malicious mischief. In August, Taitz claimed she'd found Obama's "real" Kenyan birth certificate, which was easily proved to be fake. Next, the guy she claimed found it for her charged that Taitz had put him up to the forgery, and the ensuing tangle of lurid charges and countercharges is even too crazy for this post.

Taitz is indefatigable. No matter how many losses she suffers (and she's racked up more than her share), she presses on. Maybe it has to do with growing up behind the Iron Curtain; she came to the U.S. by way of Israel, but is originally from Moldavia. Or maybe it's the same sort of spirit that has propelled her to a unique but impressive array of professional titles: lawyer, dentist and real estate agent.

Come 2010, though, Taitz is likely to be a leader without any followers. Other Birthers have been slowly but steadily abandoning her, some for personal reasons, some because they've realized just how little knowledge of law and legal procedure is at Taitz's command. By the end of one case, which also saw the Birther attorney slapped with a $20,000 sanction, Taitz's own client had abandoned her.

None of that matters to Taitz. The judge is just acting under orders from the Department of Justice, the letter in which her former client disavows her could be a forgery, the Birthers with whom she's feuding are all just Obama plants who've been working to destroy the movement from the inside. In Taitz's world, the setbacks simply prove the global conspiracy behind Obama.

But you have to hand it to her on one count: Palin is good at not taking herself too seriously. For all the satirical digs rained down upon her by the incomparable Tina Fey, Palin still had the courage to go on "Saturday Night Live" last year. And now, after the ultra-ironic William Shatner first did an art-house interpretation back in July of statements Palin made upon announcing her resignation, and then followed that up Friday night by reading a few select and rather absurd passages from "Going Rogue" on Conan O'Brien's show, Palin responded in kind: appearing on Conan right after Shatner Friday to read "a few choice excerpts" (and pretty dumb observations at that) from Shatner's book.

A lot of Americans think that, politically, Palin's a joke. Having a sense of humor and being willing to laugh at oneself doesn't qualify somebody to be mayor of a small town in Alaska, no less president. But give her this much credit: She doesn't take herself so seriously that she can't take a joke -- or dish it back out.