One of the most frustrating aspects of the current debate over the healthcare reform is the way that conservative bloggers and pundits keep trying to find evidence to justify Sarah Palin's false claims about a "death panel."

The latest example comes from bloggers Ann Althouse, Jim Hoft, and Doug Ross, who claim that the decision by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to conduct a National Coverage Determination for the prostate cancer treatment Provenge is evidence of a "death panel" (Althouse headline: "Death panel"; Hoft: "HERE COME THE DEATH PANELS"; Ross: "sounds like a death panel to me").

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1. The economic downturn has been severe. The history of financial crises suggests that recovery may be long and difficult, particularly if the U.S. enters a deflationary spiral.

2. A second stimulus can't pass Congress now and certainly won't pass after expected Republican gains in November.

3. The Federal Reserve plays the most important role in determining short-term macroeconomic outcomes.

4. While interest rates are at the so-called zero bound, the Fed could take other steps to try to stimulate the economy.

5. Some officials at the Fed are concerned about inflation; this appears to be limiting its aggressiveness.

6. Obama's Fed appointees are likely to be inclined to try to stimulate the economy. Their confirmation could help tilt the balance toward more aggressive measures.

7. There are significant lags in macroeconomic policy, which make swift action by the Fed especially important.

8. If successful, these measures could help millions of Americans who are struggling to make ends meet during the deepest downturn of their lifetimes.

9. The economy plays the most important role in presidential approval and presidential election outcomes. If economic growth does not improve significantly, Obama's approval ratings will decline and he is likely to be defeated in his re-election campaign.

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I take it as a given that most journalists know very little about political science. But I still assumed that almost everyone has a basic understanding of the relationship between the state of the economy and presidential election outcomes. Apparently Fred Barnes missed the memo.

As Jamison Foser points out at Media Matters, Barnes published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that repeatedly suggests the key to Obama's re-election is cutting spending:

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Things have changed, however. In a column for Roll Call, Stuart Rothenberg flags a new NBC/WSJ poll suggesting that the Democratic brand has lost most of its advantage relative to the GOP.

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In Washington, the maxim used to be that you get in trouble not by lying, but by trying to cover up the lie when you get caught. Bush has turned this tired piece of conventional wisdom on its head, running an administration that almost always tries to cover its tracks with misinformation rather than admit to an error or a lie -- and often gets away with it.

Will reporters let the president continue this strategy in the second half of his term, especially when it comes to war with Iraq? The evidence isn't reassuring.

So far, Bush has been protected by his reputation for honesty, the media's distaste for complex policy issues and -- since Sept. 11 -- his status as a wartime president. As a result, the administration has gotten a pass when it has used deceptive, even dishonest arguments to sell key pieces of its agenda, most notably the tax cut and Bush's plan to create private Social Security accounts. And even when serious questions about its arguments have been raised, the White House has dissembled wildly rather than admit mistakes or mendacity.

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But Milbank's story, suggesting that the Bush administration has used the war for political purposes, took the quote from Bush somewhat out of context. "Four times in the past two days," the story said, "Bush has suggested that Democrats do not care about national security, saying on Monday that the Democratic-controlled Senate is 'not interested in the security of the American people.'" What actually happened was that, when discussing the dispute over the legislation that would create the Department of Homeland Security, Bush said "the House responded" to his plea for weaker civil service protections than Democrats support, "but the Senate is more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people."

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The controversy was created by an Aug. 19 article on Page 1 of the Washington Times about a Web site created by the NEA's Health Information Network. The site was designed to help schools plan lessons for the first anniversary of Sept. 11. Under the headline "NEA delivers history lesson; Tells teachers not to cast 9/11 blame," reporter Ellen Sorokin claimed that the NEA "is suggesting to teachers that they be careful on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks not to 'suggest any group is responsible' for the terrorist hijackings that killed more than 3,000 people."

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However, rather than directly admitting its error, the OMB simply changed the release on its Web site, posting an altered version (Adobe PDF file) without any disclosure that the incorrect bullet point had been deleted.

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As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman have pointed out, a July 12 press release from OMB contained a major factual error.

The release was a preview of an OMB report called the Mid-Session Budget Review, which showed a projected federal budget deficit of $165 billion for fiscal year 2002 and a decline in the estimated 2002-2011 surplus from $5.6 trillion at its peak to $1.7 trillion today. In the third bullet point of the press release, OMB attributed figures pertaining to the 2002 budget to the wrong surplus estimate, claiming that "the recession erased two-thirds of the projected ten-year surplus (FY2002-2011)" and that the tax cut "generated less than 15% of the change."

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Take President Bush's corporate responsibility speech on July 9, with which his advisors said he "hoped to hearten traders and investors with harsh plans to crack down on corporate fraud -- and perhaps spark a rally," according to the Washington Post. When the market declined later that day and the next, it was therefore widely framed as a reaction to -- or a verdict on -- the speech. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., went so far as to say on CNN's "Crossfire" that if Bush had asked for the resignation of Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt, "the market would have gone up instead of down. As the marketplace looked today at the reforms that were being proposed by the president, they didn't see enough teeth in them, and as a result, the market plummeted again."

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These claims allow politicians and pundits to assign blame for the scandals without bothering to explain how, exactly, their political opponents are responsible. In short, it's yet another cynical game of pinning blame on the other guy.

The Democratic attack was launched by House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., in his weekly press conference on June 26, the day after WorldCom announced that it had improperly reported ordinary expenses as capital expenditures: "It is, I think, telling that in 1995, when the Republican leadership came in, both Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay made statements that the main goal of their effort was to try to deregulate corporate America. Well, they did a lot of that in the last years, and now we see some of the results of that."

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As the New Republic's Jonathan Chait first reported and Spinsanity, among others, also covered, Bush's claim that during a 2000 Chicago campaign stop he listed three exceptions under which he would run deficits -- war, national emergency or recession -- is blatantly false. No one has found any evidence that Bush made such a statement, and the White House has pointedly failed to provide any.

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This is only the latest example of GOP officials and their supporters in the media using bombastic, anti-democratic rhetoric to shut down debate on any issue related to the war. Whenever serious questions have been raised, this Republican-pundit alliance has launched a massive and aggressive counteroffensive to silence critics -- with grave implications for open debate about the war on terrorism.

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The Dallas Morning News reported that on Thursday, President Bush accused Texas Democratic Senate nominee Ron Kirk of being an "obstructionist," even as he praised Kirk as a person:

"I know Ron Kirk. Like Ron Kirk. He's a nice fellow. He's not the right man for the United States Senate, as far as I'm concerned. I need a man up here in the Senate that's going to help me get an agenda done. I don't need an obstructionist. I need a positive influence. And John's [John Cornyn, the Republican candidate] an independent thinker, but he's a man who, I'm confident, working together, will help Texas."

Bush is now presumptively defining Democrats as obstructionists (and nonindependent thinkers) simply for being members of their party. Kirk has not cast a single vote in the Senate -- indeed, he has repeatedly expressed his desire to work with the president. But Bush was undeterred:

"When asked whether he thought Mr. Kirk could work with him, the president replied: 'Oh, I don't.'"

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But his paean fails to acknowledge how ideology and public relations concerns can dictate -- and distort -- much of Heritage's work. What about the foundation's methods, which are more than just an intellectually honest questioning of the "conventional wisdom"? As John Judis describes in his book "The Paradox of American Democracy," the foundation is dedicated to producing good conservative P.R., not rigorous scholarship. Founder Edward Fuelner wanted a "quick response capability" and article-length pieces rather than dense scholarship. Some years ago, Burton Pines, a Heritage vice president, said this of the think tank's mission: "We're not here to be some kind of Ph.D. committee giving equal time. Our role is to provide conservative public-policy makers with arguments to bolster our side."

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The e-mail was sent Thursday night to registered members of the RNC's Team Leader program by Blaise Hazelwood, the political director of the Republican National Committee.

In a letter to the activists contained in the e-mail, Hazelwood draws an outrageous parallel between America's war on terror and the Republican fight against Democratic opposition in domestic politics:

"Fellow Americans, we are fighting two wars right now. Abroad we fight terrorism and at home we fight the disgraceful and obstructionist Democrat senators."

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And every year, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and other liberal critics accurately point out that the methodology used in the calculations is totally misleading. This year, alas, is no different.

The Washington press corps has finally grown wise to the tricky statistics being used (or sick of the whole debate), but regional newspapers across the country are already starting to uncritically regurgitate Tax Foundation spin yet again.

Here's a report filed by the Washington correspondent for Salt Lake City's Deseret News, for example:

"The Tax Foundation says the average American works 117 days to pay all federal, state and local taxes."

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The speech contained scary-sounding but vague denunciations of what he called "ultra-conservatism." McAuliffe entered into a discussion of how Republicans "just can't help themselves" and "always show their true colors by choosing the extremists on the right." After citing Bill Simon's win over the more moderate Richard Riordan in California's Republican gubernatorial primary, McAuliffe turned to the campaign for the GOP nomination for the state Supreme Court in Texas.

"It happened in the Texas primary too. There was only one Latino Republican on the statewide primary ballot -- Xavier Rodriguez. And he lost, even though he is a sitting state Supreme Court justice," McAuliffe said. "Republican primary voters, not surprisingly, preferred the Anglo candidate, who was the plaintiffs' lawyer in the Hopwood case, which ended affirmative action in the Texas university system." The result, McAuliffe clearly suggested without citing any evidence, was that (presumably white) Republicans voted for Smith purely because of his race.

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