Yearly Archives: 2009

Politically exhausted Americans may have expected a return to at least moderate civility after the long mudslinging campaign of 2008, but this year the crazy was merely ratcheted up, as the “just asking” paranoid style of Fox News took center stage, serial health-care misinformer Betsy McCaughey returned, and South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson, sitting on a pile of health insurance campaign donations, hurled the now infamous “You lie!” accusation at the President during an address to a joint session of Congress. Yet no untruths were more flagrant, pervasive or distracting than the five compiled by Hannah Dreier at the Washington Independent below.

WASHINGTON-- Senate Democrats on Thursday approved the best health care reform bill they could manage: a sweeping $871 billion proposal designed to extend coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans and slow the growth of runaway costs. It was at once a monumental achievement, which if signed into law would represent the most expansive overhaul of the nation’s dysfunctional health care system in generations, and a disappointment to many liberals who’d hoped the reforms would go further to rein in the medical-services industries most responsible for the skyrocketing expenses.