Sarah Palin

Funding for special housing for homeless people in Alaska is available again after being deleted in a budget forwarded to Gov. Sarah Palin's office earlier this year, reports Rena Delbridge of the Daily News-Miner. The $650,000 set aside for homeless housing was compressed into a smaller amount when it passed the governor's desk, and the mistake was overlooked by the legislature until after its session ended in April.

The money provides a resource for local agencies to fund grants for construction and support services. It's for so-called "supportive" housing that help homeless people learn how to cope with everyday tasks. As the money helps homeless people get off the street, public expenses should also go down, since fewer people on the street likely means lower costs for law enforcement and emergency medical services.

It's interesting the money showed up after another body of a homeless person was found this weekend in Anchorage, the twelfth homeless death in the region since May of this year.

– Emily Linroth

As Vancouver, B.C., watches Fraser River stocks of sockeye fail, the count of steelhead passing the Bonneville Dam in Vancouver, Wash., is soaring. And while low Alaskan Yukon runs of king and chum salmon predict a devastating winter for subsistence fishermen, salmon are even making a comeback in the Seine, as InvestigateWest reported last week. What differences could account for these drastic population changes?

Multiple environmental factors could be affecting populations. Warmer weather can heat up rivers, especially those overdrawn by humans, and discourage the cold-water-loving fish from heading upstream. Shifting ocean currents or other predator influences could be altering food sources. Pollutants from stormwater can accumulate in the fish. Overfishing can deplete numbers. Sea lice from farmed salmon could be transferring to wild salmon, weakening them and increasing the likelihood of succumbing to disease or predators. Even superb returns from previous years could be problematic, as too many fish spawning and then decomposing could produce excess bacteria, possibly resulting in disease.

Sarah "don't let your death panels near my baby" Palin hasn't always been against end-of-life counseling. As Alaska governor, she signed a proclamation making April 16, 2008, Healthcare Decision Day with the goal to have health care professionals and others participate in a statewide effort to provide  information about advance directives about end of life decisions, Matthew Daly of the Associated Press reports.

"The proclamation noted that only about 20 percent of Alaskans, and 50 percent of severely or terminally ill patients, have an advance directive. 'It is likely that a significant reason for these low percentages is that there is both a lack of knowledge and considerable confusion in the public about advance directives,' it said."

This is the same person who decided to sow fear and confusion by claiming that language in the health care reform bill that would pay for conversations between doctor and patient covering items like living wills, making a close relative or a trusted friend your health care proxy, learning about hospice as an option for the terminally ill, and information about pain medications for people suffering chronic discomfort was akin to making her Down syndrome child and/or aging parents march before Obama death panels.

Thursday, Palin refused to back down from the death panel language on her Facebook page with a posting titled "Concerning Death Panels."

Today's topic:  The health care debate.

Category: Making stuff up.

Timing: August

"The America I know and love is not one 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. Such a system is downright evil."  -- Sarah Palin

"Death panels? Seriously? Could Palin see the Soviet gulag from her house?" Asks Denver Post columnist Mike Litwin.

Writing in the LA Times, columnist David Lazarus points out the anti-ad featuring the Canadian woman who fled fled to the U.S. to get treated for a brain tumor. "I'm here today because I was able to travel to the U.S., where I received world-class treatment," she says. "Government health care isn't the answer." Lazarus points out that the problems with this ad include the fact that no one is proposing Canadian style health care for the U.S. Canada offers it citizens a single-payer insurance program, not medical treatment, and a single-payer insurance system isn't part of the leading proposals now on the table here.