Over the past few weeks, misinformation circulating about Obama’s health-reform bill has gone from mildly plausible to downright demented. The myths are so pervasive that even the White House is worried. They've set up a Web site to counter some of them. “What we learned in the campaign is that in today’s world, where what qualifies as news is often something that you’ve heard from your neighbor who got it from another friend who is sure that they got it from an authority, you have to take that seriously,” Linda Douglass, communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform, told the Gaggle last week.    
 
There’s a discernible pattern to the emergence of health-care misinformation. The more startling claims often surface on conservative blogs like Hot Air or in Investors Business Daily editorials. They “go viral” being e-mailed through activist networks, referenced on respectable blogs like The National Review’s Corner or linked through news aggregators. Sometimes conservative think tanks will lend legitimacy to the claim (although rarely will they support it fully). Soon enough, the lie is repeated by Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck and is being discussed by bemused mainstream commentators, while Democratic operatives scramble to refute it.
 
Here at NEWSWEEK, we’ve heard our share of crazy myths. Here are some of the truly loopy ones:
 
-      Doctors will be imprisoned if they provide life-saving treatments not sanctioned by the government
-      Private insurance will be outlawed
-      Obama wants to revive a Nazi program of killing incurably or mentally ill people
-      Medicare will be ended
-      The bill allows the government to access your bank account

Perhaps it's the insanity of these myths that has led to an outbreak of unseemly "town hall face." Whatever the upshot, we're hoping to catalog and marvel at the absurdity of it all. So we want to know what you’re hearing. What crazy myths are ending up in your inbox? Have you heard anything nutty from your relatives or friends? Let us know in the comments.

Many pundits have noted of late that August has rarely been kind to Barack Obama since he hit the national stage. The folks over at First Read have pointed this out numerous times. Today, Ed Kilgore kicks the idea around in The New Republic. Here’s Kilgore:

As the Dog Days of August descended upon us, there developed across the progressive chattering classes a deep sense of malaise bordering on depression, if not panic—much of it driven by fears about the leadership skills of Barack Obama. The polling numbers seemed to weaken every day, and Democratic unease was matched by growing glee on the airwaves of Fox and in Republican circles everywhere.

Within ten weeks, however, Obama was elected president and joy returned to the land.

Yes, dear reader, I am suggesting that this August's sense of progressive despair feels remarkably similar to last August's. This week last year, the Gallup Tracking Poll had McCain and Obama in a statistical tie. The candidates were fresh from a joint appearance at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, which was widely viewed by progressives as a strategic error by Obama. More generally, Democratic confidence, so high earlier in the year, was sagging. "Liberals have been in a dither for several weeks now over Barack Obama's supposedly listless campaign performance following his return from Europe," influential blogger Kevin Drum summed up sentiments at that time, "and as near as I can tell this turned into something close to panic."