WASHINGTON — Sarah Palin is urging her followers to read an article likening President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler in the way Obama pressured BP to set aside $20 billion for oil spill damage claims.

“This is about the rule of law vs. an unconstitutional power grab. Read Thomas Sowell's article,” Palin said in a note to followers sent via twitter.

In the short article for Investors Business Daily, Sowell asserts that Obama seized broader, unconstitutional power when he pressure the oil giant to create the escrow fund for payments to people hurt by the oil spill, and then put attorney Kenneth Feinberg in charge of paying the claims.

Sowell compared Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Hitler assuming new powers in the 1930s, during the Great Depression.

“When Franklin D. Roosevelt arbitrarily took the United States off the gold standard, he cited a law passed during the First World War to prevent trading with the country's wartime enemies. But there was no war when FDR ended the gold standard's restrictions on the printing of money,” he wrote.

“At about the same time, during the worldwide Great Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law `for the relief of the German people.’

“That law gave Hitler dictatorial powers that were used for things going far beyond the relief of the German people — indeed, powers that ultimately brought a rain of destruction down on the German people and on others.”

He concluded, “Those who cannot see beyond the immediate events to the issues of arbitrary power — vs. the rule of law and the preservation of freedom — are the "useful idiots" of our time. But useful to whom?”

Read Thomas Sowell's article here.