Lemastre's Comments (67)

“Folks, the Nobel prizes for peace and to an extent literature are political statements from the committee(s) who select the winners. We err in thinking they are like the sciences prizes in being awarded solely for proven accomplishment. They should be, but they aren't. Once you understand that, it's easier to accept Obama's selection.”

“I appreciate your take on the Nobel prize situation. The peace prize and the literature prizes have come to be the Nobel organization's political soapbox and unlike their other awards aren't based on the recipient having done work proved good by the passage of time. I tend to think that Obama's prize is mostly the committee expressing its relief that Obama seems quite unlike his predecessor.”

“I'm not sure that Congressional claims, implied or otherwise, of acting in the public interest are believable to many of us anymore. Every day, the lack of progress toward health-care reform and other public priorities makes it increasingly obvious that the commercial interests who profit by the status quo are writing our legislation or stymying any constructive revisions of it. Congress' job nowadays is to try to make the lobbyists' wishes sound like responsible legislating, but I for one don't buy it.”

“People who subscribe to insurance need to know where insurance companies are coming from. They gotta know that the companies only want to maximize their profits and will propagandize against anything that even hints at threatening that scheme. So I’m not scared by their BS -- I’m just disgusted. I buy insurance for the specific service it offers. Any communication from the company that’s not addressed to me personally or doesn’t affect me or the service I’m buying goes in the recycle bin unread.”

“I assume that "something we all enjoy" refers to movies, and although not all of us enjoy movies, it's safe to assume that anyone tuning into the Oscars telecast does. But they must also be ready to tolerate stretches of barely relevant padding. That the myriad of self-serving awards shows that now clutter our TV schedules are allowed to go on for more than an hour or 90 minutes is certainly annoying. That's why anyone who says anything of substance is a welcome relief. The fact that the "deed" is reported rather than its content is a testament to the shallowness of the reporter and/or his assessment of his audience's taste.”

“Why not at the Oscars? Some actors have more on their minds than thanking their agents. And do any of us remember who any Oscar-winner's agent is, anyway?”

“Perhaps wars of self-defense are defensible. Invading other nations for specious reaons certainly is not.”

“Obama makes nice speeches -- it's how he and the Democratic Congress got elected. Now you suggest that this is not enough to get the health-care reform he promised -- that despite the campaign rhetoric, Congress doesn't understand what the voters want and that we have whack them with a 2x4 and tell them it again. Well, first off, we need some help from the White House, which seems not to have got the message, either. Single-payer and public option appear to have been abandoned with hardly a struggle. And Obama presenting no bill of his own but hoping the Repubs would help write one seems to have flopped bigtime. Perhaps that's no surprise, considering the animosity the GOP feels over losing the White House and Congress. And with no actual reform bill to discuss, it's been easy for big pharma and big insurance to drop lies into the public discourse. Big pharma and big insurance always know exactly what they want and are always ready with money for Congress and lies for the public to counter any contrary influences.

I suggest it's the president's job to stop playing footsie and do some arm-twisting to produce a comprehensive bill and the votes to pass it. Otherwise, it should be a one-term incumbency for Mr. Obama.”

“Obama's waiting for bipartisanship to happen might have have stemmed from genuine hope at first but now looks like a stalling tactic to give him time to devise a health-care plan -- which he should have had in hand before his campaign ended.

The Obama team seems surprisingly naive in all this. First, by expecting bipartisanship; second, by having no plan to sell; third, by not even threatening to push for single-payer, thereby losing it as a bargaining chip; fourth, by announcing their willingness to abandon the public option before it was seriously opposed. If this keeps up, any health-care changes will likely be those requiring us all to buy insurance from private companies under their traditional terms. That scheme would actually produce a form of bipartisan approval.”

“You gotta be kidding! ALL poverty-stricken adults CHOOSE to be that way? Hoo boy!”

“Headline is wrong -- Woods beat Woods. Yang deserves credit for a hell of a round on Sunday, but Woods gaffed about eight short putts he would ordinarily make, any five of which would have given him the title. And he hit some errant drives, but that's not unusual for Tiger.”

“Hey, the Prez has no "spare time." He's on duty at all times, especially when in public. I've no quibble with his golf, but golf courses do suck up tremendous amounts of water. The question is how much percolates back into the aquifer after all the grass is greened up. I'd like to see more natural courses, where no water is added at all.”

“I wrote nothing about authorship of the healthcare legislation -- I said a plan must be presented.

If Congress can't come up with one, I think it's appropriate for the President to have in mind at least the major features of a plan he would sign and how they will work. This will give the mad dogs and blue dogs something realistic to chew on as a sort of competition with the crap being dreamed up by the pharma/insurance lobbies and rightwing loonies.”

“Although I'm happy Obama beat out the Repub ticket, I'm dismayed at his attempt to sell a healthcare plan that doesn't exist. The late, great General Motors for all its mistakes knew it couldn't sell cars it hadn't designed or built. Of course, with no tangible plan to discuss, loonies and dummos of all stripes, and more rational folks as well, are being fascinated and distracted by the lies emanating from the pharma/insurance lobbies and their pawns. An actual plan needs to be laid out, point by point, right away.”

“Great Scott! What does making more people dependent on the government mean, anyway? We have only one federal government, on which we all depend for a myriad of services. And we all pay taxes. And if there's a military draft, a few million of us will be liable for that. So what additional control does the government want, and why?”

“Noting evidence that the human race is reconsidering conditions it has created for itself isn't evidence of a "purpose" in the universe. The actions of the human race and the existence of this planet it inhabits are of no consequence whatever to the universe. A grain of sand in the Sahara may be more significant in the universe of sand than is the Earth in the celestial scheme.”

“"If it bleeds, it leads!" You're never far off the mark if you follow this dictum in TV news. No doubt there are other such cliches that are similarly accepted. News presentation in America is homogenized because the people who do it come from a homogenizing university system. And they employ the same or identical consultants to tell them how to sex up their news shows. That's why TV and radio news looks and sounds the same everywhere in America. I suspect that journalism schools all across this country still regard network news operations as examples of how to do it right. And when a station fires an anchor because he's too old or ugly, he may well become a college professor and perpetuate the system that just screwed him over.”

“Did I not read somewhere today that the White House has decided it must concentrate not on healthcare reform but on health INSURANCE reform!? My response is GREAT SCOTT! What the hell have we been talking about since the Clinton administration if not getting everyone INSURED?! No one is proposing a government takeover of hospitals or doctors' offices. All that we've been after for the last 20 years is a single-payer health INSURANCE system -- as we already have in Medicare, which could be expanded to include everybody. But of course that would be too sensible an approach to even be considered if big pharma and the insurance industry feel threatened.”

“The parents should not have to worry about their children's basic medical costs, because if all Americans are covered, then any kid born in the U.S. is covered from birth. But people certainly need to consider the many other costs involved in child-rearing before they start procreating.”

“Mr Obama can't sell me on any plan unless he details what it is. He won't detail a health plan, probably because he fears that if it loses, he'll be identified with a loser. Well, that will be the case regardless of who concocts the plan that passes during his administration. I've been hoping that before the lobbyists' plan for enlarging the private sector's hold on our health is presented by Congress, he will get a single-payer, federal plan on the table.”

“I was merely commenting on the assertions in the first paragraph of sunnyjane's missive.”

“The lady isn't Gates' neighbor in the next-door sense. And when the police receive such a call, they apparently consider it mandatory to check it out, no matter that the reported activity seems to contradict the rules in "Housebreaking 101" regarding daylight entry.”

“Of course, Washington can pretend that health insurance is okay -- we’ve allowed our government to award itself the sort of health-insurance scheme everyone should have but cannot.

The first thing the country needs is a single-payer insurance plan covering everyone and taking advantage of the buying power such plans can exercise. Trying to incorporate private insurance into it just confuses the issue. So does confusing “health care” with “healthcare insurance.­” Once we have universal, single-payer insurance, then we can help healthcare providers improve their systems. But first, we should put a good single-payer insurance plan out there.

If the Democrats were in control of legislation and Obama had presented a detailed plan, we might well be tweaking the details of such a system by now. But as long as both parties in Congress are controlled by lobbies wanting the status quo, little or no improvement in our health-insurance situation is likely coming from Washington.

I expect the lobbies will grant Congress a period of posturing and bloviation and then may permit some tepid and incomplete plan to come forth that extracts more premiums or taxes from the middle class and expands coverage only slightly -- the plan will surely require us to maintain or add to our stack of private policies. The Medicare Part D program, with its strange “donut hole” suggests the sort of thing that might be hatched. Or, the lobbies may mandate no new plan at all.”

“It's possible that without their religion-based claim, Jews wouldn't have been given a plot in Palestine, and we wouldn't have this particular ongoing battle. But even without religion, men probably can find plenty of other points to quarrel and battle over. You can call it human nature. But a human nature that doesn't need to invent religious fairy tales might also be more rational in other areas, too.”

“Maybe Andy Borowitz will give this show the review it deserves. Let's face the fact that while most guys can replace a faucet washer, there are times when a plumber with professional-grade equipment is called for.”