dawlishgal's Comments (9207)

“He may have lied to the police, or else she did.”

“What a sad state of affairs when Saddam Hussein has more genuine credibility than the US government.”

“When somebody is a sports hero, he becomes a role model. I suppose it would be OK if these people could manage to stay out of trouble, but they get publicity for everything else they do, so it is bound to happen when they mess up.

If they lied about a car accident, it should be reported. Why on earth would anybody smash the back windows of a big car to get a driver out of the driver's seat? No wonder questions were asked. Also, it was almost 3 am. If celebrities don't want bad publicity, then they shouldn't seek good publicity. It is all part of the same package.”

“I hope that at the same time, the southern states errect firewalls against the excess of tax money they receive compared to what they pay in. People in the north could use the money to solve their OWN problems instead of givng 180% of what it pays in to Mississippi, as just one example. Or you Republican states could try to secede again, and this time we'd let you.

It would be good to get rid of all of the state that have two senators, just like REAL states do, and yet have almost zero populations. I, for one, am sick of having my issues decides by people in Alaska and Wyoming!”

“Actually, freedom of the press here belongs to the big corporations with lots of advertising dollars. Same as our political system belongs to them because they have lots more dollars to bribe our elelcted officials. Nobody is looking out for ordinary people anymore.”

“What's the point of firing two bit lobbyists when Obama continues to invite CEOs of big banks, big investment houses and big insurance companies into the White House for private sessions. Over 500 visits from health care biggies alone. How many from consumer adocates? I haven't heard of any.

And when he chooses big Wall Street exec foxes to guard our financial chicken houses and does nothing to stop them from rewarding their own kind with no regulations or responsibilities for how they spend our money?

This latest PR gambit is mere cosmetics. . Read the article by Matt Tiabbi (the best investigative reporter going), the one in the Dec. 19 issue of Rolling Stone. The adminstration is pretending that lobbyists are the same thing as the heads of companies who hire lobbyists.­...the latter have not lost any of THEIR access, and they are the ones who really count..

Until Obama gets rid of Rahm Emanuel and Robert Rubin and their Wall Street cronies, there will be no reform. None...in fact big finance is already getting more chances to f*ck the country than they had before they ruined it in the past few years.”

“Oh, please. Men still kill their wives and their wives' lovers, and it isn't even considered a crime in certain places. A few scratches and a bonk with a golf club for a philandering husband...­.why the bleep not?”

“LOL”

“There is a strange situation here in Pittsburgh. Our mayor paraded his wife and child around for photo ops for months until the recent election; That was 3 weeks ago. Then, shortly after winning, he announced that he and his wife had separated. OK, that was a fairly small deception as pols go. But then he announced that he had hired a pitbull lawyer from NY (I think it was). The lawyer threatened to sue everybody and anybody who spread "rumors or innuendos.­"

Seems to have riled up some PIttsburghers to be threated , especially since rumors of philandering were swirling around the mayor for months. Anyhow, now there are websites (ravenstahlrumors) dedicated to giving people a chance to make up thousands of outrageous rumors to defy the lawer to sue them all. My favorite is "Luke prepares poultry and doesn't wash his hands afterwards­." Good for many laughs. I LOVE PIttsburghers. Who wouldn't?”

“Whatever Obama intends to do later, it is very clear that his first priorities now are in pleasing Wall Street, big banking, and the military industrial complex. He allowed big insurance and big pharm to write (so-called) health care reform (bills. He keeps himself above the fray and spends all of his time and energy (and reputation) in courting thugs like Grassley who will never vote for any kind of reform anyhow. He is alienating the people who worked the hardest for his election. And those who are still in the Obama camp keep telling us that the little guys must wait their turn. That is SO NOT what we were told in the election campaign.

. . Seems to me that by the time our turn rolls around, there will be no money left to do anything for us, and, besides that, Obama will have defanged his own power by making such bad choices. Not that he has used it for anything good so far. This is the same as happened with the Clintons..­.first their broken promise to oppose NAFTA, then their lame attempt at health care and the way they neglected to fight for Hillary's creation..­..just allowed big insurance to spend hundreds of millions of dollars lying about her bill. And we have been a decade and a half with no decent heath care reform and it looks as though we are not going to get any now, either.”

“It pains me to say this. As long as Obama directly chose to employ Wall Street regulars, particularly former officers in corrupt companies that were responsible for the breakdown of our economy, in much more important positions in his administration than any two-bit lobbyist could hope to attain, all of his tossing of small potatoes lobbyists is just cosmetic.. Read the article in the new Rolling Stone about how any kind of meaningful deregulations regarding banks and Wall street have been defanged by Obama's choices (who have even managed to either scare or corrupt Barney Frank)..

Obama KNEW what he was choosing, and he could have chosen honest people like Krugman to help get us out of the mess that was created by the same guys that Obama chose (ostensibly) to fix the mess. Same way he could have chosen Howard Dean to head up making a decent biz of of our corrupt big corporate health care organizations. . Instead, he chose guys from big insurance and a bunch of retreads from the NAFTA-loving Clinton adminstrat­on.. That tells us a lot about what he intended to do all along.

No mention anymore of renegotiating NAFTA, either. Apparently, he and his hand-picked stooges realized that this was another campaign promise that would be easy to break.

For a lot of people (and I am one of them), Obama was one last chance at some decency in our government before we gave up on politics as a solution to anything.”

“If a liberal made the same comment as Beck did, Palin supporters would be going ballistic. Beck and Palin are both "Hoots," or would be if they and their terminally gullible supporters weren't so damned self-serving and creepy.”

“Perhaps she and her supporter's mean COMMON sense, rather than common SENSE?”

“Why mercy to her staff? They took a job promoting a fraud and ought to be confronted­..

It is the media that foists Palin on us and distorts her popularity by going to every one of her events and pretending that her crackpot supporters represent some kind of majority. We ought to be shoving polls in their faces and demanding mercy FOR US.

There is a group of Americans who can logically be called "The Gullibles" who are paranoid about everything the liberals try to do to make life safer and better for average people. The are infamous for voting against their own best interests (and those of a majority of the rest of us). This brain-deficient group is extremely tolerant of the flaws of their own, however. If Palin lies, they want the media to not report it because they think she is being persecuted. But, if t her small, but loud group turns up en masse at a Sam's Club in some rinky-dink suburb of Pittsburgh , they use it as a photo op. What the bleep do these people expect, and what is the economic motivation of Limbaugh and Beck who are throwing human sacrifices to these people? Could it be $$$$$$$$s, millions of them?

It is downright weird to hear these crackpots claiming that Obama is not a real American, but that Palin will be their savior.”

“I can't remember another president who was so afraid to offend the other side of the aisle while playing fast and loose with the loyalty of those who worked so hard with their money, their phones and their door knocking to get him elected. As far as I can see, there is no reason at all to court those who will never vote for or with what is supposed to be Obama's side, yet Obama spent prized resources like his reputation courting people like Grassley. It makes me wonder whether we just assumed he was on our side. The alternative is that he is so needy re being liked by everybody that he figures he doesn't have to pay attention to the desires and needs of those who already like him. Either way, it is bad news for progressives.

I lived in CT during Lieberman's rise to power, and recognized quite quickly that he was a wolf in sheep's clothing. Voted with Democrats on issued that didn't matter ot his corporate puppeteers and on all matters in which there was little or no doubt as to the outcome. But when his vote really mattered, then he voted with Republicans, and he still does.”

“Don't put words in my mouth. Of course, Obama puts the military at a higher priority when he decides to put enormous amounts of money there. Money that can't be used for other things like health care without those who want health care being accused of causing a deficit.

Clinton did pretty much the same thing when he used his initial burst of power to pass NAFTA, even though he had made a campaign promise to oppose it. By the time health care got to the top of HIS priorities list, his power was pretty much kaput. He could have said, "No health care, no NAFTA," or even, "First health care, and then maybe NAFTA, but he didn't. And if you don't know how that turned out, you had better google it.

And don't say it is congress's job when Obama could easily be giving speeches telling people to contact their congressman and senator and tell them that he and we want single payer. Or even public option. He is very detached from the details of the plan. Other presidents have taken the helm and acted as leaders with respect to congress, not just as spectators. Obama has made it pretty clear that any plan is just about as good as any othe plan as long as there is some kind of plan so he isn't embarrassed by the lack of one.”

“Excellent statement. I believe in regulation too, having experienced the thumbs of two insurance companies three times. I am still angry for the way they tried to rewrite my husband's disability policies AFTER he became disabled. I understand the need to vet the applicants, but they made up stuff from whole cloth, just to deny him coverage. And, after he died, they tried to say that I wasn't his beneficiary. Luckily, his employer fought for our rights.

The problem is that many, maybe most people don't know how to read their policies and compare the promised coverage to the reasons for denials of coverage. And, even if they feel cheated, they don't know what to do about it. I did the legal research for my husband's policies. The most egregious offender was the one that tried to average his two different serious disabilities, one total and one half, and to call it 3/4 of a disability­... Turned out that he had a disability and a half, as I am sure the insurance creeps already knew. They just hoped that we wouldn't know.

Stuff like this goes on all the time, and I don't know why we are giving insurance companies the right to write the health care bill when they've been ruthlessly abusing the public trust for years, .”

“The truth of her accusations aren't all that important (unless true and her father has access to little girls). Her family ought to be more accepting of her and whatever reasons she had for making the accusations. Either they're true or she thought it was in her interest to make them. A REAL family would be concerned in either case because there is clearly something wrong with her..”

“It's part of her legend to appear unstable, and no matter which she does, she will be scrutinized and things will be taken out of context. That is the sacrifice she is making to appear in public....­to be the target of people who want her to live up to her legend.”

“No wonder she breaks down in public. It must be very stressful being treated as some kind of unstable loose cannon with a lot of people waiting for her to go off at any random moment.

If I were her, I would settle for making recordings, but it is her choice to do public performances. And she is willing to accept the consequences when she appears unstable. So bleeping what! I wish the sharks would mind their own business. Nobody is forcing them to pay attention to her.”

“My husband died in May after what had appeared at first to be successful heart surgery. His last words were of faith and optimism and love, and I want to keep them private. I haven't even shared them with our children. Thank heavens that nobody has asked me.. I cringed when I saw the clip in which Oprah asked the question that is none of her business.”

“It is interesting how people change over time. Palin seems to be stuck in high school days. She cribbs thoughts from some of the more destructive "thinkers" of our age, but she does it to further her politcial goals, but not because she has an real interest in politics. She wants the power, but not the work of being a leader. And she appeals to people who love the idea that people as uninformed and mentally lazy as they are can be president. We just had a president who was elected for that very reason. How quickly people forget.”

“How does what a news anchor knows about Alaska have anything near a similar import to whether or not a candidate for VP knows what she reads? Palin is all about settling scores with imaginary enemies. I suppose that appeals to a lot of hostile authoritarian Republicans (probably about 1/3 of that party), but she would be terrible in any high office.

Anybody who wonders what these Republicans see in Palin ought to read the John Dean book about authoritarians. It tells us more than we can comfortably know about these people who are missing the brain chip for empathy and have twice the usual chips for narcissism.”

“So what? He promised REAL health care reform and he ought to be in that particular "box" too, but he leaves it all up to congress. When it comes to war, he leaves it up to the military. We need somebody who is more than a spectator president. He ought to be at least explaining why we are ignoring our needs at home to fight this endless war.

Yet, he finds if fairly easy to make this costly expansion of the war when we could be using the money it will cost for other purposes more beneficial to most Americans. We have already given enough to the military-industrial complex, who manage to preserve their jobs by advocating constant wars.”

“I have been thinking about the terrible situations our soldiers are in ever since I read the recent article in Rolling Stone about the 3 men who went on a killing spree at the big base in Colorado while between combat assignments.

The article describes the stresses of having watched a buddy die, and then having to go back and fight some more without even being able to get a lame attempt at sufficient psychiatric care (the understaffed psychiatrists have time only to stuff these guys with pills). Apparently, the military regards troops as fungible. It is horrific. The leader of these three seemed to have the idea that since he was destined to go back to this awful situation, it didn't matter what he did while waiting, since nothing could be worse than going back. He tried to get out of going back, but failed.

How can the human and financial tolls these wars are taking be worth the small benefits of whatever victory is achieved? Especially when we can't even define what a victory might be.


Thanks for your eloquent statement.”