I was extremely gratified that those questions were brought up, although I was disappointed in Obama’s answer to Scherer; it’s pretty hard to deny that he simply lied in his answer.

It was also discouraging that no other reporters followed up. Why couldn’t someone have pointed out that the Justice Department lawyers said that their position had been cleared at the highest levels or asked why the government didn’t ask for more time. I guess it was more important to find out what “enchanted” Obama.

The fact is, Obama usually says the right thing to questions, and if reporters pinned him down on things like the state secrets privilege, he’d be forced to actually do the right thing rather than just say it. Well, or stop having press conferences.

So, how did that work out for her?

Perhaps we all have it wrong.

Maybe Rosen really wants Sotomayor to be the nominee, so he plays a brilliant 12th dimensional chess game. He publishes an obviously incompetent and false smear of her, thus bringing her name to the forefront, and encouraging fair-minded people of all political persuasions to defend her. With all the resulting publicity, Obama, despite his well-known 11th dimensional chess abilities, is cornered, and virtually forced to nominate Sotomayor, or be charged with giving in to anonymous defamation.

I can’t believe in his change anymore. I want to. He looks good, he sounds good (usually), but he’s turned his back too many times already on the transparency in government that he promised. In this area, he is only marginally better than George W. Bush, and in some ways worse. Does anyone think that Bush would have gone out of his way to cover up any crimes that Clinton might have committed?

For roughly two hundred thousand years humans were able to thrive and expand from a corner of east Africa to cover the planet without benefit of the medical profession. What have we done to ourselves to place us in need of these successors to the high priests of ancient Egypt?

We decided we wanted an average life expectancy greater than 35 years.

A single payer system will bankrupt us faster than any terrorist attack - that is a given, just look at Medicare.

No, it is not a given; just look at all of the countries with single-payer systems that are not bankrupt.

The only way to reduce health care costs significantly is to reduce services.

There aren't billion of dollars to be magically saved.

and

I specialize in finding efficiencies in companies and improving their profits. I've made health care companies tens of millions of dollars.

Then there are obviously at least tens of millions of dollars that can be saved by eliminating the profit motive from health care. And I seriously doubt that those companies were losing money before you came along.

Increased life expectancy is the result of improved living conditions (clean water and food, improved sewage systems, and the like), not the medical profession.

Improved living conditions helped, but so did drastically reducing infant and child mortality via vacinations, dramatic reductions in young women dying in childbirth, and surgical procedures that mean a ruptured appendix is no longer a death sentence.

Sure, doctors can intervene in traumatic injury with positive outcomes but the trauma is frequently the result of human aggression or invention.

You don't think they had human aggression in those 200,000 years you were talking about? I'm sure back then, people were dying from infection with just minor wounds.

We’re screwed.

They could start with themselves and change their name to “The Republican Torture Party” or “The Irrelevancy Party”.

I didn’t like “preventive detention” when Bush did it, and I like it even less when someone I actually voted for is advocating it. I don’t trust anyone with this power. I wouldn’t trust myself with it.

Obama is supposed to be a Constitutional expert. He has even less excuse than Bush to trash it.

While I admit to some of the same reservations about Judge Sotomayor as other readers, predictions about how someone will act once on the court are not always correct. I give you Justices Warren, Brennan, White, Blackmun, Powell, and Souter as examples.

Judge Sotomayor may be excessively legalistic in her approach, but is that inappropriate for an appeals court judge, especially one who prefers not to get overturned by a conservative Supreme Court?

To assume that she will act in the same manner if on the high court is premature. She may, but she may also feel liberated by the position and not be bound as strongly to precedent as she has thus far.

I blame Bush for a lot of things too, but Bush is no longer in charge. He is irrelevant, unless Holder or someone gets the stones to indict him for war crimes.

There is a new sheriff in town, and he is the one we need to hold responsible for what is happening now. Obama campaigned on promises of change and transparency, and is failing miserably on both counts. I don’t know if he never meant what he said, or if he changed his mind for some reason, but at the very least he owes the American people an explanation.

Sounds like we need to hire Old Joe to administer our public health care option.

I would like to hear more about what you’ve done and how you did it. After negotiating with all of those people, do you have time for anything else? What kind of deductibles or co-pays do you have? What is your maximum benefit? And if you can do it, why can’t my employer negotiate such a deal?