Oh, yeah, right....

It wasn't Diane Schuler's fault.

It was the fault of alcohol.

Please.......

Human beings always have a choice. No matter how fucked up you are, you know you should not be driving on a highway with little children in the car when you are so messed up, you don't even know you're driving the wrong way.

Unless you're suffering from advanced schizophrenia or dementia (which this woman was not), you know damn well you should not be behind the wheel of a car containing little children if you're in that condition.

If you have to fuck yourself up with booze and pot, do it after you drop the kids off.

Wherever Diane Schuler is in the afterlife, she is suffering the tortures of the damned. As she should be.

And what kind of idiot are you, to try and excuse or rationalize her behavior?

Re:

I sort of don't care

She's reducing the population, took several evil vehicles off the road. Seems like a win win all around to me.

Nice try at trolling, but nobody could be as big an asshole as you claim to be.

It's just not possible.

.....is that the people who need to hire someone to come in and clean their houses are the biggest frickin' pigs you could imagine, as Rebecca documents so ably in her article.

People who wouldn't think of letting crud build up on their stovetop or in their toilet never require the services of a cleaning agency.

You would think some of these people with the really disgusting houses would be embarrassed to have someone from outside come and see what pigs they are.

But noooooooooooooo.................................

It's comforting (in a perverse way) to know that some things endure....

• air pollution
• bad television shows
• athlete's foot
• idiots like yourself who hold a grudge like it was a bar of gold

It's almost Labor Day. Healthcare reform is struggling, the public option is near dead. Why couldn't Obama deliver?

He couldn't deliver because:

• The right wingers decided right from the start that their strategy would be obstruct, distort, and spread fear. They are very good at this, and they did their usual stellar job of fear mongering, distortion and obstruction. Obama and the Democrats were put on the defensive right from the start, and they never quite caught up.
• The right wingers had the more compelling images....e.g., death panels, deciding whether your grandmother would live or die....."Who's going to pay for all this?"........."I don't want the government telling me which doctor I can go to....."
• Health care is very complex. Health care reform is very complex. While the Democrats were trying to explain all the complexities to a public that doesn't like anything more complex than "Will Paula Abdul come back to American Idol?" the Republicans were putting simplistic, but very effective images out there.....Your grandma out of the street.....socialism in America......

Obama and the Democrats never had a chance. Rush Limbaugh wins, and healthcare reform loses.

You're right that part of the blame for the failure of health care reform has to be laid at Obama's door.

But my point was that we have people in the conservative and Republican camps who set out to sabotage health care reform because they didn't want Obama and the Democrats to get credit for it.

These are the people who have distorted the issues and created fear among older Americans and among people who don't take the time to understand all the complexities and nuances of the current system.

I thought Obama did a reasonably good job of presenting health care reform to the American people. But it's a lot easier to sow seeds of disinformation and fear about health care than it is to fix the inequities of the current system.

No, GW doesn't stand for "George W." It's been my online pseudonym since before W was a gleam in the eye of GOP kingmakers.

Excellent comments. They bear repeating:

Real reform is not possible

Nothing went wrong -- Obama set out to do the impossible and found that it was impossible. He was sufficiently arrogant to believe that the Clintons were incompetent and that if they had "talked" more and reached out across the aisle, etc. they would have succeeded. It's true that Obama has no spine and has morphed into a moderate Republican. Its also true that during his campaign, he displayed a shocking absence of knowledge regarding health reform. But, Democrats comparing Obama (who knew nothing) to Clinton who was well versed and understood the issues chose Obama and his empty rhetoric.

Nevertheless, the best, most knowledgable politician in the world couldn't succeed in effecting real health care reform for the following reasons:

1. Big pharma has gads of money to defeat reform;

2. Insurance companies have gads of money focused on defeating reform;

3. The money motivates politicians to defeat reform;

4. The American people are stupid -- they believe lies about death panels, the menace of big government, etc. They also fail to recognize that they currently pay for health care for uninsured through increased health premiums.

5. Americans are greedy and irrational -- they want the best of everything for themselves, but want to pay for nothing.

Big pharma, insurance companies, and politicians use the irrationality, fear, and stupidity of the U.S. electorate to defeat any proposal that is not in the interest of Big pharma and insurance companies. Until some part of this equation changes, no meaningful health reform can occur. That's just reality, and it has nothing to do with Obama.

Obama's fault was to not recognize this reality up front.