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Bugfix list below!

From the diaries. This is a handy guide on how to use the supple new comments, from the guy who designed the ajax parts of it. -ct

The new Daily Kos comments system uses the state-of-the-art Ajax technology to make reading and contributing to Daily Kos discussions fast, easy, and fun. No longer do you have to suffer through waiting for entire pages to load just because you recommended the diary or gave a comment a rating. Virtually everything can now be done in-place right on the page you're viewing.

Read on for way more details and compatibility information!

Ted Koppel states the obvious in his NYTimes op-ed:

Perhaps the day will come when the United States is no longer addicted to imported oil; but that day is still many years off. For now, the reason for America's rapt attention to the security of the Persian Gulf is what it has always been. It's about the oil.

Of course it's all about oil; there were and are a few dozen gov'ts uglier than Hussein's we could've invaded.

But what annoys me about Koppel's "revelation" is that he tiptoes so close to the elephant in the middle of the room, and promptly hides his face:

The NYTimes is leading with a story about Germany's possible role in the rendition of Khaled el-Masri:

For more than a year, the German government has criticized the United States for its role in the abduction of a German man who was taken to an American prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he said he was held and tortured for five months after being mistaken for a terrorism suspect.
...
But on Monday in Neu-Ulm near Munich, the police and prosecutors opened an investigation into whether Germany served as a silent partner of the United States in the abduction of the man, Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Arab descent who was arrested Dec. 31, 2003, in Macedonia before being flown to the Kabul prison.

Why might Germany be so afraid of its complicity in this crime?

The American fuhrer may be forcing it to revisit some rather unpleasant history.

I'm wondering, do the Dems have an overall theme for the 2006 congressional elections, such as the "Contract with America" that the GOP used with such effect in 1994?

If not, I have a candidate to kick around, and we can use this thread to come up with other ideas.

My idea is simple: the current GOP-dominated Congress forms a "Republican Guard" around the current maladministration and its Culture of Corruption. They have become exactly what they claim to hate, as often happens with unchecked power.

And just like the "elite" troops designated to protect Saddam, these miscreants can actually be removed with relative ease come November, where justice can finally and truly be served.

Here's my question to you political strategists out there:

Should we proactively put abortion before the current SCOTUS lineup, and schedule its trial and decision for a politically opportune moment?

Hey, it wasn't us who made Roe into a political football. Why not pick it up and run with it?

Hard to have a discussion here on the subject of Israel/Palestine without it getting heated. But if you want a place for more sober analysis, here's a thread for you. There are other threads to be radical and hateful on.

Now Yossi Beilin of the Israeli left (Meretz) had an interesting analysis on Ha'aretz just now:

"The unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, not as a part of an agreement with Abu Mazen, greatly strengthened the Hamas."

Why? Simple. The Israelis were too proud to grant a victory to any Palestinian faction. They had to abandon those settlements on their own decision; they couldn't let Abbas or anyone else take credit for it. And so Fatah couldn't go to Gazans and say, "Look, we brought you out from occupation." Gazans were free to conclude the opposite.

Da boss has posted his list of Rules for diaries. But these were just intended for consumption by the clueless and unwarshed masses. The real rules for diaries on Daily Kos are listed below; you should Hotlist this diary to refer to them from time to time.

Maureen Dowd's latest screed is utterly worthless...save that $49.95...but like any vague cloud of birdshit, for me it had a silver lining.

For all its dazzling digital spectacle, "King Kong" is not as daring as it could be. Peter Jackson could have made Kong a woman. Or, while he was borrowing "Titanic" imagery for the lovers' parting on the Empire State Building, he could have gone all the way and made "Brokeback Island."

Just picture it: Leonardo DiCaprio, blond, doe-eyed and smitten, curled in the ape's epicene yet hairy grip. Kong, swinging both ways.

Ummm...I can't even muster an Armando heh™.

And that's good.

This NYT article may shed some light on why humanity is so predisposed to the "bandwagon effect" and why pundits like O'Lielly have such irrational followings:

Having watched 100 children, [Derek Lyons] agrees with Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten that children really do overimitate. He has found that it is very hard to get children not to.

If they rush through opening a puzzle, they don't skip the extra steps. They just do them all faster. What makes the results even more intriguing is that the children understand the laws of physics well enough to solve the puzzles on their own...

Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.

Some context, and political analysis overleaf...

The real Myth of the Purple Finger is that we're not asking Iraqis the right question when they visit the ballot booths.

The reason we're making no progress in Iraq, why we continue to be greeted by IEDs instead of flowers, is simple.

We have no popular mandate among Iraqis for the presence of our forces.

Jack Murtha cited opinion polls of Iraqis that claimed:

"over 80 percent of the Iraqi people want the U.S. forces out of Iraq" and "45 percent of the Iraqi people feel that the attacks on U.S. forces are justified."

These figures have been confirmed and elaborated by Media Matters.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are under attack as being "surrender monkeys waving white flags". We can't seem to get a consistent strategy and voice on Iraq.

Please follow me over the flip. I think we have an angle on this.

Many people here list their scores on the Political Compass test.

Now Kos reader Hatamoto has created a Daily Kos Political Compass Chart that I urge you all to list yourselves on. I ended up where they put Gandhi and Mandela (quite comfy with that company) and more or less in the mainstream of Kossacks at -6.00, -5.28.

While the Political Compass is the rage, it raises a bunch of questions for me. Please follow me across the link for more:

I am Hillary Rodham Clinton's political advisor. It's barely a year after 9/11, and Bush is massing troops at the Iraqi border.

The question: does my candidate vote in favor, or not, of authorizing the use of force?

I have only one answer for her:

Hillary, if you ever want to call the Oval Office yours, you're going to have to vote in favor.

Follow me over the jump for why.

The shrill one is at it again, and the paywall they put around him ain't containing it:

Registration for Medicare's new prescription drug benefit starts next week. [...]

At first, the benefit will look like a normal insurance plan, with a deductible and co-payments.

But if your cumulative drug expenses reach $2,250, a very strange thing will happen: you'll suddenly be on your own. The Medicare benefit won't kick in again unless your costs reach $5,100. This gap in coverage has come to be known as the "doughnut hole."

One way to see the bizarre effect of this hole is to notice that if you are a retiree and spend $2,000 on drugs next year, Medicare will cover 66 percent of your expenses. But if you spend $5,000 - which means that you're much more likely to need help paying those expenses - Medicare will cover only 30 percent of your bills.

I must be out of it here in my 30's, but this really surprised me. Read on, it gets much, much worse...

Paul Krugman, whose job at Princeton was offered by Ben Bernanke, all but endorses him as the best choice Bush could have made to lead the Federal Reserve:

By Bush administration standards, the choice of Ben Bernanke to succeed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve was just weird.

For one thing, Mr. Bernanke is actually an expert in monetary policy, as opposed to, say, Arabian horses.

Beyond that, Mr. Bernanke's partisanship, if it exists, is so low-key that his co-author on a textbook didn't know he was a registered Republican. The academic work on which his professional reputation rests is apolitical. Moreover, that work is all about how the Fed can influence demand - there's not a hint in his work of support for the right-wing supply-side doctrine.

More on the flip...

So today we find out that the Vaccine against cervical cancer works, and really well:

An experimental vaccine has proved highly effective at preventing cervical cancer in a two-year study involving more than 12,000 women, researchers reported today.

The vaccine works by making people immune to two types of a sexually transmitted virus that cause most cases of the disease.

The vaccine, Gardasil, is made by Merck, which plans to apply for approval to the Food and Drug Administration before the end of this year and, if the vaccine is approved, to market it in 2006.

But Dobson and the Religious Wrong are going to be incensed! Why? More below:

In reference to the Red Cross and FEMA handing out $2000 debit cards to hurricane victims, a commenter over on Atrios just asked:

Why aren't they getting $1 Million per family like the 9/11 victims?

It's an outstanding question and is the real elephant in the room no one wants anyone to see when discussing investigations of the gov't response to Katrina.

With all the examples of successfully protecting a population from hurricanes and floods over history, one cannot make the argument that this was any less preventable than 9/11. Indeed, one can make exactly the opposing argument.

One of the funniest things I've read during this week of utter misery was that "W. is looking for a Refund on the Louisiana Purchase." (In a comment on Atrios, of course.)

Now this isn't a time for humor nor is this a humorous diary. I think at this point, the majority of the country has woken up to find the emperor has no capability much less clothes, and the question now is what to do about it.

A major shift has occurred in the nation over the last 25 years, and that is the creation of what I term a "Refund Culture." Since LL. Bean and other stores started offering a lifetime, no-questions-asked satisfaction guarantee on retail products, America has been taught that it doesn't need to live with bad decisions like it used to.

The political implications of this on the flip: