For a Congressional Republican, the multiple Jack Abramoff investigations freeze the bowels in a way that the Plame case never will.  Rove is dispensible, and you can proably get by if Bush himself resigns in disgrace, but practically every Republicans in Washington connected in some way to Jack Abramoff.  Not bad in itself, but practically everything Abramoff did was in some way illegal, and everything that wasn't illegal was sleazy enough to embarrass whomever it touches.  

much more on the flip...

It's beyond doubt that Harry Reid basically pushed in Frist's nose yesterday.  When that sort of thing happens, what do you do about it?  Yesterday we saw four basic strategies.  

more on the flip...

So we will have our drag-out ideology battle after all. Harry Reid, among others, has expressed disappointment, but is disappointment appropriate? I don't think it is. For one thing, Bush promised a long time ago to nominate another Scalia, so it's not like we didn't see it coming. For another, Bush had no choice.

...

It seems like more than a year ago when George Bush took his second oath of office.  Half the country thought things would go on getting better until Republicans died in a massive ejaculation and ascended to conservative heaven, while the other half got busy updating their passports.  The connected Keepers of Conventional Wisdom nervously whispered phrases which hadn't yet become embarrassing jokes, phrases like `privatization,' and `nuclear option,' and `Bill Frist.'  It seemed like a matter of time.  What the hell happened?  In a word, the Democrats became relevant.  

This year Kos broke an enormous milestone when Democratic candidates, sitting Democratic Senators (Barbara '08!) and official representatives of the Democratic Party elbowed their way into the crowded fray of diaries and posted their own, like any other member of the Kos community.  What's more, unlike the rightwing, which treats the blogosphere as another paid astroturf operation, our party's message is that they're listening.  For the representatives of the Democratic party reading this, I want to thank you for being here and beg your forgiveness for rudely offering unsolicited advice.  I have a simple message and I hope that it's worth your time.  

Anybody running SETI@Home knows the general idea of distributed computing (link), an approach to supercomputing-without-the-supercomputer that just delivered its first major scientific discovery.  

As reported in Nature, distributed computing has delivered the largest-scale GCM ever.  In fact it delivered several GCMs.  Specifically, the authors selected 2,000 individual models capable of predicting current climate from past conditions and then ran each models into the future under various greenhouse predictions.  A good number of models before that might be 12.  

We're fucked.  More on the flip.

I'll start with an idea that came up in comments in the ground-breaking diary by the Democratic Senate Communications Center:  I want the ability to categorize diaries.  

More on the flipside;

In the most fear-ridden campaign since the times of the Alien and Sedition Act, Barrack Obama gave me hope.  In his spirit I propose that we can co-opt those Republicans who opted out of the George Bush suicide cult and govern America from a position of overwhelming support.  Below the fold I will talk about how.  

It seems easy enough to ask, what actually were the two parties' respective mindsets pre-9/11?  A good political-beat reporter could wrap the story up in an afternoon of phone interviews and Lexis-Nexis.  The fact that it hasn't been reported, or if it has it hasn't made any significant mark, points to the Democrats' fundamental weakness in this election cycle: the results are so egregious and lopsided that simply reporting them in an honest way opens up the press to accusations of bias by the right-wing noise machine.  

Here is the best case that I can make for where the respective parties stood pre-9/11.  

Sure it's hard to get worked up about lawn signs as about felonious assault, but somebody has to pay for the things.  And it's happening f*cking everywhere.  Let me share a story.  

That said, representatives from Science magazine gained unprecedented access to North Korean researchers and, among other scoops, report for the first time that Pyongyang may be willing to negotiate an end to its civilian and military nuclear program (link for subscribers only).  Details below the fold.