So Democratic Representative Bart Stupak wrote a letter to Howard Dean, where he proclaimed:

The last thing we want to do as Democrats is to disenfranchise voters," Stupak wrote in the letter to Dean. "I have heard from countless Democratic and independent voters who are frustrated and angry to think that their votes are being ignored."

Could people please learn what terms mean before they go making bold statments?

I'm fearing for my Democratic Party today, and I'm fearing for my nation today.

I've been reading more and more as the media begins a ... well, I'll avoid the "L" word here out of a desire to keep from adding fuel to the fire ... an assalt on the character of the first black candidate to have a serious shot at the Presidency, on the basis of inflammatory statements made by the pastor of the church he attends.  And I imagine what the response must be in the minds of any of the millions of blacks across America who play by the rules, believing that they really can become equals in America by working hard and going to the best schools and succeeding in the way the system demands you succeed.

In Salon yesterday:

Interesting result from a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press: If their favored candidate is not the Democratic nominee, a quarter of Hillary Clinton's primary supporters would defect and vote for John McCain in November, while only 10 percent of Barack Obama's supporters would do the same.

WTF?

Catching up on my Air America podcasts (we managed to lose our Air America affiliate here in Austin, TX - which has one of the most vibrant progressive communities in America.  How lame is that?), I came across a Rachael Maddow (maybe the smartest person on talk radio these days?) comment that reminded me of this discussion.

She was talking about how Edwards had filled the "angry white man" role while he was in the race ... and how none of the other candidates could really match his tone effectively.

A nifty little Brief Analysis from the nonprofit National Center for Policy Analysis came out today, under the title Geoengineering: A Global Warming Fix?"  For some reason, author Pete Geddes left off what must have been his working subtitle how applying band-aids to global warming can be the Mother of all Contracting Boondoggles for Corporate America.

In a WSJ OpEd dedicated largely to trashing Bill and Hillary, and chiding Democrats for not understanding their perfidy for so long, Noonan concludes by taking off the gloves wrt George Bush's effect on her party.

George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.

Let's face it - the long-time characterization of Hillary is proving true.  Her biggest problem has always been that no matter how far she tried to move to the right, in the minds of many Independents and ALL the Republicans, she's always going to be marked with an Ultra-Liberal brand.  All that money that Mellon Scaife and company spent during the 1990's is still drawing interest.  But for every step she took towards the right, she distanced herself from the natural constituency of people who really believe that the things Hillary Clinton championed back in 1992 are still worth fighting for.

As a father of two myself, my heart went out to the recently released Iraqi in this McClatchy News Story (who else?), set free after 15 months of wrongful detention:

Amin said he'd never been a threat to security. He thought about his children waiting for him outside.

"It was a lot of suffering and I lived with very little hope," he said. "I always hoped to hug my son and daughter and to raise them with the right principles. ...I depended on God to get through and now I forget it. It's only a page in my past."

But what was really chilling?

Well - maybe this isn't entirely Time's fault.  They get an assist from the good headline writers at Yahoo, who posted up a link that declared:

Iran, Hamas vow to thwart any Mideast peace deal

Pretty damn incriminating stuff, eh?  Those evil Iranians are already declaring that they'll act to prevent peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis?

I have no idea if my e-mails will actually get read - I returned them to the information/solicitation e-mails I regularly get from the DNC and DCCC, since I contribute money regularly to them.

But I had to vent - and I figured I might as well vent somewhere where it might possibly raise an eyebrow.  Doing it here certainly won't register ... and a call from me to Feinstein's or Schumer's office would have no impact at all.  Addresses that I retured e-mails to were:

dccc@dccc.org
dnc-003nR035MP@mailer.democrats.org
democraticparty@democrats.org

Austin is always revered as a blue, liberal oasis in the middle of big Red State Texas.  Yeah, we have to put up with Rick "amazingly, a worse Governor than Bush" Perry living here year round, and the cadre of wack jobs sent to live among us every two years from Longview and Freeport and the Panhandle and suburbs of Dallas, but far and away Austin is one of the more progressive cities south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Hmmm... correcting in response to a comment, CSC divested itself of its Dyncorp International holdings a few years back.  Another Austin firm, Veritas LLC purchased Dyncorp - but at least they're not living in taxpayer funded quarters!

The best reflection on the news that Fox helped blow SITE Intelligence's surveillance of Al Qaeda may come from Fox itself:

Reading the Washington Post today, I have to conclude that Senator Carl Levin is either just as arrogant as the Bush/Cheney axis ... or that he's plain stupid.

Declaring the government of Iraq "non-functional," the influential chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said yesterday that Iraq's parliament should oust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his cabinet if they are unable to forge a political compromise with rival factions in a matter of days.

Is that a solution to the current impasse that's bedeviling the Democratic Party?

Clearly, if we're going to stay in Iraq on a Bushian time scale, we're going to need more bodies than the current system can provide.

If we're NOT going to stay in Iraq on a Bushian time scale, it's time to start the wheels moving for the US to withdraw.

The Dems can very comfortably vote NO on both the money and the draft in one fell swoop ... while Repubs will have to choose between being on record in support of a draft, or voting against more money.

Yeah, in the Senate, it will be filibustered to death - but it will force front and center the debate that SHOULD be taking place ... the military is dying by 1000 cuts at the hands of the current Bushian policy, no matter how much money is pumped into it.  What are the Republicans willing to do in order to support Bush AND the military?

Because in two years, it's going to be a Democratic President ... and the Republicans are going to be screaming that any and every conversation or scrap of paper or e-mail be logged and made public ... and we need formalized groundrules now.

The first step is a court challenge.  There is absolutely no room to leave these requirements ill-defined.  Congressional Republicans need to understand that whatever leeway they want to grant Bush will be granted in perpetuity, regardless of who is in the White House, before they'll buck Bush at all.  

And it will take a court challenge to drive that point home.

Robert Novak breaks out the shovel this week (no link available yet):

While Sen. John McCain claims that everything is "fine" in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, events strongly suggest otherwise. The former frontrunner is now in deep trouble.  With respect to the positive signs a presidential campaign can point to at this early stage -- fundraising, national polls, state polls, endorsements -- McCain finds himself almost empty-handed.

For this and other reasons, the nascent campaign of former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson poses a challenge for McCain in particular. Thompson has reportedly raised millions in just days after filing an exploratory committee, and a new national Bloomberg  poll puts him at 21 percent, in a strong second place against former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

I hope that everyone got a wonderful chuckle at the story line that the staff of the Wall Street Journal

"reacted with near horror at the prospect of having Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. as an owner".

Why push for an end to funding of the Iraq occupation by March 2008?

And why has Bush been insistent on keeping Iraq going until he's no longer President?

Look at the economy - and the other part of Bush's legacy, that his financial backers really care about.