I've been spending the day obsessing over horserace coverage, probably

I've heard a lot discussion of Obama, Edwards, Clinton, Biden, Dodd, Richardson, Kucinich, the politics of change-- a message that even seemed to be echoed by Romney, a sign that the Republicans are beginning to desert a sinking party. I've heard endless cud-chewing about McCain/Leiberman vs Thompson, Huckabee vs Giulianni, Chris Dodd vs Harry Reid.

It occurs to me that there's name I've not heard tonight from anyone but myself:

George W. Bush

Given the dysfunction of recent years presents our democracy with unique challenges. To meet the needs of this post-post 9/11 environment, our foundational documents will need to be updated to meet new challenges. I have some modest suggestions of ways we might get started.

Someone please explain to me why Hilary Clinton is leading, and gaining, in the primary polling. I simply fail to understand her desirability as a candidate.

I know the overwhelming consensus on Daily Kos seems to be in favor of an immediate withdrawal from Iraq (as soon as is practicable in a safe and orderly manner). I'd like to believe this is the best course of action-- I certainly don't want to be sharing Iraq policy with the president-- but I nevertheless find myself deeply uncomfortable with the logic of withdrawal. I do not believe we are "winning" or that a win/loss logic is even applicable at this point. I do not believe the status quo is acceptable, and am horrified by the toll the war has taken in lives and resources, both American and Iraqi.

So I ask in the spirit of honest inquiry (please don't flame me for this)-- if we leave, what happens to Iraq then?

[Edited for spelling]

I know the consensus position at daily Kos seems to be: withdrawl from Iraq as soom as humanly possible (with appropriate caveats for doing so in a safe and orderly manner). I've never been fully comfortable with this-- to the extent that we essentially broke their country and bear the moral responsibility for the consequences. This would seem to demand the exertion of every resource at our disposal to make things right, and the potential for a genocidal bloodbath in the aftermath of a US withdrawl is very real. At the same time, our presence there doesn't appear to be helping matters and the situation is both untenable and murderous.

Via Sullivan, I found an article in the Boston Globe that has a proposal I find relatively promising, and not incompatible with a speedy withdrawl of American troops. That is: draft every man in Iraq between the ages of 18 and 35 into service.

http://www.boston.com/...

We've definitely picked up control of the House of representitives. So, assuming Webb has won VA, and Tester has pulled Montana, we've got both the houses of Congress.- committee chairs, agenda setting ability and subpoena power. At the very least, John Conyers should be chair of the House Judiciary committee.

This being the case, where does that put the odds of impeachment proceedings at? One in ten? One in five?

So far, the Democrats have done a terrible job of uniting their campaign messages into a unified force. We're waging dozens of small battles instead of a single national campaign, with the Bush administration providing the only link. The party remains fractuous and unable to articulate a single message.

I think we can encapsulate why we need a Democratic congress in a simple phrase-- "Stop the Bleeding".

Stop the bleeding of our soldiers in Iraq.
Stop the bleeding of our budget and economy.
Stop the bleeding of the constitution.
Stop the bleeding of the environment.
Stop the bleeding of our standing in the world.

Things have gotten so bad that our common aspiration, our best case to the American people, amd the only realistic thing we can hope to accomplish with a narrow margin in a single house has come to this: to keep things from getting worse. That's where we find ourselves, and Democrats ought to campaign on it openly.

Stop the bleeding.

So it has come to this.
America, land of the free, beacon of liberty, city on a hill...

Leave aside habeus corpus and secret evidence, leave aside spying on American citizens without a warrant, leave aside the perpetual war and secret prisons, leave aside an executive branch that now claims the right to ignore sections of law at will.  

America sanctions torture.

God help us all.

I propose that hereafter, to every useage of the words "Donald Rumsfeld" we append "The man responsible for Abu Ghraib" or "The man who claimed responsibility for Abu Ghraib". Though this is both obvious and redundant, it easily takes the syntactic place of the term "Defense Secretary," as in the following sentence:

"Donald Rumsfeld, the man who claims responsibility for prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, was today revealed to have personally suppressed all post-war planning for Iraq for his own political purposes."

Admittedly, we have far more recent outrages, but I find it unforgivable that this one has been let to slide, when the man took "full responsibility" for prisoner abuse. Besides, with the great torture/prisoner treatement debate about to come, a referesher course in just what it is that we are opposing might not be amiss.

Despite decades after Roe v Wade, abortion remains a central issue in American polticics. Why, given that the other issues of the age have been long since buried, does this continue to pose not only a contentious problem, but a rallying cry to the Christian right? There are some that believe that this debate lives on because it could never reach its natural conclusion through civil discourse; however the Loving case ended debate on interracial marriage in a similar abrupt and activist manner, and the national fabric has adopted it thoroughly. Why not so with Roe?

I suspect we continue to argue about Roe, and about abortion, because we have miscontextualized the debate as a womens' issue.