But incumbents aren't supposed to run as Independents (or Connecticut for Liebermans) when they lose their damn primary.

How often has that happened in a US Senate race? When was the last time?

Lieberman is the bad actor here, not the voters of Connecticut who participate in little-d democracy.

I am not convinced that it is defacto a problem if an ad fails to identify the candidate as a Democrat. The primary is over.

Also, it connects with people generally on a "throw the bums out" level. Many Republicans are feeling this same sentiment. Why not keep the focus on outside-vs-inside the Beltway and "throw the bums out"?

And that girl was just asking for it. Look how she was dressed.

A word geek! As a guy who used to read dictionaries as a kid, I gotta give you props for polysemy. Wonderful word! Never heard of it  before. Thanks.

People who write search engines talk about hits when they're describing entries in a result set.

For that matter, baseball fans actually mean "hit a ball with a bat" when they talk about hits.

Get used to the flexibility of the language and lighten up.

You keep complaining about the DNC's failure (under McAuliffe) to meaningfully connect with the grassroots who wanted to volunteer. But you keep saying it as though nothing has changed at the DNC since the 2004 election.

But, you know, the new head of the DNC was backed by the state organizations based on his commitment to the 50 state strategy. And he sort of has a record for involving the grassroots in politics.

The man was videotaped taking the money and they found most it in his freezer.

This is (and should be) part and parcel of "throw the bums out". There's no "another side" to this story. The dude got caught with his hand in the cookie jar all the way up to his armpit.

The Democrats in general and the CBC in particular should be leading the charge to get him to stand down.

Why knows when the indictment will come down? Why wait until it's too late to challenge him?

Re: your tag line -- I'm not sure what Connecticutt needs, but I'd say many Democrats in Connecticut would probably welcome an experienced statesman, instead of a wannabe Bush apologist.

He's making his bed, and he's going to have to live with it.

That's nearly a bushism. Ending a hackneyed phrase with a second, unexpected, hackneyed phrase rarely makes it fresh.

In VT (admittedly tiny), Dean essentially grabbed all school funds and split them up equitably based on school population.

I really believe the only solution to the imbalances in our education system is to do the same at a federal level -- the Feds should collect all school tax monies and then divide them up on a per pupil basis across the country.

I do see the risks of national politics messing with all of the education money, but it seems to me that, if we can get it together to make Social Security and Medicare work, we should be able to do this, too.

I agree with that completely. And your post certainly gave me a more rounded perspective of Obama's speech. I had naively thought of it in terms of Dean's pseudo-infamous

"White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals on the back ought to be voting with us, and not them, because their kids don't have health insurance either, and their kids need better schools too."

A calling out of the GOP on the Southern Strategy, the gay marriage haters, the Tancredo Border Patrol, etc.

I realize my question was something of an aside to the point of your post, though. Thanks for humoring me this far.

Well, yeah. That's a given -- a larger proportion of blacks are poor than whites.
But there are more poor whites than poor blacks, for obvious demographic reasons. So
how is poor and powerless a proxy for race?

I came from a family of 12 children. Our family hovered around the poverty line throughout
most of my childhood, until we got old enough for Mom to go to college on the GI bill
as a WWII vet. Two incomes pulled us into the middle class.

I'm becoming more convinced that Edwards (who I haven't really warmed up to,
although he's actually living and working in my corner of NC) has it right.

Or, as has started cropping up on the blogs, it'a the toppers and the rest of us.
My family could survive, for a time, the loss of a job. Not an indefinite length of time,
though.

I think maybe you're assuming I can take your observation to a particular logical conclusion,
but I can't.

Even the Vice Presidential candidate he was endorsing that night was famous for pointing out that there were "two Americas" (divided by economics and power, which often serve as good proxies for race in America).

I worry this is going to sound like nitpicking, but it's intended as a serious question asked by a white guy trying to better understand issues of race. I assume that you used the word "proxy" loosely, to mean "stand-in".

If that's the case, how is economics and power a proxy for race? Are lower income, less-powerful white people any less included in that America?

Is it that the obstacles they (or their children) need to overcome are fewer than blacks in the same situation? (Is it the same situation?)

Tom, if you'd spare some time, I'd appreciate it a great deal.

A question: in two years, how does Cegelis run against Duckworth, if she endorses her now?

Why should she torpedo her (and her progressive supporters') goals in favor of more-of-the-same machine politics?

Oh come on. Hackett was recruited by those Dems in DC, believing he could win in a red state because their warchest would be backing him up.

When they yanked the rug out from under him, he quit. He could have kept fighting.