Obama said he wanted him to stay in the caucus and after that it was Reid's call. A lot of people seem to be spinning pretty hard to turn that into an endorsement of Lieberman keeping his chair.

... first the primary and now the presidential race has sucked a lot of the air out of the room.

... seems like they are still struggling with this.

I'd rather be up 9 than down. :)

It has nothing to do with compromising principle, it has to do with what it is actually possible for Obama to do.

I expect him to support a filibuster of the bill if it includes amnesty.

I expect him to vote against the final bill when it includes it.

I expect the bill to pass, with amnesty, no matter what Obama does.

For whatever reason there is huge pressure in congress to pass this disaster, and Obama cannot reverse that. It is not clear he could stop even if he was sworn in as President. Blaming him for failing to stop every bad bill in Congress now that he has become the nominee (and that only a few weeks ago) as some people have done is absurd.

Didn't the Senate already pass an even worse version of this bill by an overwhelming margin? I'm really not following where everyone feels like Obama could give a press conference and kill this bill.

Yes, he is the presumptive nominee.

But do you think for a minute that when he is the actual honest-to-god President he will be able to make bad bills vanish simply by picking up the phone? If so, please talk to me offline about a real estate deal. Even if he vetoed the damn thing it most likely has enough support for an override.

If I was guessing, Obama knows that there isn't a thing on god's green earth he can do to stop this bill and that going to the wall on it will just make him look weak and the party divided at a time when neither of those things are a good thing for our chances of winning the White House.

By all means, people should yell and put pressure on him to really bust his ass to get the immunity out of the bill, but at least stop and consider whether or not what you are demanding that he accomplish is possible. And if it is not possible, is making the grand gesture and going down in flames a good thing or a bad thing for our chances of recapturing the White House.

</soap box>

McCain and the GOP have already made it very clear that they intend to pour money into his campaign through every crack in the campaign finance laws. Obama taking public financing would be unilateral disarmament on his part. And it would seriously dishearten supporters like me who would have been shut out of the process to a great extent going forward.

Which is an improvement over last week, which was flat-out unbearable.

If Bush spends any time on the ground in Iraq I think that will be a given...

... to take your own advice here why, exactly?

Religion has also been instrumental in almost every form of social justice we have.

Google is taking over the world because this is the sort of thing that does occur to them. ;)

... a site used to store a ton of links to a particular object. Doesn't look like actual usage to the google algorithms, and hence human interest. So they weight against the site.

All of that said with no actual knowledge of the subject, so feel free to weight accordingly. ;)

That's how I felt about supporting Kerry. Something that just had to be done or there would be very unpleasant consequences, but not a task I approached with any enthusiasm.