I have a friend who is a flack for a Government agency.  She's as blue as you get and works with issues dear to the hearts of many liberals.  But she defends the use of these damn things.  They are just too effective to give up.  There effectiveness indicates that they must go.

How about a targeted fund-raising campaign--one entitled "Put This Man Out of A Job--Restore a Democratic Majority."  Use Delay's face and webfundraising.  Then it is a national campaign but we can spend the stuff on Delay when we allocate the resources.

Senator:

I think you are absolutely right.  Speech found in blogs is not "money" as defined under the Buckley decision because Buckley held that money was not speech because it was the symbolic act of giving that was speech and the amount given was therefore immaterial.  Here, there is actual speech in a blog and no law or regulation could reach a personally drafted blog post which stumped for a candidate.

On the other hand, there is no reason that the click-through ads which are becoming a part of our everyday Internet experience shouldn't be regulated as a TV or print ad.  There is no difference between the media and such ads should be regulated.  

Thanks--I'd like to look close at what they said.

Subsection (b) is dangerous.  It appears designed to allow regulation of fundraising ads on blogs--a place where we have a great advantage.  Why would a link to a contribute page not be considered funding related?  I think this bill opens the door to regulating advertising on political blogs.

This would require a constitutional amendment.  Political speech is the most protected form of speech and cannot be banned without a compelling state interest requiring it.  The method used must be the least intrusive method.  Your proposal is anti-democratic as well--people need to know more, not less.

He's trying to play the nuclear option.  No ruling of the kind described has been passed.  He'd have to get at least one Democratic vote to pass such a ruling.  He can't get them to vote to appeal Kotellar-Kelly's ruling, how's he going to get them to vote for such a dumb ruling?

If there's one lesson to be learned, its that the policy-centered who wins/who loses discourse isn't what our next victory will be about.  Republican voters and even some of their representatives are diverse, but there leadership is not (wingnuts).  Thus they are able to keep their grouping intact despite the fact that they agree on very little, except fiscal conservatism(ha!) and low taxes.

Thus I think it possible that we won't need to answer every question and be dogmatic on every issue.  Historically, that has not been how the party has worked in the past.  There's no reason we need to be tied down to specific policys--what we need is a governing strategy, a message that says--you are going to get these kinds of solutions to problems that will arise when we are governing.  That's what the Republicans do well on a process level and that's what we can do well too.

Oliver, the font is excellent.  Don't change a thing.  We can get on the same page pretty easy.  Its ideas like yours that are going to bring us back to where America needs us--in power.

I disagree.  Panic button moves might make people feel better emotionally because they've "done something" but the fact is that the Democratic Party is alive and well and no CBS reporter's B.S. story is going to change that.  

We have to slow down.  This is the slow time in Washington, D.C. and nobody is doing anything on either side of the aisle.   Things will start to heat up in January.  Let's see how the new team does before we just call for their heads.  I'd bet that, despite losing the Presidency, the Democrats are going to be more powerful come January than they have been for the last year.  

Remember from whence we came.  Last year at this time we were just waking up from our long post-9/11 slumber.  The nutcase Republicans currently at the levers didn't get there overnight and we won't displace them overnight either.  The path to electoral victory is a long, slow, boring one which is won day in and day out, not in the last five months of a Presidential campaign.

Where the hell you going to go anyway?  Nader?  He  got 1/3 of a percent.  The Greens?  Less than a third of a percent as well.  We Democrats be just gettin' started.

Bush never wanted the Intel bill.  His lukewarm support for the bill is sending the message he wants to the Hill--don't pass this legislation.  What Bush wants is his cake and eat it too--mainly to be seen as supporting the Intel Reform bill while silently killing it.

Note also: In Vietnam, the medical care was much worse.  According to this article in today's Chicago Sun-Times, for every soldier killed in action, there were four wounded.  In Iraq, there are twelve wounded soldiers for every soldier killed in action.  When the number of casualties in theater and sent to Landsthul in Germany are counted, there are about 21,000 wounded in this war.  That means that approximately 5500 troops would have died up to this point in Iraq had Vietnam-style medical treatment been available.  Iraq truly is Bush's Vietnam.

Anything we can do to make them pay a price for that sort of behavior will deter others.  Therefore, we should be rather forward in making sure that others cannot lie for political gain the way these people did.  These weren't just slants, they were lies.  And they must be punished.

We need two people doing these jobs--a fundraiser in there and an idea man.  Hell I'd be fine with McCaullife still working on bringing in the big donors, while reaching out to the new Internet source.

I don't exactly understand why, but for some reason, I feel good about where the party is at right now.  We've started to tap the forces of the future in a way that the other side can't.  When we harness these forces, we will roll big.

I don't think the situation is as dire as painted here.  I do think we have serious problems ahead.  However, the dollar is not as low as it was relative to a similar basket of currencies in 1994.  

However, it is a problem that the nation must address.  The current Administration is worse than a partisan group of idelouges, it is a collection of incompetents.  

I think this is a good candidate for our issue of 2005.  We should pick one and hammer it.