Unfortunately, Weiner should have allowed that the Republicans aren't wholly-owned subsidiaries of the insurance companies.  Actually, the Republicans are merely leased, with payments due every two years.  It's a much more lucrative situation for the Republicans, with emphasis on lucre.

I'd take the radical, activist Roberts Court ruling on personhood for corporations and shove it where the sun don't shine in their collective robes.  If corporations are "persons" equivalent to real, live, breathing citizens, then let's apply the anti-slavery laws to them.  That's right - forbid ownership of corporations.  It's time we dismantled this abusrd fiction the reactionary pro-corporation judiciary has fabricated from whole cloth.  They can either claim corporations are "persons" or they can allow them to be owned by shareholders.  They can't have it both ways.  At least this argument would seem to offer an easy way to pass simple legislation which can strip "personhood" from corporations and other collective entitities.  Ban corporate slavery.

Nominating candidates for the bench when they are very junior also means that they have no controversial decisions revealing their hard right mind set.  Couple that with the scurrilous "up or down" vote blather spouted by the Republicans during their recent ascendancy, and one can see how they managed to slip these charlatans into the Federal court system.  One could only wish the Democrats would ever learn how they need to play this game.  Sometimes I despair for these bozos who are supposed to be representing me.  How clueless can one party remain over decades - not years - decades?

Vecky, the problem is that that 40K additional troops is just the proverbial camel snout under the tent flap.  Even McChrystal's initial analysis indicates he'd like to have more troops, more like another 40K on top of the baseline number.  That brings us up to a total of 140K.  Afghanistan's population is about 30 million and I suspect at least 0.1% of the population is Taliban, if not al Qaeda.  That means we've got about 30K insurgents in Afghanistan.  Typical COIN doctrine calls for a 10:1 force ratio, and we can't count on the Afghan security forces to do crap now.  How do we even get to 300K troops for Afghanistan alone, much less pay for them?  This doesn't even take into account the minimal $25-$30 billion we should be committing for civil affairs action in Afghanistan, which I can just see the Republicans supporting.  When the annual bill for Afghanistan could easily run at $300 billion, we damned sight had better score it.

You know, I would also hate to be one of the additional troops without those engineers too.  If we select the COIN strategy, we need to commit both.  That will not be cheap and it has not been discussed with the American electorate.  The military chiefs have focused only on what the cost will be for their portion of the program, and they've low-balled that as well.  Right now, we've been spending about $25 billion all up for Afghanistan.  Quintuple the military commitment and add an extra $25 billion annually for the civil component.  That brings our bill for Afghanistan up to about $150 billion per year - for at least the net ten years.  The Republicans need to sign on to that civil part too, not just the military portion.  They also need to commit for at least a ten year period, during which they just shut up about the outcome and let the military and civil action teams get on with their work.  Without that commitment, they're just poseurs about supporting American security interests.

When New York's economy started to tank is when it all started to go wrong for Governor Paterson.  Combine the state's pending fiscal crisis with the circus which developed in the New York State Senate which paralyzed everything in New York's government and Paterson was left looking totally inept.  His mismanaged Clinton's replacement, but that wasn't fatal.  Money issues are always fatal and Paterson doesn't appear to have a clue about how to handle the situation.  What's amazing is that he headed up the Democrats in the New York State Senate for years before becoming Lieutenant Governor.  It makes you wonder if Spitzer chose him to get him out of the chamber for someone more competent.

Just forget about Blumenthal challenging Lieberman if Lieberman decides to run again for another Senate term.  It ain't gonna happen.  Too much baggage exists between these two guys for Blumenthal to actually challenge Lieberman.  Just look at Blumenthal's response when Lamont was challenging Lieberman.  Only Lamont's primary victory prompted Blumenthal to switch and even then his support was pretty tepid, allowing Lieberman's campaign to conduct all sorts of illegalities without much active pursuit for weeks before the general election.

Dodd won't be losing a primary this year, because the current challenger, Merrick Alpert, is running at Dodd from the right.  All those folks who claim to be disappointed in Dodd just might want to take that into account when they decide which candidate they'll be voting for in the primary.

I agree that someone needs to be speaking with the Pakistani Army to reinforce the idea that a conventional assault on Mingora will produce the exact opposite result from the one the Pakistani government seeks.  However, taking down an insurgency generally requires close-in fighting which almost invariably produces unwanted casualties among the forces involved, in addition to the civilians who get lumped under the "collateral damage" sobriquet.  The last thing any of us needs is for the Pakistani Army to decide to just barrage the city with artillery in preparation for their entry.

Damn my eyes, if that military deployment diagram doesn't look like something the French would have done way back in 1950 and 1951 in French Indo-China against the Viet Minh.  That little maneuver in the upper left hand corner of the diagram also causes me some mirth.  That "force" is supposed to moving down away from the border with Afghanistan in heavily mountainous terrain.  I'm sure the Pakistani Army will be able to seal the route against the Taliban infiltrating into the Afghan border area while pulling the bulk of their forces away from the border.  Just like the French were able to cut the transit routes for the Viet Minh in the northern border region with China in 1950-1951.  Anyone remember the action around Lang Son?  The Taliban ain't the Viet Minh, but, then again, the Pakistani Army ain't the French Foreign Legion either.

Will someone who opposes the "surge" please tell me how we might be able to provide the security in Afghanistan necessary to help support civil affairs projects essential to stabilizing Afghanistan.  We found the Taliban forming there because we walked away from Afghanistan and forgot about it when the former Soviets left.  We didn't do the heavy lifting then and it cost us and the world dearly.  Those advocating walking away now are calling for a redux of that failed policy.  Why should we expect any better outcome?  What's the program being offered to stop a resurgence of the Taliban and al Qaeda?

Dean has absolutely no chance at any position within the administration so long as Emmanuel is COS.  Dean pushed policies which were antithetical to the outmoded approaches Emmanuel wanted.  Worse, Dean was vindicated by success in two elections.  He made Emmanuel look foolish.  I suspect his standing inside the WH is below basement level as a result.  

"...They think that bi-partisanship and lack of party responsibility are necessary to the formulation of public policy today, because they were in 1949 or 1957..."  Funny that you would pick those dates as the time frame in which voters would have created an idea of bipartisanship.  Especially so since clearly other commenters here want to lay the blame completely at the feet of the boomers.  Boomers would have been developing their political awareness during the early 1960s, with the rancor which characterized that period.  The folks who would have developed their political awareness during the time frame you reference were the cohort from the Great Void, those between the Greatest Generation (per Brokaw, not me) and the Boomers.  This cohort is also the crowd which crafted the current economic and political mess we're in, not the Boomers.  Basically, it's folks like Broder.

We did start on this effort 30 years ago.  Jimmy Carter burned a lot of bridges pushing for a modern energy program.  St. Ronni Ray-gun (may his name be forever revered) pulled the plug on the programs at the earliest opportunity.  Ignorant ideology will always get you into the deepest end of the swamp and Reagan proved it totally.

Petroleum's demise will merely echo the product which it replaced -- whale oil.  Colonel Edwin Drake was drilling that well because the supply of whale oil was declining and the nation (if not the world) needed another source of lantern fuel.  Most of the petroleum produced in the early years of liquid fossil fuels was distilled into kerosene, with "gasoline" an undesired by-product.  In those early days, gasoline (which is broad mixture of light distillate products) was literally toxic waste.  Finding a use for it was critical, but it also meant internal combustion engines had a source of cheap, readily available product.  Widespread electrification and the creation of a large motor car industry after several decades changed that, but vast new petroleum discoveries in Texas, the Middle East, the Caspian and Indonesia kept the price low.  We've taken a strange, wandering path to reach our present state.

"...His problem isn't his policies. It's the scandal related to his having misused the state police for personal political ends. He sqandered what was one of  the largest mandates in the state history through that scandal..."

Worse, Spitzer lost the PR battle on this topic, because good reason to believe that Bruno, the NY Senate head, in fact did violate the law.  Spitzer just couldn't allow Andrew Cuomo any time in the sun doing his job as NYS AG to investigate Bruno.  Spitzer's tin ear on this whole scandal is just breathtaking.  He's managed to turn a real negative for his most important political opponent into a net positive for that politician.  Talk about a reverse Midas-touch!