If there were two national parties in the traditional sense, that might be possible. Since the GOP is now pretty much where the Federalists were in 1816 or so (a regional, reactionary party), there is no second party for the Democrats to negotiate in good faith with. If there's a true second party, it's the Blue Dog caucus--which may in fact become a formally separate party in a decade or so.

Time to move forward without worrying about the extremist GOP remnant. Let them filibuster till they're blue in the face, then give them some lovely parting gifts and get on with rebuilding the country they fracked up so badly with the acquiescence and collaboration of what passes for Democratic leadership in the House and Senate.

Yes.

49 of 50 states are constitutionally required to balance their budgets, admirable in principle but a disaster in the viscerally, hysterically anti-tax climate that Republicans have created nationwide. In California and elsewhere, ballot initiatives and a culture of Republican scare tactics (taxes = communism) have pretty much taken raising taxes, the most logical way to fund schools and pubic infrastructure, off the table. Suggesting that employed people actually pay to keep social institutions from crumbling into dust is a recipe for political suicide. People who think nothing of dropping half their yearly income on an SUV start foaming at the mouth at the thought of being asked to cough up a few hundred more a year for income taxes.

Obama and the federal government are being asked to clean up the messes that shortsighted state governments have to some extent created for themselves. Because in the current economic climate tax increases would (it is widely agreed) make matters worse, borrowing is the only way to repair the damage caused by decades of neglect of the nation's educational, health and transportation structure at state and local levels. And the only jurisdiction that can borrow right now is the Federal Government.

What would the results of the stock market implosion be if it had happened to a nation with a well-funded educational system and universal health care (i.e. if the Great Society had been funded and maintained)? I suspect there would have been no implosion, since the ruse of the Trickle Down Free Market fixing everything would not have gotten the traction it has gained since the Reagan era. That the Clinton administration failed to meaningfully shift the paradigm back toward paying for the society you live in shows the complicity of Democrats in the debacle as well.

Anything that promotes further growth of Las Vegas, which is perhaps one of the least sustainable cities in America with respect to water resources, would seem to negate much of the benefit of such a project. Discuss?

I'm glad we don't have to say "snow machine" any more.

Steele was simply misremembering a Dylan lyric ("Ballad of A Thin Man"). Wow, there really IS something for everyone in Today's Grand *New* Party!!!

If Steele were white, he'd be Stephen Baldwin.

Democracies have citizen soldiers.

Empires have mercenaries.

If a war can't be fought with citizen soldiers, it is a war of imperialism.

We can quibble about details, but KBR/Blackwater is an army of mercenary auxiliaries. The U.S. military are beholden to them in the same way the Roman legions were beholden to their barbarian auxiliaries.

We'd better hope our mercenaries' overlords don't get a counteroffer.

By the way, I'm sorry if this offends anyone who has worked for KBR/Blackwater and put their life on the line for them. Please know that I never asked you to fight for me; you did that on your own dime. I didn't ask the men and women of our military to fight this war for me either, but I owe them something that can't be repaid--our country breaks faith with its citizen soldiers every time it sends them in harm's way to further its imperial designs.

and we need a Million Asshole March to make it clear just how terribly aggrieved we white conservatives are. Why, making us pay (gasp) taxes is Just Like Slavery.

Be thankful you live in a country where such nonsense is protected as free speech, and please pick up y'all's litter as you leave Lafayette Park.

was that there was no one espousing a true liberal creed to call him on every conservative canard and revisionist myth he put out on the airwaves. Limbaugh bloviated unopposed by the Democrats of the day, and Gingrich took over Congress in like manner.

President Clinton was a "progressive," i.e. a liberal whose concern was solely and exclusively with the middle class, and had renounced the truths that earlier liberals had stated, namely that (1) government isn't the problem, it's a necessary counterweight to special interests, (2) taxation isn't theft, it's the dues that citizens pay to belong to a civilized society, (3) the so-called free market can be rigged, and (4) the only way to protect the middle class is to create clear ways into the middle class for the poor and uneducated.

The danger that Limbaugh represented in 1994 was that his ideas, as ignorant, fiction-based, and hate-fueled as they were, went unchallenged in the media and the Democratic Party of the time. Even without Obama, who has proven himself a more efficient adversary to conservative orthodoxy than many would have predicted, there is something called liberalism in 2009 that once again dares speak its name.

He could become a modern Wayne Morse (look him up, kids). But the calculus of modern political fundraising means that Specter, like every Senator, is basically a joint-stock company owned by his fundraising apparatus. And switching that over from being a GOP-based outfit to a Democratic-based outfit is probably impossible; I don't know campaign finance law, but mightn't Specter find himself open to lawsuits for recovery of money given him by the GOP and by donors who thought they were "investing" in a GOP property when they contributed to him?