Fighting Back Against Bush's War on the Middle Class.

"Victory" is, of course, undefined, except for John McCain's "until they're happy with being a 100-year occupied state." (Leaving "victory" undefined, it should be noted, violates one element of the Powell doctrine.) If the objective of the war was to find WMDs, oust Saddam Hussein, discover whether there was a connection between Hussein's regime and 9/11, or oversee democratic elections in Iraq, all of those missions have been fulfilled and the troops can come home victorious.

Ms. Roberts didn't define the "victory" the American people were waiting for because the objective she and and her fellow war boosters are pursuing -- a vassal state that serves an American Empire -- is not one which the American people want. "Victory", some vague, undefined, indescribable "victory", is a generic enough term that she can get away with saying it's something the American people want. I want "victory", but then I think we've already achieved victory according to the military objectives set out before the war. If the Administration -- and its war boosters in the press -- were not up front with the American people about the objectives the had in mind before the war, that's their problem, not mine.

As I open my browser, my homepage (Yahoo) shows the top Salon stories. One of them is Joan Walsh's, with the headline "My last word (for now) on sexism." Another is Camille Paglia's "Clinton's slick willies", which asks (in the subheader) "Does Hillary surround herself with girly men?", an article which contains such meaningless pop psychology as speculation that Sen. Clinton is "reconstituting the toxic hierarchy of her childhood household, with her on top instead of her drill-sergeant father". This is an accusation I'm sure I'll see leveled against a another presidential campaign in which the candidate is the dominant personality any century now.

Things become so much clearer once someone explains that the important thing to take away from the story is that it's okay that the nuns were denied the right to vote because they might have been voting for the wrong party.

I realize it is generally considered bad taste to imply that voters might be swayed by policy, but in this case the election is so close that Koppelman may want to ponder the possibilty, suggested here by others, that the Iraq war had something to do with the result everyone assumes we are heading towards. For me, it was that she was better on health care, he was better on Iraq, and they were both better than McCain on everything. If she had gotten Iraq right in the first place, I think she would have won the nomination easily. Admittedly, i don't have the data to back that up.

But one thing I did notice was that during the weeks after Super Tuesday that the fronteunner was being decided, Obama's first defense when attacked was to point out that he was right in 2002-2003; his first attack was to point out she was wrong, or to try to get her to admit her vote was a mistake. On the other hand, Clinton's most strained arguments during that period were the arguments she and her surrogates made that the two had always been the same on Iraq, or that he hadn't always been opposed, or that she hadn't been in favor, or that his early opposition didn't matter, or whatever. It's almost as if the campaigns had access to poling or focus group data that suggested that the voters thought this was an important distinction and wanted to go with the one who got it right.

As long as questions are being listed, how about a straightforward, yes-or-no question for ABC:

Was Ivins one of the four people who told ABC that tests revealed the presence of bentonite in the anthrax?

Whenever I see conservatives practice affirmative action, I understand why they are so vehemently against it.