I wonder: one one hand, it's very much in the interest of the democratic party as a whole to hold revotes in Michigan and Florida, insofar as leaving things as they are makes the party look like it's preoccupied with using complicated rules to disenfranchise its own voters, a perception that will be aided no doubt by the republican parties of those states.

On the other hand, I could also see a legal fight over paying for the cost of the revote emerging, between the states(especially Florida) and the dems.

As far as the candidates not piping up goes, I'm guessing they're both just waiting for the other to call for it first-- that way whoever calls for revoting first looks more "desparate", and the other one looks self-assured and magnanimous when she(?) seconds the notion.

(It's a pity we've devolved to that, but what with national news stories about the significance of Obama not wearing a flag pin, I can hardly blame the candidates if this is in fact how they're approaching the matter.)

I mean no disrespect to Mr.Fekeiki, but his plan is simply unworkable. Very few strongmen simply "go away" when asked to, whether after a year or any other period of time, and there's no reason to believe that if Allawi was given those totalitarian tools he would respond the way Mr. Fekeiki suggests.

Secondly, Fekeiki says nothing about privatization-- a legitimate Iraqi government would disallow all the privatization contracts foisted upon them by Bremer and company-- and it takes a lot more balls to do that than to be a strongman at the US government's behest.

Nevertheless, I'm glad to hear from Fekeiki, and glad he made it out o.k.

Maybe part of the problem, just based on looking at the Walmart link, may be the psychological hurdle: the combination of unknowns, striking the potential buyer as a bit too daunting.

(I had a Windows-based PC with a Via chip some time ago, and HP software wouldn't install on it, rejecting the CPU with an error message saying it wasn't Intel or AMD, therefore unacceptable.)

We must resist the temptation to reflexively attack elites," he writes, since human societies need leaders and this is an able bunch...

My reaction to his caution to "resist the temptation" to attack the elites makes me want to ask-- Yeah? why?

Wouldn't another group take their place if they weren't there, presumably an equally ambitious and equally self-interested one? And have the current bunch really been doing that good a job?

It occurs to me that, like Laura Miller, I've heard this thesis before-- and it also occurs to me that he didn't use the more commonly used "overclass" because the derivative quality of the argument would be all the more obvious.

Finally, I'm very suspicious of overclass charity-- it seems like P.R. for

(1)restrictive copyright laws that keep prices on medicines artificially high, as well as

(2)a way to discourage too much talk of good old-fashioned progressive taxation and activist government.

As I recall in 2002 the democrats were confident that, because the polls said that people favored democrats on the issues, they didn't have to run on the issues, and besides it was an off year, and everybody knows the party out of favor does better in an off year, and makes up ground, so... might as well run to the right of Bush, and give him everything he wants...

In other words, "this election is not about ideology, but competence"- Michael Dukakis, 1988.

In other words, "we don't need to run on issues(far too risky), let's run on being not-republicans!"

In other words, in 2006, impeachment was "off the table", and we had the quickest descent in approval numbers for a sitting congress in the history of modern polling, occasionally running numbers even lower than Junior's.

But all this incessant discussion of horse-race metrics notwithstanding, what really disgusts me is that in all likelihood the nominee will bend over backwards to demonstrate how inoffensive he is to corporate America and the defense industry in particular, and in spite of this when she loses we'll be told that it was because the democrats didn't move to the right enough.

But nobody will run any polls on that, it will be based on the wise words of blowhards on tv, and in print, and on the net.

For the longest time I have believed that BushCo didn't protect the museums(or, more importantly, the hospitals, which often had looters stealing expensive medical equipment and generators) because they wanted to accomplish two things:

1. they wanted televised scenes of Iraqis looting, so that they would seem like savages in the eyes of Americans(including of course the US soldiers), and thereby less worthy of sympathy,

and

2.because they wanted the Ministry of Information Building sacked, so it would be harder to systematically determine how many Iraqis died in the conflict. And in order to do this they had to create the illusion of a logistically uncontrollable situation. The M of I was the rough equivalent of our social security administration, with records on everybody.

(The Bush response to Katrina smacks of the same thing, as far as no. 1 goes.)

"If Clinton beats the odds and wins the Democratic nomination, Republicans will say she stole it."

It's not just whether the republicans will do so, criticizing the role of the superdelegates, but whether or not criticizing the the superdelegates is intrinically just-- and it is.

They exist to prevent somebody whom party hierarchy disapprove of from gaining the nomination. It's as plain and simple as that, however reluctant democrats maybe to acknowledge this openly. And while it may be too late to fix the democratic electoral system this go around, even if Obama gets the nomination-- and he probably will-- the problem wont go away by itself and they'll need to fix it eventually, preferably before 2012.