Poor Steve. Didn't he drive a Corvette back in the day?

Actually as I recall it was a Buick. With a playboy logo dangling from the rear view mirror.

The dog can talk? Since when did that happen?

Does anyone have any evidence that anyone high up in the Obama campaign -- or perhaps the candidate himself -- has read the columns that we have been reading here?

The phone conversation Glenn related earlier is really telling. They haven't thought this through. They must have thought they were taking the path of least resistance which from their point of view is the best thing for their campaign.

I hope the next column will be about the growing effort to get Obama to man up and do what he is supposed to do.

I really just want to hurl...

If it weren't for the illegal and heavy handed tactics, many of the protesters would get no news coverage at all. Wouldn't it be better if they kept it up?

I'm a little pissed at the taxpayer having to shell out $80K settlements when the bill should go to the RNC, but I don't begrudge the plaintiffs one dime. Actually, we should make hundreds of plaintiffs, and when the total taxpayer tab hits $5M or so some of the diehard Republican voters might notice something is wrong here.

Thank the world for 60 year old librarians. Reminds me of my mother, who if she were alive would be right there with her.

Suskind could have gotten his hands on a clandestine video clip of Bush and Cheney and Addington and Feith all planning this while chortling how they were going to get away with it and it wouldn't matter. Pelosi would still be determined that impeachment is "off the table." A billion portentous pundits will all write somber tomes about how it would be bad for the country (and Democrats in particular) to indulge in "partisanship."

We know what happened. Maybe some details aren't right just yet (I hear the memo came from Feith's office not CIA for example) but if there is anything this administration has achieved, it is how you can get away with it.

We know what happened at Enron, we know what happened at the EPA, we know what happened at FEMA, we know what happened when China got our spy plane, we know what happened in the Plame incident, we know what happened with the VP Energy Task Force, we know what happened over and over again. There is almost no counting them all, much less investigating. I suppose we don't know who Gannon was over-nighting with at the White House and isn't it interesting that the male escort happens to be the one scandal of little consequence.

Face it people, the Bush people have run out the clock, the pardons are coming, and Obama isn't going to do anything about it assuming he has the chance. Forgive me for being pessimistic, but I haven't seen much reason to feel otherwise.

Glenn I think there is a big piece missing here. It isn't so much that McCain/Palin goes negative -- it is there media surrogates that go negative. Sure the Republican candidates themselves can say negative statements, and they run negative ads. But it is really likely that this is not what does the damage. They have "the mighty Wurlitzer" to make the most of such statements, amplify them, and get everyone talking about personality instead of issues.

If Obama/Biden are to run negatives they absolutely cannot count on the media to treat them the same way they treat Republicans. The Democrats have no media surrogates they can rely on to blast the message out. I think this is why Obama is gong to go onto Fox News and work the right wing media hard. He has to know right now he will not get the free ride that McCain gets -- at least until he changes it.

The best analysis of what has to be done that I have seen was right on NYT columnist page, by none other than Paul Krugman: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/opinion/25krugman.html -- this was a week or two ago but worth a re-read. The problem is Krugman is an anomaly that the media PTB would get rid of if they could -- like they did with Donohue.

I am sure someone high up in the campaign is reading your column -- please keep at it.

Is there an explanation as to why that the journalism profession does absolutely nothing to protect its own? If anyone they are in a position to do something about it -- they have proven that they can stir up outrage if they want to, so why don't they?

Back in the '90s there was a TV series called "La Femme Nikita" and for some reason I kept running into fans of the show. Almost all of them were perfectly comfortable with the idea of a super-secret quasi-government organization that knew no laws other than its self-declared mission to kill terrorists. The idea that one of these agents could shoot them with impunity if they so much as happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time that bothered them very little, if at all. ("It doesn't affect me.")

Sorry, Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Gellman. Far too many Americans believe that the illegal things that James Bond (license to kill) does is for their benefit. I am sure you realize that until they believe otherwise, Pelosi and Reid and Obama will be perfectly free to act with "political expediency" in cases like this. How to get them from there to here remains a mystery to me.