I was wondering if GG was ever going to respond to Bateman's little defensive tirade, and I guess I got my answer.

All the same, I have come to look forward to seeing Bateman's posts over on Eric Alterman's blog, which made it so simultaneously interesting and disappointing. He has provided much useful information and insight in the past, as well as some very excellent first-person narratives, but I guess the perceived slight to the honor of the military was just too much for him. As it was LTC Bateman ended up defending his conduct by trying to draw an equivalence between Greenwald and Limbaugh.

I hope LTC Batement and Glenn Greenwald have a chance to interact on this issue further, but on a more professional basis from Bateman's part. I think he is much better than this.

"I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over."

I hear that didn't work out too well for the Gypsies and the Jews in Europe a few decades back.

It seems pretty clear that the lame-ducks under Bush are pretty well intent on pursuing a scorched earth policy. They will then sow the fields with salt. If they get their way, conditions will be so bad that progress will be nearly impossible to make. Then, four years down, they can call Obama's administration a failure and run on the "change" ticket again.

Is it just not enough? I don't want a 311-163 victory, I want a 474-0 victory. After decades of smug, self-righteous, ignorant, hypocritical, incompetent, corrupt and jingoistic Republicans I want them to be so far discredited and humiliated that I won't live long enough to see them rise again. They've taken too much of my adult life as it is.

So yes, I begrudge KY, TX, SC, and all the other "safe" states for McCain. Let them call themselves the "real America" but their other presumptive privileges should be revoked.

Giving goodies only to friends and allies is, and must always be, the province of the right.

Thanks for that. You are, of course, correct. However I think it is unrealistic to expect -- if they attain prosperity -- that they will in any way acknowledge progressive policies and certainly not liberals or progressives as the source of it. The slimeballs who hated Clinton so much did pretty well when he was running things.

The Democrats won in 2006 and took control of both the House and Senate. What did they do with it?

They hunkered down and hoped they could avoid being criticized by Fox News. They made sure their lobbyist contributors got what they paid for. They drew a paycheck, confident that their incumbencies were reasonably secure. That's what 90% incumbency re-election advantage does for you, even with a sub-20% approval rating.

What were their unhappy constituents going to do anyway? Vote Republican? Throw them out of the party? (Look what happened when they did that to Lieberman.) Write angry blog entries?

The weapon used by the 9/11 hijackers was not box cutters or fake bombs or anything else tangible. It was surprise. I am not combat expert, but I suspect that true experts would choose that weapon over any other if given a choice.

That's why there were no copycats. If anyone tried to hijack a plane that way today, it would be the job of the cabin crew to pull the bloodthirsty, nothing-left-to-lose passengers off the shattered bodies of the hijackers not the other way around. It wouldn't even matter if he managed to sneak a revolver on board -- he would fire six rounds and then he would be done for.

What TSA (and the DHS) is doing is a waste of time and money and even worse, it gives the terrorists a victory. I am aware of a number of important technical conferences that now prefer to hold their events outside the U.S. because so many of their attendees are tired of being hassled at the borders and often not even making it to the event after all. This might seem to be a minor thing, but the U.S. is losing is place of prominence in technology and that is part of it. As long as we are doing what we are doing, the hijackers have won.

You have to face it: a too-big segment of our population will simply have no idea of what you are talking about.

We have all heard the joke about a conservative is a liberal that's been mugged.

I would suggest that a liberal is a conservative who has been rendered. How about it? Let's go through the list of big Palin voters and see how it works.

If Judge Leon -- of all judges -- ruled that there was no credible evidence to suggest that these detainees are "enemy combatants," that is as compelling a sign as one can imagine that there is none.

I know why you wrote this, but I am really tired of the implicit inference that if the judge had been appointed by a Clinton or a Carter the ruling can only mean that the ruling was politically motivated.

That could be on the top ten list of the worst things the right wing has done to us. Every sensible statement must have a "no political bias" prophylactic which ends up doing nothing to forestall the right wing whining about bias against them.