Actually, the best source I found courtesy of Teh Google was . . . War Room's Tim Grieve, whose "Everything You Wanted to Know About The Nuclear Option" from 05/12/05 is at:

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/05/12/nuclear_option_primer/index.html

It turns out the nuclear option depended heavily on having Dick "Cakewalk" Cheney on hand to make key rulings as Senate President. Perhaps the Dems could go nuclear when ol' Blood & Guts (other people's blood, other people's guts) is on one of his junkets to look in on Halliburton's investments in the Middle East, and a Dem is president pro tem; but the whole thing now appears as just another Cheney/Gop think tank crackpot scheme.

Andrew writes, "[T]he 2000 election of Chen Shuibian as president of the country that he likes to call "Taiwan" was a stunning event -- the first democratically engineered change of power in a culturally Chinese society."

That's a powerful sentence, Andrew. It took a couple of readings before it really sank in.

As a result of your last Taiwan-China post, I learned that the KMT still controls the Taiwan legislature. So I'm not surprised to read of gridlock and chaos [see: U.S. Senate; filibuster] despite the election of Chen Shui-Bian; and I suppose this explains the occasional brawls shown on CNN. But dammit, Janet, they're trying; and thanks to 'How the World Works' I've become interested in -- and frankly am rooting for -- Taiwan. I hope its efforts today will one day lead the PRC to a form of democracy (with Chinese characteristics of course).

"alcayde: The original is alcaide, or someone who is in charge of a fort. It derives from the Arabic al-qaid, which means general." -- Endnote 3 of Chapter XIII of Book IV, The Modern Library's 2001 version of "Don Quixote" translated into English by Tobias Smollet.

Query: Six years into the phony War on Terra' (TM), how do Bush-Cheney pronounce the name of their most hated enemies? Is it al-KAY-duh, or al-KYE-duh, or al-kye-EEE-duh?

Answer: The Gop refers to its most hated enemies as "the Democrat [sic] party."

Glenn asks, "Who would possibly believe that an American President has such powers, and more to the point, what kind of a person would want a President to have such powers?"

Um, so-called Republicans, and Joe Lieberman. The inhabitants of right-wing think tanks. Right-wing bloggers. TV anchors, pundits, guests, and corporate columnists. Wall Street. Evangelical Christians, militant Catholics, and other Crusaders. Rural red state dummies. Rush Limbaugh. Dick Cheney. Lynne Cheney. In short, roughly 28% of all Americans.

Judges try hard to not allow their handling of criminal defendants be influenced by outside factors; yet I can't help wondering if the threats reportedly received by this Gop-appointed judge served to acquaint him with the viciousness and utter lawlessness of the Gop's neo-fascist right wing. In any event, this judge clearly refused to be bullied by the radical right.

Tom Daschle, the Great Appeaser who I otherwise detest, once said he always knew when Rush Limbaugh was attacking him, because the number of death threats against him and his family would spike. Limbaugh rails against Reid and Pelosi a lot; why do they still seem blissfully unaware of the real threat to the American Republic posed by the radical right?

Glenn is too professional to say it; but I will point out that another party which formerly championed a Germanic ideal of strong-jawed Aryan manliness was led by a clique who themselves were very far from said ideal. Except that Herr Hitler actually served in WWI.

OT, but this morning I tuned into 'Today' for the first time in ages; and OMG I thought I'd fallen into a time warp and returned to 2002. Tim Russert was reassuring Matt Lauer that [even though an overwhelming majority of Americans detest Bush Jr. and hate his idiotic war; I'm paraphrasing] the Dems had better be careful in pandering to the kook fringe left by defying Junior or they (gasp) will be in big trouble, mister. It was really disgusting.

After all the blogging from Teh Left, the corporate media has zero excuse to still be shilling for Bush-Cheney. The problem with America's discourse is not that the millionaire anchors and pundits are lazy or sloppy. (They are, but that's not the problem.) The problem is that GE and Time Warner and the rest of the military-industrial complex profit in lockstep with the Gop. We the People are merely annoying DFH's best ignored by the pros from Dover.