Every time Harry Reid agrees to a condition that any bill "requires 60 votes", he is working for the minority party and not his own caucus. There is absolutely no excuse for the Majority Leader to let the minority party get a filibuster without actually having to filibuster.

Compare and contrast: every single filibuster contemplated by the Democrats during the past five years met resistance up to and including the Republicans threatening to break the rules of the Senate and impose a filibuster-breaking rule by sheer force. Now, to get all the powers of a filibuster, all the Republican leadership has to do is schedule a meeting with Reid and say "well, we might filibuster this bill, so why not save us the time and simply require 60 votes to pass?"

This is not leadership - it is pathetic weakness. The weakness Reid brings to the Majority Leader position is unprecedented.

After 8 years of Bush/Cheney negative campaigning, is the body of voters finally seeing a backlash against negative campaigning? One can hope so. Clinton's surprise in NH can be traced to the feeding frenzy in the media and the desperate anti-Obama invectives of the past week appear to have only helped him. On the GOP side, the biggest fear-mongers appear to only have limited (Huckabee) or no support (Giuliani), while the "statesman" McCain is well on his way to front-runner status.

I can only hope so. (And no, don't try to sell me any bridges, I realize how easy a cynical response to this hypothesis can be.)

It's beyond ridiculous. He is behaving more like a Republican than a Democrat.

I know I'm only one voter, and my primary (MD) isn't until after Super Tuesday, but my primary vote is going to depend on this issue. The leadership of the Democratic party sickens me with their refusal to actually lead on any important issue. I may well write in Chris Dodd's name even though he's dropped from the race. Or I may go for Gravel. In any case, I cannot vote for a candidate who enables Bush lawbreaking.

And that sentiment also holds for the general election in November.

An author whose main point is based on the blatant lie that Mussolini was a socialist deserves far more disdain than you give him. One problem of the intellectual left is the everpresent need to appear to be even-handed. Intellectually, Jonah Goldberg deserves no respect whatsoever. Some argue that it suffices to take a passive-aggressive approach and let him hang himself with his own rope. I disagree. I think the only fitting response to Goldberg's sheer mendacity is open disgust.

Calling Mussolini a socialist is the intellectual equivalent of equating "up" and "down". It is sheer brazen Orwellian distortion. There is no need for Salon to give any kind of forum to this kind of anti-intellectualism.

King, you've listed Saturday's games as 1:30 EST and 5:00 EST. You scared me a bit, since I had been planning on watching the Pats game in the evening. They are actually at 4:30 EST and 8:00 EST respectively.

What Americans have to realize is that there is a set of people who want war with Iran, and who have been trying for at least the last 6 1/2 years, and it would probably be more accurate to say much longer than that, to get the US to initiate a war with Iran. We have seen them trying psyops time and time again to get a war started.

At this point, the "hawks" have no credibility left. Americans really need to wake up and see that there is a set of American warmongers who use the American military for their own purposes, and do not have the best interests of America at heart in the least.

I've been bored with hockey for about a decade, and I was thrilled to watch the outdoor game. Made me remember the joy of playing outside as a kid.

Hockey has so many problems these days I don't know how they can recapture the excitement level of the 70s and 80s. But a few outdoor games certainly wouldn't hurt. Also, it was smart to feature the Penguins with young hotshot Sidney Crosby.

One addition I would suggest: the penalty box should be underwater.

Sure, Senator Specter said that the bill set civil rights back 900 years just before he voted for it. But it's not like he said that was a bad thing.

I love the phrase "too-broad denial" used by Mickey Kaus. That really is priceless. Apparently if it's legitimate to criticize a politician for a non-denial denial, as was popularized by Woodstein, then the "opposite extreme" of denying a claim forcefully and distinctly is also bad.

I'm so happy Kaus has a prominent place in today's political media!

that there are commenters here actually agreeing with the dribble uttered by Romney. "Freedom requires religion". Uh, no it doesn't.

Religion(s) require a surrender of freedom. Without that kind of surrender (conscious or not), there is still freedom.

This is Orwellian gibberish.

Yes, Gandhi and MLK, Jr. were religious leaders. They were not, however, secular leaders. I have no problem with religious leaders participating in politics. What I have a problem with are religious leaders claiming that their way is the only way to understand the universe, which is typically followed up with smearing of the non-religious as part of their campaign to pander to the religious majority.

When Romney says "freedom requires religion", he is saying "non-religious people are bad people". That is the implication, since his statement logically implies the idea that a religion-free society would not be "free".

Again, I'm surprised that some Salon readers would assert their voices to such an odious point-of-view.