I don't know Matthew Dowd. I wish I did. I have heard nothing but fabulous things about him over the years. I know people are very fond of him. Obviously, war brings out a lot of emotions in different people, and possibly changing emotions, as he laid out in the New York Times.

She managed to compliment Dowd and call him a emotional flake all in the same sentence. Obviously, the party line is that the stress was too much for poor Matthew and he should be somewhere that people who love him can look after him. Not too shabby for a fill-in pinch hitting for Snow Job.

BTW - I read the original article in the NYT. The only thing I wondered about was why did he wait until his son was at risk before opening his mouth? The guy got disenchanted with Bill Clinton, switched to the Republicans and is now disenchanted with Junior. I sense a pattern.

Maybe if Darth Cheney didn't want an annual progress review of his and Junior's not-so-excellent adventure, the malAdministration shouldn't try to fund it through annual requests for emergency appropriations. Congress gets to decide every year whether or not to open the purse, how far, and under what conditions. Just like any other request for an appropriation.

But then you know, getting lessons on the Constitution from Cheney is like going to a Bible school class taught by Madeleine Murray O'Hair.

but it's awfully hard to get the font size right. The new size is too small for the bottom part of my glasses and an enlargement id too big for the top part. It's hell getting old!

When asked about his vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq, Edwards said:

I will tell you this: Making a mistake, which I did, about something that important gives you enormous strength going forward. Because now I have absolutely no hesitation standing behind my independent judgment about what needs to be done. I don't care if it's popular or unpopular. Or what the political considerations are. You probably see some element of that in everything I'm doing.

That's the kind of thing that we need to hear, a "yes, I screwed up, but here's what I took away from it" attitude from a politician that doesn't feel the need to appear infallible.

I seem to remember it's called "learning", something that real grown-ups do. Not the ersatz grown-ups that Darth, Junior, and a certain junior senator from New York are trying to portray.

As the back-channel communications network was

"paid for and maintained by" the Republican National Committee

and the RNC is a private organization, I wonder if Uncle Karl wasn't a little too clever.

Messages that were sent using this newtwork are absolutely readable by court order and I doubt that executive privelege can protect them. And if government-owned PCs were used to access that back-channel network, wouldn't the provisions of the Hatch Act still apply?

After you've turned four corners, you're just running around in circles.

Sooner or later, you're going to have to cross the street in order to get anywhere.

The American people have wanted change in Iraq, and they got it. The president announced a new policy on Jan. 10th that was quite different and divergent from where we were before ...

I wasn't aware that throwing more bodies onto the pyre was considered a plan. But as I've said before, it's not anyone that they know, it's only the help and assorted locals, so it's not like Junior is aware that we're talking about real people here.

Junior cannot change on this or any other subject once he has taken a public stand. This would mean admitting that he has made a mistake and as we've discussed in countless threads here at Salon, he is just plain incapable of doing that.

I'll believe that the Republicans are serious about wrapping this fiasco up when enough of them vote for a bill with a timetable to make any veto threat an empty one and if Junior actually does veto, they vote to override. Until then, it's just posturing so as to keep their seats in '08 by being able to say they tried but the nasty ol' president just wouldn't listen.

Junior and his handlers no doubt think that the Gonzales flap is a usefull sideshow. As long as we're paying attention to Gonzo, L'il Georgie isn't getting personally fried and serves as a wonderful distraction from the failure of his "surge" in Iraq, the fact that the dollar is in the tank versus virtually any hard currency, and that one of Reagan's advisors just pointed out that he's bankrupting the US economy by sticking with Reaganomics after any possible value it may ever have had is gone.

Having Gonzales resign would provide the masses with one less distraction. The Senate investigation will continue, but Bush can put up a wall of executive privelege litigation more than thick enough to get him past January, 2009.

Yeah, other Republicans will take it the neck for this in November, 2008, but I doubt that Bush sees that as his problem.