You say "Sen David Vitter, R-La", the standard way of presenting a public office holder. The AP news wire story by Douglass Daniel, on the other hand, waits until the 6th paragraph to tell us, um, BTW, he's a Republican. Interesting.

Adapting an 800+ page book to film is a tall order. Compromises have to be made. This is why I thought that Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was so good. He managed to capture the essence of the book while simultaneously not doing it any damage with the inevitable but necessary omissions.

Mike Newell was not able to pull this off in Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire. I was very disappointed that some significant and/or very pleasing plot elements (such as Rita Skeeter's comeuppance) were written out of the screenplay. I can understand the need to do this, but then Newell went on to waste time and footage gratuitously over dramatizing other aspects of the plot. For instance, the devastation wrought by the Deatheaters at the Quiditch World Cup went well beyond the book and would have done Atilla the Hun proud; and Harry's battle with the Hungarian Horntail was ridiculously overwrought. Newell also seems to have a problem with strong female characters. He managed to portray both Herminone Granger and Fleur Delacour as hysterical ninnies, which neither is. This was especially noticeable after Cuarón's composed and self-assured Hermione Granger.

Here's hoping that David Yates is more like Alfonso and less like Mike.

Back when the Republicans were threatening the Nuclear Option, the Democrats cowered. Fearful of losing the one legislative weapon they had, they never used it meaningfully. When they should have filibustered Alito and Roberts, they simply rolled over.

But they should have forced the issue back then. We would either be shot of Alito or Roberts, or the filibuster. This is why you must do what you can when you can. The past is the past, but at least Democrats should learn from it and quit hoarding "political capital" and use all means at their disposal to get things rolling. They had a golden opportunity with the last supplemental appropriation, and another one is sure to come up. You don't need a veto-proof, filibuster-proof majority to do nothing, and the money the president wants cannot be appropriated if the Democrats do nothing.

But this won't happen. The cowardly Democrats, fearful of being accused of withholding supplies from "The Troops", will cave and give the Dear Leader whatever he wants. And they will whine about not having that unobtanium of Congressional power, a "veto-proof majority." And more people will die needless deaths.

Jason,

It seems to me that the Democrats are not forcing the Republicans to filibuster. They hold cloture votes, then drop the issue when they don't get their 60 votes. How sporting of them. The result is effortless filibustering by Republicans. Democrats need to make these cloture votes more of a fight, so that Republicans obstructionism becomes more apparent and obvious.

Perhaps Reid's "all-nighter" signals a change in strategy. Let us hope so.

Democrats do not have available to them the so-called Nuclear Option, like the Republicans once did. The gist of it is that the Nuclear Option relied on the President of the Senate making a ruling on an obscure issue of procedure, which would have the effect of allowing cloture votes to succeed with a simple majority (they currently require 60 votes). That guy, then and now, is Dick Cheney, who obviously is not going to do this for the Democrats.

Bergner says that Shahid...participated in the creation of al-Baghdadi, played by an actor, and the group for which he supposedly speaks, the Islamic State of Iraq, as a front for al-Qaida in Iraq. This was aimed, Bergner said, at convincing Iraqis that the group is really Iraqi in nature.

And Bush, in the last few months, has been trying to convince us that Al-Qaida in Iraq is really not Iraqi in nature. Isn't this story just oh so convenient for the Bushies?

When Al Gore has, in the past, made perfectly logical and sound arguments about climate or Social Security, conservative pundits rushed out to declare how incoherent he was, even to intimate that he was off his medicine.

Well gentlemen, this is incoherence. Nothing Bush has said about this intelligence estimate or Iraq is coherent. Heck, even the NIE is incoherent. It lists Hezbollah as a threat to attack the "Homeland":

We assess Lebanese Hizbullah, which has conducted anti-US attacks outside the United States in the past, may be more likely to consider attacking the Homeland over the next three years if it perceives the United States as posing a direct threat to the group or to Iran.

Imagine that. This group, focused on fighting Israeli occupation and influence in Lebanon, has never expanded its operations beyond this scope that I'm aware of. The attack the NIE refers to? The attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983. And that qualifies them, all of a sudden, as a threat to attack the "Homeland" in 2007? And note the provocation required to bring this about. It is as if I were told that if I go and punch some guy in the face, he may lash back. What an amazing revelation, that.

I hope Mattel takes the incident as a sign it needs to go back to the drawing board on this thing.

Or maybe this is manna from heaven for Mattel. Can you just imagine the ad campaign for this new gadget?