The Republicans have learned that lying works. No matter what they say, the media will report it as "Republicans say X, Democrats say not-X", as if each position is equally valid.

Worse, Obama regularly says nice things about the liars: he recently praised Sen. Grassley. He's basically saying that the liars are credible.

Bipartisanship was worth a shot. Obama now needs to do a 180 and fight like hell. If he doesn't, he comes off like a battered spouse in denial, too weak to fight back or leave.

The Republicans' intention is to destroy the Obama administration. Democrats need to respond by passing good bills with zero Republican votes, using reconciliation to prevent filibusters.

When the House and Senate bills are merged, the conference committee should put all the progressive provisions back in, and the bill should be forced through the Senate using the reconciliation process, which only needs 50 votes.

Living wills can go back in at that point.

Let's see: we have the health care debate, right-wing thugs shutting down public gatherings, people showing up at Barack Obama's appearances with guns, the split between Obama and his base on the public option, the Afghan presidential election, a hurricane that's going to hit either New England or the Canadian Maritimes or both, massive unemployment, a continuing foreclosure crisis, and OMG Michelle Obama wore shorts!

It's just crap to use the "slow news month" excuse, since it isn't true. The media have gotten into the habit of writing more fluff stories in August, perhaps, even if it displaces things that the readership actually needs to know about.

Ronald Reagan, hero to the right, signed the UN Convention Against Torture, and the Senate ratified it. It is the "supreme law of the land".

Furthermore, USC 2340 explicitly criminalizes torture, defining it as follows:

• "torture" means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;

• "severe mental pain or suffering" means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from - (A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (C) the threat of imminent death; or (D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality;

Go back and read the CIA report released yesterday and compare to the above definition.

The question is whether she will join Republicans to filibuster a bill that the majority of the Senate would vote for.

The Obama administration are the worst negotiators I've ever seen. Given how smart Obama is, it's hard for me to believe that they are as foolish as they seem, so it seems more likely that there are active saboteurs doing the leaking, or that what Obama really wants is very different from what he says he wants. Pre-announcing (even by leak) what you're willing to give up means you're already given it up.

... not the dolls, though she does have one. And the books are very well done (for the most part), and do a great job of teaching history; not just the history you learned in school, but all of the other details that you'd otherwise only hear from someone like Howard Zinn: child labor in factories, things like that. Many of the books turn the tables on what we are conventionally taught: from Felicity, the Revolutionary War girl, you learn that sometimes Patriots ran Loyalists out of town so they could take their property, and that daughters of Loyalists were good people too.

Now, it is true that most of those girls are impossibly spunky, resourceful, and courageous, but there are worse role models for my daughter.

A number of letter-writers are pretending that Salon never criticizes Iran, or are pretending that Prof. Cole is an Iranian apologist, or are falsely suggesting that Prof. Cole claims Ahmadinijad's election was legitimate, or some other nonsense. That's because they can't refute what he writes in the article so they have to pretend that he said something else and refute that instead.

Keeping an appropriate degree of pressure on the Iranians, insisting on inspections and the like is good policy. Exaggerating and overhyping the threat is not.

... any criticism of Israel, no matter how minor, even if the author is a Jew or an Israeli, will be called "Jew bashing" by certain letter writers. No matter that in the Israeli press, you'll find vigorous debate and strong criticism of government policy and treatment of Palestinians, often far stronger than most American editors would allow in their publications.

While it's true that Sarah Palin never said she could see Russia from her house, she repeatedly tried to claim that Alaska's proximity to Russia somehow gave her foreign policy experience, and she pointed out that there are places in Alaska where you can see places in Russia, is if that were somehow relevant to her VP qualifications. So it was a fair shot.

Sen. Reid demonstrated that it's easy to break a hold that doesn't have sufficient support, when he did it to Sen. Feingold. All he would have had to do was move to push the bill forward anyway. This would flush the person trying to hold the bill out in the open. The obstructionist can call for lots of time-consuming roll-call votes and try to block cloture motions, but he/she would need allies to go on the record.

But Reid (and many senators) have a warped sense of courtesy toward their fellow members.