Had Colbert merely skewered the Bush administration, we'd be hearing more about it. Now that Bush's approval rating is in the low 30s, the press is less afraid to attack him than they were before, at least somewhat.

But what they won't forgive Colbert for is the skewering he gave the press.

"Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!"

The abuses and poor performance of Democratic consultants was a major topic of "Crashing the Gate", and has long been discussed in detail on DailyKos and MyDD among others.

And unlike Walter Shapiro, Armstrong and Moulitsas name names. Bob Schrum, who get paid tens of millions to run national campaigns, only to go 0 for 8, is the most glaring example.

Even today, Schumer's DSCC won't fund candidates unless the candidate agrees to use the consultants and campaign directors chosen from the club by the DSCC. That would be OK if those guys had a winning record. But there's a whole industry in DC of people who get rich by losing elections.

And boy, has Shapiro been spun, thinking that Terry McAuliffe was one of the reformers.

Bush learned all this at his father's knee.

In 1976, when George Bush the father was head of the CIA, the Reagan administration did not like what the CIA was saying about the strength of the Russians. So Bush created "Team B", bringing in a bunch of outside "experts" to reassess the intelligence. They vastly upped the estimates of Soviet strength across the board, claimed that the Soviets were prepared to fight and win a nuclear war, and generally declared the Russians to be ten feet tall. They eventually forced the CIA to change its estimates. They were much closer to right the first time.

Yes, there are Palestinians who want to throw the Jews into the sea. Yes, there are Israelis who want to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, throwing them off the land. Each extreme element uses the extremists on the other side to justify its own extremism, and I see plenty of commenters on this article completely dehumanizing the side that they oppose.

However, in 1967 the US co-authored UN Security Council resolution 242. The preamble calls the taking of land by military conquest illegitimate, the resolution calls for Israeli "withdrawal from territories conquered" in the 1967 war, language that might permit minor border adjustments, but that would not allow the wholesale land grabs contemplated by Olmert. It calls for mutual recognition by all parties and for secure borders.

The US can veto any Security Council resolution, but if it does not, it is bound by such resolutions. It cannot bless Olmert's attempt to rip up Resolution 242 and unilaterally impose borders, keeping the most valuable land on the West Bank and dividing the rest into bantustans with Israeli troops on all sides. Turning the Palestinian territories into giant open-air jails tends to discredit any Palestinian leaders willing to cooperate with those seen as the jailers; Sharon's repeated humiliations of Fatah led to the Hamas victory.

"Christian," here and throughout, indicates fundamentalist or evangelical Protestants.

Sorry, that's plain lazy, and Salon should not engage in this word usage. The majority of Christians in the United States are not fundamentalist or evangelical Protestants: many are Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, etc. This lazy word usage is politically convenient to the Christian right: it allows them to pretend that the 80% of Americans who call themselves Christians back policies favored by a number closer to 20%. It is a small minority that claim that the practices described in the article are "Christian".

Please do not write "Christian" as shorthand for "fundamentalist". This is the web, you don't need to meet set word counts to get your articles to fit on the page.

It might be possible to make carbon trading work if it's backed by strict government enforcement. The idea, for example, might be that the country is only allowed to produce a certain amount of greenhouse gases per year, and the quota declines year by year. Each citizen gets a quota, and if someone wants to emit more (to drive a monster SUV or build a factory), he/she will have to buy licenses from someone else. To make sure that the fee is always paid, when you buy gasoline, you pay for the carbon rights. When your electric utility buys coal, oil, or natural gas, they pay. In many ways it will look like a tax, with credits for those who use less than the average amount of energy, but the idea is that the tax rate is not set at a fixed number. Instead, the rate is set just high enough to cause greenhouse gas emissions to decrease according to the set schedule.

The key to justice is that everyone starts with an equal right to pollute. In drought years in California, the public is often required to cut their water usage by a fixed percentage compared to what they used the previous year; this can be cruel punishment to those who were stingy with water when it was not required, and the effect has been to encourage people to waste water whenever rationing is not imposed, to have a high quota during drought years. So we shouldn't grandfather in past big polluters, though we can provide economic aid to the rural poor.