Bush asked for permission to send 22,500 more troops for 60 or 90 days. How the hell was this allowed to happen, so many more troops and so incredibly more time? I thought we elected people expressly to stop this shit from continuing?!?!

I haven't read all the responses; this is pretty obvious so it may already have been said:

Americans, for all their obscene amounts of disposable pocket money compared to the rest of the world, do love a bargain. We have, in the last twenty-plus years, consistently walked past the Mom 'n Pop stores, often owned by our neighbors -- and certainly owned by people who in turn bought our goods and services -- to get whatever it is we need (or, more often, simply want) at WalMart, Home Depot, Office Depot, etc. We knew the goods were made overseas, we knew the companies were owned by far-away investors and soulless billionaires. But hot damn, three boxer shorts for seven bucks? Do I look crazy? Screw you, Mom and Pop. I'm goin' to WalMart!

That tour was of the "campus" at one of the big dot-coms or Cisco or one of those. No way was that stuff being outsourced overseas at that time, it was all creative New Economy sizzle that no one but the U.S. was doing. Note my use of the past tense. Microsoft has a campus like that, Oracle might (Ellison is pretty stingy) and a few others. But they don't talk about them quite as loudly as they used to.

Glenn states that in times gone by, journalists were on the outside (of the Beltway establishment) looking in. Does that mean that politicians of yore never controlled the message, that they were helplessly dissected, their innermost motives and evasions revealed under the newspaperman's wily scalpel? I don't think so. Politicians have always controlled the message to the best of their ability, and have succeeded more often than they've failed.

It's probably been said elsewhere: technology is great stuff, but there are places where it hasn't produced a satisfying substitute for many things, one of which is an honest election tabulation. Sure, it takes a long time and involves a lot of senior citizen volunteers, but paper ballots, marked with ink markers, counted by hand in thousands and thousands of precincts with the numbers passed forward to be added together in the pokiest, carefullest way ever...that's how you get an honest count of who voted and how they actually voted.

Get computers out of elections!

Cheney is currently on a carrier in the Persian Gulf, telling Iran they'd better not get to big for their britches or he'll sick the U.S. Navy on 'em.

Somebody put a leash on that maniac!!

We've been trying to get this fish to ride the bicycle we gave it and gee, it just doesn't want to cooperate. We're getting really frustrated and we're sending along a second, even bigger bicycle in hopes that the fish will get the frickin' message!

If fear of Bush is all that's preventing the Bank's directors from firing Wolfowitz, then they do not have my sympathy. Bush will be gone in less than two years and the U.S. will continue to support the bank to the extent that is justifiable. If they give their cojones to Bush, what do they gain?

Al-Quaeda, aided and abetted by the neocon fearmongers, already undermined our will: our will to stick to the founding philosophy of our country, even when fear confronts us. What is happening now, it seems and hopefully will continue, is that we're healing our will to live by the Constitution at all costs and shout down those who want to use our fear to enslave us.

Impeach!

The centrality of the Middle East for many "religious conservatives" is due to several factors: some religious conservatives see war against Muslims as a religious battle in defense of Christianity, some see it as necessary to secure the existence of a "Greater Israel" which many Christians believe is a prerequisite for the return of Jesus, while still others see bellicosity as a test of loyalty to the Cause or even as proof of one's belief in the exceptionalism of the tribe, whether the Tribe is "America," "Christianity," or "conservatism."

You're leaving out those for whom conflict on a grand scale is one more welcome distraction from the existential emptiness that plagues their lives and gives rise to their religiosity in the first place.

I never thought I'd have any reason to look back fondly on John Ashcroft -- that anal-retentive, Bible-thumping prig. But at least he had some principles.

These are an anachronism at best; legislation should be proposed immediately to get rid of them.

Impeach!

About wiretaps "saving lives?" Has anyone ever shown any evidence of this? If Bush had taken our 500 Billion Dollars and used it to station a government agent with a breathalyzer outside every bar and houseparty in the country and prevented every drunk in the country from driving his or her car, now THAT would've saved some lives. But wiretaps and the Iraq war? I don't think so.

These are some very scary dudes. I have long disliked Giuliani and taken comfort from knowing that he will never be our president. When he invoked 9/11 to deny bin Laden's stated reason for that very attack, well...he couldn't go much lower in my estimation, but he did. They're all creeps.

He was front and center, sounding like the kind of guy we wanted to send to Washington to muck the place out -- and then silence. Haven't heard anything from him of substance, and now he's voted AGAINST getting out of the war? Color me confused and disappointed.

Because no Senate should allow any president to put a patsy in his place when the going gets tough. Harry Truman must be flipping in his box.

This guy Lute is outranked by everyone whose butt he's supposed to be able to kick. Tell me again how this is supposed to work?