An alien life form visiting Earth might be hard-pressed to see the difference between you and your cat. But if you can't see the difference between either Clinton and Bush, if you honestly don't think the last six years would have unspooled in a completely different fashion if Al Gore had been president -- well, maybe you are an alien life form.

Dodd may be in a position to fall on his sword, but Clinton and Obama may be very smart in not antagonizing the big telecom giants. Just as with the media giants (and there is overlap), their power to aid or interfere with a campaign is now too large to be ignored.

I said that Billary and 'Bama were smart to avoid confronting the telecoms. That wasn't a comment on their slipperiness but on what has become of Corporate America. As someone else pointed out, there have always been powerful constituencies that anyone hoping to get elected (rather than making quixotic, self-defeating points-of-honor) has been "smart" to avoid pissing off. Very true. Thus, even if your goal as a presidential candidate is to be the new Teddy Roosevelt and break the stranglehold media and telecom giants have on the way today's information flows and is colored, twisted and agendized along the way, it would be pure insanity to say so early -- or perhaps at any point -- in a political campaign. Governors, actors and ex-lawmakers running for federal office don't face this problem as acutely as sitting senators, obviously; they have an easier time waffling and avoiding the subject. I think we should cut Billary and 'Bama a little slack in this department, stop clamoring for them to cut their own throats.

The devil is in the details. Dragging our country into the globalized 21st Century, getting our foreign policy anything approaching "back on track" and insuring our citizenry's health are all jobs that have to be done one detail at a time. Leadership can rouse a people's energies (think Kennedy and the space race) and perhaps Dems are lacking in that department these days. But the Reps' dishonest sloganeering and semantic weaseling isn't leadership. It doesn't inspire any more than a bad smell whets the appetite. What it does is turn people off to the whole process, leaving Republicans to pilfer the treasury, borrow the nation into bankruptcy and consolidate their fiefdoms of personal power. A pox on them all.

I hear you, but one has to be, by nature and constitution, good at wrestling in the mud before one jumps into the mud with a past master. Is it really because we're so daintily intellectual that we don't play unfair, that clever lies don't come trippingly to our tongue? If John Kerry (and his people) could have swiftboated Bush right back in his smug chimp face, he'd probably have been happy to do so. Some people are willing to pick up a rock to end a fight and some aren't. Those who aren't should stay out of fights with those who are.

There seems to be no depth to which the snakes in this administration will not sink. They're an insult to real snakes everywhere.

Someone is under the affluence of inkohol.

And you've gotta love those economic sanctions, dontcha? Iran wants to be European, wants to do bizness with the Germans and the French and join the EU someday. But Bush is jawboning the Euros to break up with Iran. Guess what Iran does? Starts doing bizness with China, who becomes their next best friend. That's gonna do us a lot of good fifty years from now, isn't it, Norm?

It gives you an idea, but you still have to use some imagination to visualize what it's like to be waterboarded by people who hate you, who are quite capable of killing you, who enjoy your terror and pain. This was an experiment, black hoods notwithstanding, in which friendlies waterboarded a friendly.

Perhaps I am alone in this, but I do not include all orchestral music in the classification "classical." Classical music, IMO, was written to please an audience, not to examine the limits of an audience's patience by tweaking and twanging and pushing dissonance/atonality to its limits. That's a purely mathematical exercise, IMO, where the math of music in the hands of the classicists was put to use strictly to entertain. Those dudes had a living to make. (I won't argue that the likes of Stravinsky and Copeland didn't achieve some of both; nothing is all black or white.) The best pure-entertainment orchestral music alive today is in the movies. A lot of it is crap, too, as was a lot of what was written for the courts of the kings and emperors. But some of it will survive, works by Elmer Bernstein and John Williams and others too numerous to list. Long in the future, when the difference between 1730 and 2030 doesn't seem so great, maybe those survivors can be lumped in with the classics.

I can understand why you'd remain anonymous if that's all you've got to say.

Eisenhower didn't decide which party he was in until right before the allowed the Republicans to draft him. Completely apolitical while on duty, gave us Warren and Brennan on the SCOTUS while serving as a Repub prez. Those were the days.

There are a lot of detainees at Gitmo who cannot be released because they've seen too much. A journalist who's spent x years at Guantanamo Bay, and you're going to let him go out in the world where he can write and talk? Faggeddabouddit.

That Mukasey is GWB's Earl Warren.

As someone said in a slightly different context over on TPM: Congress is a management layer in the corporate pyramid that that runs America.

And if I were Bush, I wouldn't either. Asshole.