Taking a position against torture and kangaroo courts was not the electoral poison it was supposed to be, it seems. Nor was being against warrantless wiretapping. Where does this so-called conventional wisdom come from?

What's more, the vote against the war wasn't electoral poison, either.

When a vote comes along that's so important the Republic is riding on it, then you damn well better not play the angles. If we hadn't in 2002, we might have suffered temporarily; but we would have come back this way much more quickly, too. Probably would have won in 2004, too.

Some dead professor, right? Boy, giving taxes to charter school systems is giving us great schools, isn't it? Handing over our pensions to private enterprise, how's that working? And life without unions? Why, we're happy as hogs, and really rich! Was Friedman right about Enron? Right about Halliburton in Iraq? About all those free contractors deciding how to torture? Congress seems to be working almost exclusively on the "market system." How's it working for the people? Broadband: we're the most libertarian about massive conglomerates having the monopoly on supplying it, but we are falling further and further behind the world. Friedman may have been a useful tonic back in the '70s. But we've got control of inflation now: the solution is, you give all the surplus to the CEOs, and they soak up inflation by buying bigger and bigger yachts. And if there's any extra left over, build tanks with it. Can't have enough tanks.

Oh, and the information explosion is really doing great. It's already built 3D graphics and music stings on FOX.

Sure, he could argue. But he was almost completely wrong.

We'd be better off taking a much more libertarian view of the drug "problem." But Friedman was not alone in taking this view. Sure, if you deny any role for government in any endeavor, every once in a while you'll be right.

First, it's talking about a show that nobody here has seen. Where's the slide show? All we have are the pronouncements of the author about "taste." How dare she take pictures of her dying lover? Of the corpse? I have no idea. Is it a good picture? If it is a good picture, it is a fitting memorialization. If it is strikingly graphic, it is a small vision of the hell that happens every day in a hospital. Show me the picture! Then I can see if I agree or not. There is, in this article, not a single reason to think this person has real judgment or is just another "taste" nazi.

Liebowitz came of age in the Rolling Stone of the '60s. Quite a few memorable pictures of that era, and there's a knack that she has that invites the viewer in, and shows you the unbuttoned thing inside the public straitjacket -- or pop monstrance -- of the lush, over-indulgent era she lived through.

Do I prefer the photographers of the immediate post-World-War-II generation? The Magnum photographers? Yes. But photography is created by the people who offer money for photographs, and Annie Liebowitz embodies her generation better than many others.

What does this article teach me? Nothing, except that the author doesn't like the work but doesn't do much to tell me why.

I'm perfectly willing to get candidates in the South who are like Heath Shuler -- actually with the Democrats on the crucial details, but an enthusiastic blue dogger. However, I think Kilgore and the DLC types conceal that they aren't just thinking strategically about the big tent, they want the progressive platform to be ditched. They think that privatizing stuff is just cool and modern, and why can't Democrats get with it? They seriously believe half of the Republican platform. So they advise their appeal to the south not as an electoral strategy so much as a means towards taming Democrats. I really don't think it works the other way around. Any fool can see that, if we got another Clinton in political abilities, we should run him. But someone from Illinois could also do it.

What Schaller is saying isn't that the South should be ignored, but that we can't count on that region being anything else but the last citadel to fall rather than the lynchpin of our new majority. FDR kept the Solid South by ignoring segregation and sending in tons of federal dollars.

Of course, we'd be stronger if we had more seats in the South. We don't need a political strategy to change that, we need a platform. And it's a progressive platform, though not ideological, and not regional at all.