There's a problem with getting power the Newt Gingrich way, and exercising it by slandering your opponents. When you lose power, you have a power that is habituated to lying, so much so that they can't even recognize the truth.

Franken called out Limbaugh and O'Reilly in a very funny way. These two epic bullies and liars don't like being called on it, so they create this foolish image of the fanatical enemy, Franken, and start the campaign by trashing him, which drive's Coleman's negatives way up. Do they charge him with substantive things? No. They say the vote was "stolen," when this recount has been more painstaking than any I've ever seen. What's the "fraud"? Well, I guess Acorn might have signed up some poor people. So they resort to the counter-factual trashing of Acorn. They say that "other issues" are involved, by repeating the "double-counting" canard, which was proven false, and they beg for more absentees to be looked at again, forgetting that when Coleman did that, he lost votes every time. The courts couldn't "Count more of them" when examples he brought up in court were fraudulently signed. "Okay, his girlfriend forged his signature, but that's really the way he wanted to vote!" And they ridiculed our chads and "intent of the voter."

If you look at life in the radically black-and-white view, you never can gain a realistic idea of your opponent, and you lose more and more. Al Franken a "radical"? Yeah, like Obama was "a friend of radicals," right? More and more people see the GOP for the idiots they are, big and fat or not.

When you live by the lie, you have nothing but lies to defend yourself with.

I hope we're now at the beginning of the Al Franken Decade, because I will love to see right-wing heads explode again when he takes his moderately left position on many issues, and votes with the center on others.

In 1966, my then-wife miscarried at almost the same age. At that time, there was no question of being able to save the child. At my wife's pleading, I went to view the tiny little body of my daughter. Scarcely a foot long, just over a pound. This has remained a sadness for both of us. However, the medical realities of the day did not present us with a choice. Technically, it is the different now. Presented with the choice today, I wonder what choice we would have made. The example here gives no guidance.

I rather think that we would have done what we could to maximize the chances of our preemie having a life, though. It's nearly impossible to think of the opposite.

Bill's reaction was completely fact-based. The race-baiters were the Obama spinners, who were looking for any way to trash Bill. Hardly a new event for the mainstream press, which passively followed along with the endless right-wing smears of the Clintons, and then leaped in joy to be able to attack him over Monica, joining the impeachment brigade. Bill was guilty of hoping that Obama's campaign would fade like Jesse's did. That's not racist, that's just sticking up for the other candidate. He hoped, unrealistically it turned out, that the Obama campaign would fade. Duh. It's racist to compare Obama to Jackson? In what crazy mind?

On the other hand, you're obviously forgetting the smear of Hillary as the one who leaked the picture of Obama in Kenyan garb -- to the Drudge Report! Really? What was the evidence of that? Why, Drudge, who is, of course, nothing but accurate. Drudge ran with it because it was a twofer: a picture of the skinny Obama looking foreign, and blaming that not on the GOP but on Hillary. Face it, that was the Obama campaign's version of the Canuck letter. Anyone who searched the AP Photo website could locate that picture in five minutes.

As the incomparable Bob Somerby said, "Today, we are all Drudge."

1. No comic will ever let up on the image of Bill as a compulsive horn dog. I'm somehow sure his behavior is less depraved than the Arkansas gossip amplified by the Washington powdered wigs would have had it.

2. No winger will EVER be able to see what he does as motivated by anything good. This is not a credit to them, it's proof of how immoral they are. The right is like the Soviet apparatchiks in the '30s, following cues to be right in step with the party line, which was getting weirder and more depraved by the day.

3. But the nastiest thing of all are those who think these two women should have stayed in North Korea to pay for their deeds. Really? A team of reporters who tried to understand the sex trafficking from North Korea? Whose worst "offense" was to briefly cross a poorly-marked border? Maybe the right's obsession with borders is responsible for this. And maybe they confuse the North Korean border with ours, as they confuse the president's power with Kim Jong Il's.

Back in 1994 or 5, when Gingrich was trying to cut Medicare expenditures, Clinton came after him, hard, and quickly won that round. In fact, he took Gingrich out of action during that debate and the "shutting down the government" period. Never again would Gingrich be supported by the majority. Now, Gingrich's out was the ludicrous idea that he wasn't cutting Medicare at all, he was only "cutting the rate of growth." The program would have less money than it would otherwise have. A cut is a cut.

Now, he's trying to back up Obama on the same issue, only this time, he's playing the Clinton part. Of course, he's having to resort to completely delusional ideas about euthanasia and so on to do so.

The truth is the truth, and sometimes a cut is a way to make better treatment cheaper.