That's one big problem with your analysis. TNR is a worthless place, where the occasional good post is leavened by tons of "Lieberman crap," as it were. Iraq war promoters. Neo-Republican simps. Its circulation is crashing because it represents nobody but its writers and its highly idiosyncratic publisher.

I say Kos was calling it right, and your whole article gives this story far too much importance, even if true.

In fact, under Salon's new management, I keep seeing symptoms of the Salon/TNR disease. Kinsley? Good writer. Terrible editor.

I saw parallel universes being constructed first with the Kennedy assassination. But thinking back, of course McCarthyism was the same: history is made, not by the masses, not by large historical forces, but by a small cabal of men who make secret deals, which you can read into here and there. It's paranoid thinking, maybe even a synthetic gnosticism. Look, vote fraud is real enough. I can think, well, Gore absolutely won, and maybe Kerry actually won too -- but this? No, I can't buy it. It's a waste of time to even think about it. The truth is, even Cheney isn't that much of a dark overlord. They screw up all the time. The people who brought us Katrina, and Iraq, did this, the greatest crime against the American Republic since its founding? Nah, doesn't wash. They're just not so superhumanly organized.

I'll go this far: they wanted the war for dominance in the Middle East, and protecting us the way Clinton did? They weren't interested. They knew something would happen. Agencies warn over and over about an imminent attack, and they seem not to hear. That's because they would be able to channel the anger and fear we'd have into an imperial project like the invasion of Iraq.

Even though it means sorta agreeing with Farhad here, my vote is no.

The best example is the Alito vote. There was only one vote that counted: voting for or against cloture. Joe voted FOR on that one. Then he covered his ass with the meaningless vote against Alito, which he knew would lose when he voted for cloture.

You can be ideologically all over the place when you're a Democrat. But when the party needs you, you vote with the party in a meaningful way, not just to cover your ass when you're up for reelection.

But under the National Journal scoring, I guess that's a 50-50, right?

You know, the kind that can't deal with women as equals, so they have to call feminists "lesbians" and "strident" and all the rest. It's just so... juvenile. Grow up, boys.

There's an interesting article in the New York Times Op-Ed today about the latest conservative whine about how boys are being treated so badly by colleges, how women are the majority in colleges, and blah, blah--

Well, if you take a good look at the statistics, you do see a lot fewer black men, low-income whites and Hispanic males, too. In the top quartile of income, over $97,500, turns out that men are about 52% of the college population. So all's right with the world in the only place that counts, okay?

I don't know if you whiny males can still analyze social situations worth a damn, or if all you can see is the end of your pointy little masculinity, but that points to an economic situation to me, and the end of affirmative action and all that "discrimination" that conservatives have aided. Not to "victimization" of men by those horrid women who insist on equal rights.

What exactly is this poll measuring? The ability of FOX to bamboozle, or how much a beacon this broadcaster is to those who approve of Bush?

I think we need more results, over time, and compared with levels of Bush-loving in the general population, to understand the dynamics.

Are all nuts. Tom is the best.

There's a lot of OTHER cartoonists in Salon who could be changed, though. To say nothing of our trolls.

"Oh, that Andy Warhol fella. He just copies soup cans, doesn't he?"