Nelly, come on -- I think I made it pretty clear that the point of my post was partisan strategy. I was looking at ways for the Democrats to win, not at what's best for the long-term health of the nation. (As you seem to astutely realize, these two measures aren't always compatible.)

That doesn't mean that I've only looked at the question of whether to keep the filibuster through the lens of politics. As I've written before, and as you might have seen had you clicked on the links in this post, the filibuster is quite undemocratic, and if you care about democracy, we shouldn't preserve it.

So for your pleasure, here's an excerpt of what I said before [you can find it all in my article here:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/05/20/pro_nuclear/ ]

The filibuster is ... one of the more anti-democratic parliamentary maneuvers in the federal government's most undemocratic body, the Senate. A tactic not envisioned by the founders, and most famously used by Southern racists to frustrate the passage of civil rights legislation, the filibuster doesn't exactly have a savory tradition.

The problem with the filibuster stems from the problem with the Senate, which gives every state two representatives, regardless of population. In the Senate, the two Republican members from the nation's smallest state -- Wyoming, with a population of less than 500,000 -- often cancel out the wishes of the two Democratic senators from the nation's largest state, California, with almost 34 million people, 68 times the number in Wyoming. The filibuster, which allows any member to keep debating an issue unless there are 60 members willing to stop him, exacerbates the undemocratic nature of the Senate. If everything in the Senate must meet with the approval of at least 40 senators in order to receive the blessing of the body, technically a very small minority of Americans can obstruct the will of the majority. The 40 senators from the 20 least populous states represent only 29 million people. In other words, the filibuster gives a tenth of the nation's population the power to veto the will of the other 90 percent.

Speaking on the floor of the Senate in the past couple of days, Democrats have argued that this is the way it was meant to be. The founders, who wanted to prevent a popular majority from tyrannizing a minority, thought of the Senate as a body that would cool the passions of the population, Democrats say. That may be so, but it's not true that the founders wanted to give small numbers of senators the right to frustrate the rest of the body through endless debate. "The very fact that the filibuster exists is a historical accident," says Frances Lee, a political scientist at the University of Maryland and a coauthor of "Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal State Representation." The filibuster was created in 1806 when the Senate changed its rules and failed, more or less by accident, to include a provision to limit debate; Rule 22, which required two-thirds of the Senate to agree to limit any debate, was adopted more than a hundred years later, in 1917. In 1975 the number of senators required to invoke "cloture" on debate was reduced to three-fifths of the Senate, or 60 votes.

Which party does the filibuster benefit? Support for a particular parliamentary rule depends, Lee notes, on whose ox is being gored. At the moment the filibuster is a tool for liberals, who've used it to block President Bush's judicial nominees. In the past, it's been used effectively by conservatives. Strom Thurmond spoke for a record 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. FactCheck.org notes that the last senator to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia, "who spoke for 14 hours and 13 minutes, finishing the morning of June 10 -- the 57th day of debate on the measure."

Cynthia,

You're completely wrong: It's not silly to describe either a man's or a woman's appearance in a story, because doing so makes the story more interesting. That's why you'll see magazine reporters doing so all the time. Have you ever read, say, "In Cold Blood"? Or maybe anything by Tom Wolfe? Or anything in The New Yorker? Or Rolling Stone, or Vanity Fair, or Salon? Journalists in these publications describe their subjects, both men and women, because such details are important. Another way of putting it is: Any profile of Einstein would be worthless if it didn't mention his hair.

...Cynthia's concerned with the disproportion, and as I tried to say, I don't see such disproportion. One particular article may describe more women than men, and another may describe more men than women. Others may describe everyone. (Whether a journalist chooses to describe a subject depends on a great deal of factors, including the tone of the piece and, of course, whether or not the reporter has met the person or just spoken to him on the phone.) Overall, across all journalism, I don't get the impression that reporters tend to describe women more often than they do men.

Cynthia said it would be "silly" to see descriptions of men. I'm saying that it's not silly, and it's not unusual either.