I agree with you, Orbitboy -- I'd love for the GOP to finally fracture. They've got three main wings: nationalist, capitalist, and fundamentalist -- and, sure, the first two are increasingly uncomfortable with the third, even though they depend on the third to trot out the vote for them. I'd love for that split to happen.

And I also agree with the Anonymous who said the state level is where the action is for the Democrats, versus the corrupt and vapid national party. That's so right! The Democrats definitely lost their way when they tried to play the national game with the GOP -- the top-down GOP works best that way, while the bottom-up "all politics is local" Democrats work best that way, and when they strayed from that, they got in trouble.

Time will tell, I guess, whether the vote for the war funding was wise or foolish. At the most, it was pure politics; certainly they must've been watching the polls and saw that the majority of Americans approved funding with benchmarks, even as they opposed the war.

I wonder if the DINO problem would lessen if more active, statewide Democratic operations came to dominate the party; DINOs seem like classic American-style political opportunists, which is why they're so nasty when it comes to standing for anything; they're always ready to leverage their "loyalty" if it brings them benefit.

Some folks defend conservative Democrats as reflecting the diversity of the party, but if that translates into weakening the Democratic voting bloc (and tracking those votes really highlights party discipline, or lack thereof), then they're a bad thing. It gives the least loyal members the most power (the Joe Lieberman Effect, if you will), which is exactly the opposite of the GOP's approach -- the GOP punishes dissenters, and the Democrats reward them. How many strikes do DINOs get?

ABC's Nightly News last night did a hatchet job on Clinton and Obama for their "No" votes. I found that interesting -- they went after them whole-hog. I'm going to write and complain about it. I couldn't believe a mainstream news channel went after a couple of mainstream candidates so relentlessly (I should've taken notes, but I was too angry); guess they're gearing up for 2008, when the Media will suddenly become very aggressive (assuming a Democrat wins), after slumbering for the last eight years. I remember last seeing that Jekyll/Hyde transformation when we went from George I to Bill Clinton -- it was like a lightswitch, from powderpuff news to knives out. And that's not just because I'm a progressive partisan; the coverage was definitely harsher.

Progressives need to keep developing Web-based organizing, using it as a way of generating real-world activity, to counter the nonliberal media's corporate smackdowns, and to offer ever-broader, alternative information sources to challenge those standard outlets. The mainstream media are still shockingly gentle to the GOP, and are predictably harsh to the Democrats. Until that happens, anything the Democrats do will be framed by hostile media -- I call it the Gliberal Media.

I think this is probably the culprit...

The experiment didn't say the Bt protein gave the bees the "disappearing" disease, or that it killed all of them; it just said the bees that came in contact with the crops appeared to be more negatively affected by the parasite.

The timing seems interesting; the colony collapse disorder (CCD) seems to parallel the widespread use of genetically modified crops in our country. I'd be curious to see whether Europe's experiencing the same CCD, given that their people successfully resisted reckless use of GM crops.

Given how systematic the problem is, I could imagine some combination of effects where the Bt weakens the immune system of the bees, making them more sensitive to parasites.

And since the biotech industry is very capital-intensive and well-represented in lobbying terms, it'll probably be another dozen years before anybody seriously links them to it (and they'll have PR flacks and bogus counterstudies to blow smoke, in their usual way).

I think some kind of unintended side effect with Bt would be far more plausible than the cellphone theory, given the rush to get those and other GM products on the market and in everyday use.

Mr. Greenwald wrote...

Time and again, they are revealed to be people completely unmoored from reality or without the slightest regard for basic precepts of responsible commentary. Facts which are unpleasant to them are deemed to be "fake" for that reason alone, and the most serious accusations come spewing forth from their mouths without any regard to whether they are actually true.

Hell, that characterizes the whole ideology, going from the very top with Bush et al., all through the noise machine, and on down.

I don't think the right-wingdings will apologize for anything, because that's not their role. They're spraying flak (and flack) on the front end, hoping some of their charges stick. Apologies aren't part of the battle plan.