to have everything you say mean exactly the opposite: priceless.

In the companion Holland piece (link to Reuter's bike ride) Bush yells, "What I would give to be 16 again!" I think he's got the timeline backwards, but one day, if he keeps ridin' and readin' and thinkin' real hard about all the things he's got to think about......he'll get there. Way to go tiger! You shout "air assault" cause you got to go up the hill!

Thanks to Salon for posting this article and the link to the video demonstrating the claims, which is droll and riveting all at once. Seeing is still believing, and the implications are extraordinarily damning. As to the Republican peddlers of such grossly flawed technology: are they malicious or just dumb? Now that Bush and co. have utterly smashed that distinction, I have no problem thinking them both.

The original, longer Bradblog article with back-up is even better.

or something like that.

Democrats are the gas; Republicans are the brakes. Drive with the brakes on for too long, it starts to smell funny. Like any dualism, the parties actually need each other - for definition, and for informed action. Considered agreement on morality (page-dating) as well as ethics (humane treatment of all citizens and even the accused) benefits from a range of thought and experience. However the Republicans haven't agreed to agree on anything beyond the 9/11 Hour of Power for some time.

The issue here is hypocracy consistently edging out good government. On that the Reps don't have a (studly) leg to stand on.

Mr. Blumenthal has done it again - hit the nail, clear and hard, on the head. A sharp, terse executive summary of foolishness dragging hypocrisy and hubris all over town. Kind of like every other day in this evil empire. Sydney's the best.

If the Inexplicables focus on just a few razor-close Senate seats, it's easier to manipulate the voting machines without MSM scrutiny - which will happen without a doubt. We will assist by making our very own justifications for the loss, just as we did in 2004 and 2000 (and likely in 2002).

The stakes are of course enormous for the White House to hang onto the Senate, at least. If they feel the itch to keep the House too, the "wedge" issue has to be a significant one, to allow for more widespread manipulation as well as less conviction from the Dems that the fix was in. Anything will do, as long as it distracts.

The Saddam verdict would be the MacGuffin - just like 2004's "values".

Thank goodness the stakes are slightly higher for us, and that we've seen this movie before.

Ebonius, I don't think it's a waste of time at all for you to articulate, as so many on the Salon boards do, the bizarre unfolding of this American tragedy. I've noticed recently more "cross-talk" in the letters and welcomed it, as it inches us closer to a sort of concensus and reinforces the striking humanism underneath most of the digital criticism of Bush and his handlers. It would feel so much more threatening without seeing all the wild and alert letters.

The situation is indeed both unprecedented and totally alarming, and deserves full disclosure 24/7. Having rational, sharp, humane voices like Tim Grieve and Sydney Blumenthal and letter-writers like you and others on these pages is a tremendous achievement. I don't think the choir can hear enough of it - makes the singing out sound louder and better and truer every day.

While the noisy fiasco of Bush appears to drown out all other issues, or render them as sideshows, this - the galloping implications of global-warming - is the big tent. The notion of our planet as an interlocking set of self-stabilizing forces, tending towards an optimal condition for life, is mind-blowing. It also casts a distinct shadow-suggestion that, if we don't play well, the earth might just put us out of its misery. And move on, as they say.

I hope Salon will publish more on the growing awareness of the crisis, and things that can be done. It is, as Gore says, the one issue that can potentially galvanize us more than divide. It's not as sexy as he-said-we-said politics, but the rewards, right now, seem greater than can be imagined.

on Tuesday will be Diebold 3, America 0. Bush is the bleary-eyed drunken cheerleader on the verge of hyperventilation; Rove is the evil, twisted water boy with a terrible vendetta and a secret; Condi is the toothy homecoming queen riding on the back of a sweet lemon-colored Buick convertible; her mean boyfriend Biff Cheney is driving with one bare-arm casually draped over the door; Hummer Rummer is winding up to hum. Ball is fumbled; Dems pick it up. Diebold has moved the goalposts. The goalposts are outasight. "Dammit Kerry", mimes Hillary, "where are the fucking goalposts?"

Did I mention it's a Buick?

but the MacGuffin. Washington set the timing and the sentence. The prospect of Saddam's death is the only way to suggest emotional closure in the war for Tuesday - to those who will buy it. It will of course go on, and get uglier, and perhaps the sentence will be commuted to life in solitary, as another Bush chit (compassion toward the non-stop carnage?) somewhere down that awful road.

The purpose of the verdict, 2 days before a heavily publicized Democratic surge, is in giving the media plausible cause for the Reps holding onto Congress, thanks to Diebold. The gift of Kerry's botched joke is just an additional, small red herring. Bite-size.

But the Big Mac is already on the table. Prove me wrong, please.