I am a liberal. I have been one all my adult life, i.e. since about 1968. The lack of liberalism among elected officials is OUR fault, no one else's. It is our fault because we do not DEMAND liberal values of the people we vote for, give money to, etc. Until we exercise that power, Reps are free to write us off and Dems are free to take us for granted, which they very reasonably do. The failure by the Senate to stop this most recent Bush atrocity is OUR failure. The ever-present move of politics to the right in this country is OUR fault.

UNTIL LIBERALS SAY "NO" TO CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRATS, this trend will continue. We must tell Dems loudly and clearly that if they want our money and our votes, they must heed our demands and our values. And when we say that we must follow through by not voting for or giving money to any non-liberal candidate. Until we do that, things will only get worse.

Remember the euphoria you felt after the 2006 elections? "Things are going to change for the better now," you thought, right? Where is that feeling now? Who can argue that a few minutes of that euphoria is worth what you feel now and the state of politics in this country? What is happening is no accident. It is a result of liberals lining up like cattle to vote for anyone with a 'D' by his/her name.

I repeat, politics is power. Until liberals exercise our power, we have no one to blame but ourselves for wars abroad, the diminution of rights at home, consolidation of media, insane health and energy policies, etc.

We always have someone to vote for even if that is NOTA 9none of the above).

Thanks for some interesting information on what goes on in Ohio, but you're missing some important points about paternity fraud. You rightly say that no man with half a brain lets an order run for years without doing something about it. The point about paternity fraud is that men don't know about the order that the court has issued against them. That's because the mother claims she doesn't know where the man is or how to contact him, so the court allows non-personal service of citation, i.e. they publish it in the "Legal Notices" section of the wantads in the paper (which of course we all read every day just in case some woman we've never heard of has perjured herself claiming we're the father of her child, right?). The court then enters a default judgment against the man the woman claims to be the father. This order may lie dormant for years and the man never know it exists. One man I interviewed in California first learned about a child a woman claimed was his when the girl was 16 years old and the state sent him a letter. What a surprise to him. He had no ability to contest the order and had to take out a second mortgage on his house to pay the arrearages.

Good for you on the adoption issue. Of course you realize that, if the father gets custody instead of the child being adopted, the mother is on the hook for child support. In practice this encourages mothers to lie to courts and adoption agencies about the identity and/or whereabouts of the father. That there has never been an appellate case holding a mother accountable for lying about the identity or whereabouts of a father is but more evidence of the anti-male, anti-father character of family courts and family law in this country.

get a spine and STOP VOTING FOR CONSERVATIVE DEMS, this will continue and politics in America will continue its rightward march. Between elections, liberals inveigh long and loudly against the perfidy of Dems who fail both to enact liberal legislation and to impede conservative initiatives. Then comes election time and they line up like cattle to vote for Dems who in no way represent liberal values. Then, between elections again, liberals are in a constant state of pique because the conservative Dems they elected don't act like liberals.

In short, all Democratic candidates look at liberals and know to an absolute certainty that they will have those votes come next election. Given that, they have no impetus whatsoever to do anything for liberals. And we wonder why the ruling class is so conservative. It's conservative because liberals make no demands on it.

The Christian Right, at which liberals are fond of looking down, is far smarter than we are. When George I raised their taxes, they abandoned him. They didn't vote for him even though it meant Clinton would be elected, and guess what? They really get some attention from the Reps.

Now, some will say that the Reps just pay lip service to the Christian Right. There's an element of truth to that, but if liberals had two far left SC Justices and a bunch of state legislatures trying to do whatever the liberal version of conservatives' attack on abortion rights is, we'd feel pretty good about our power, don't you think?

Look at it. Dems made a very strong showing last November to a great extent by electing DLC-style candidates, and, what a surprise, they don't really oppose much of the Bush program which continues unabated. As long as liberals don't look past the next election, this will continue. As long as liberals refuse to VOTE LIKE LIBERALS, this will continue. Politics is power. Until liberals use our power, we'll be the taken-for-granted-jokes that we've made ourselves.