One alternative to having too many posts nick-named as "czars" would be to diversify by using other obsolete foreign titles. We could have a Communications Calif, a Climate Keizer, a Regulatory Raja, a Sultan of Science, a Manpower Malik, Manufacturing Mikado, a Policy Poobah, a Transportation Taewang, and so on.

According to their website one can be member of "Young" Republicans up to age 40. Membership eligibility for Young Democrats ends after age 36. I suppose since age is a relative concept any limit is going to be somewhat arbitrary.

Two reasons a similar rise of the fringe right is unlikely to be repeated in the US: (1) While the U.S. electorate will inevitably swing back towards the right at some point, the memory of eight years of a Bush government far more right-wing than anything imaginable in Europe is searingly fresh. While a far-right vote in Europe today is something of a leap of faith into the unfamiliar, in the US such a vote will, for the foreseeable future, be one for a return to a type of government which has been tried and found wanting.

(2) Many, if not most of those in the right-wing populist parties here in Europe would be sufficiently comfortable in the Republican party that there would be no purpose to go outside it; thus even if there is a shift to the right, it will almost certainly occur within the familiar structure of the two party system, which will temper the kind of realignment and excesses that seems possible here.

Election based on proportional representation is the norm in the EU, except in the UK (and the European election even the UK uses PR). This allows smaller parties to win a share of power, or at any rate make it more difficult for mainstream parties to exercise power. Indeed one of the most troubling prospects of the rise of the populist right is not that they are likely to be seated in any government, though that is not entirely beyond the realm of the possible. The more likely danger is that it will become increasingly difficult for mainstream parties to form stable coalition governments, and that such governments will have to make too many compromises on the issues that divide traditional Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Liberals (by the European definition thereof) to govern effectively.

Thurgood Marshall was indeed a legal and liberal lion, but I will never understand why, despite the onset of age and infirmity, he did not retire during the Carter administration. The later Burger and Rhenquist Courts would have been very different if he had.

As an admirer of Justice Souter, I would have been happy to have him continue to serve a while longer; but I also think his example of not taking the "lifetime" attribute of his appointment to its illogical extreme, as too many Justices have in past decades, is very much to his credit.

I'll join the chorus favoring Sestak, who stikes me as a likely to be much like Jim Webb of Virginia; but I can see Ridge a preferable to a DRINO (Democrat and/or Republican In Name Only) like Specter.

I hope that, having now seen how Coleman's never ending challenges can curtail the length of a Senate (or House) term won by a Democrat, this does not become the Republican post-election template for all elections they lose by a slim margin. The prospect of ever more elections being fought out in the courts for months after winners should have been seated is a frightful one, but given the lack of scruples and desperation on the Republican side, all too plausible.

The old saying you refer to is actually "The Love of Money is the root of all evil." As the lampooned events make clear it what people are willing to do to acquire money that is the problem, not money itself which is pretty much morally neutral.

So picking just one more seat next year could mean the party no longer needs GOP moderates like Susan Collins to bust through Republican filibuster attempts.

Assuming of course Democratic "moderates" like Nelson don't wander off the reservation, and Lieberman does not see and take an opportunity to leverage a 60th vote status for some political stunt. Just one more seat may not be enough to overcome Reid & co.'s nerf ball approach to legislation.

I suppose Senator Vitter already has the diapers he might need to help him in a filibuster.

When I learned who was in the first PP remake I could not figure out why Kevin Kline was cast as Dreyfuss rather than Clouseau. I think he would have been far better than Steve Martin in that role, and I'm pleased to see he didn't board the second trainwreck.

As for slamming the Blake Edwards efforts, I would protest that the original with David Niven and Robert Wagner was more than worth seeing, and as a big Christopher Plummer fan I thought the first sequel adequate. But after that Edwards was simply trying to milk a dead cow - paricularly with the films made after Sellers really was dead.