for not being able to capitalize on any of the many Republican gaffes over the past 5 years. Have you talked with a Bush supporter lately? I mean, seriously--anyone who hasn't turned their back on Bush by this point? Do you really want to try to talk reason with someone like this? "Good luck," is all I have to say. We're talking about a Sisyphean task if there ever was one.

Maybe if you ran an individual intervention for each and every Bush supporter and sat each one in a room like you would a common drug addict or alcoholic, and surrounded them with reasonable people willing to talk sense for hours, days, weeks, months, etc., until the person "broke" you could get somewhere, but how's that supposed to happen? Going back to 2003, and certainly by 2004, the battle lines have been drawn. Anyone in 2006 who is still standing on THAT side of the line--still supporting Bush--has got to be a lost cause, there's just no other way to look at it. And for anyone to blame the Democratic leadership for not being able to craft a policy platform that appeals to that particular "intellect" is just ridiculous. I'd rather try to train a cat to fetch.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Trying to explain "liberalism" to someone who is STILL a Bush supporter is like trying to convince a color-blind person that Jackson Pollack was a great artist. You can't show these people something that they simply cannot see. Call it stupidity, narrow-mindedness, authoritarianism, whatever. I've called it all of those things, but mostly I call it banging one's head against the wall. Repeatedly, and forcefully.

Yeah, there's plenty of startling stuff in the Woodward book. But so what? For those of us who've been following this over the last 6 years, we kinda already knew this stuff. Woodward is offering evidence of things we either knew or strongly suspected already. Folks who are still strongly supporting Bush and the Republicans at this date will not be swayed by Woodward's "revelations." Even if there were no Foley sex scandal, the Republicans would be spinning The Woodward book the same way they're spinning this sex scandal, and every other thing they've spun over the last 6 years. People aren't going to switch their allegiance over the Woodward book, the sex scandal, or anything else. The Woodward book is no more damning than the Downing Street Memos--and we all know what happened with that. The best we can hope for is for Republicans to stay away from the polls, stop volunteering with campaigns, and stop giving money to their PAC's. That's the BEST we can hope for. Ultimately, Rove and the Republicans will dangle their favorite voter carrots:

"If the Democrats win, they'll raise your taxes."

"Immigration"

and

"The Democrats are weak on terror."

These points are all non-sense, but Republican voters have been living on a steady diet of non-sense for quite some time now. I just hope the Republican voters are disgusted enough to give up. They're NOT going to change their vote.

like it was going to be a BAD thing!

Who knows how this will all eventually turn out? But it's not hard to imagine that the House will be forced to pass some sort of legislation restricting or regulating to what extent House members can have "contact" with pages. How is the vote on THAT going to go? You're damned if you vote in favor, because you're agreeing that members of Congress can't be trusted. If you vote against, then you are upholding the ability of child predators to have unrestricted contact with pages. Maybe there are already some ground rules on the books. But if so, then they aren't working, are they? They might have to be--how would Bush put this--they might have to be "clarified" so they aren't so "vague," you know, like the Geneva Article III needs to be "clarified" and made less "vague."

So where exactly do you start or stop when it comes to "educating" the voters? As someone who has worked as an election judge in the past, I can tell you that this is clearly a case of the state of Florida electioneering for the Republican party.

Jeez, why doesn't Jeb just get it over with and have election workers cast a Republican vote for eveyone who enters the booth? That's obviously what he'd like to do....

Last March, when I was an election judge for the primary here in Texas, we were forbidden to explain to the voters that if they voted in the primary, they could not sign a petition for independent candidates Kinky Friedman, or Carol Strayhorn to get on the ballot. If voters asked about the law--and plenty of them did--all we were allowed to do "legally" was refer them to the secretary of state's toll free number.

I need to answer this IM real quick....

would Joe Lieberman say one word about this issue? If he was asked by a reporter, he should have just brushed the question off with some sort of "I'd rather not comment at this time, blah, blah, blah..." answer. If this thing blows up any more than it already has, he's on record as defending Hastert. Certainly not what he needs right now. But hey, I'm in favor of any Lieberman gaffe that'll Lamont in the senate, so talk away, Joe!

Because it's good to laugh, that's why. It's not hurting anyone who doesn't have it coming, that's for sure.

Things like this--people happily torturing detainees and bragging about it. Yeah, I sure wouldn't want to stoop to the level of making fun of whoever's responsible for that. Nope.

No laughing allowed!

Now get back to work and wipe those silly grins off your faces!