Also, don't we have enough people representing NY already?

That's all...

He is an unrestrained advocate and enforcer of the War on Drugs (despite his own acknowledged use of marijuana, of course)

Matthew 23:23 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

This may have the effect of unintended consequences.

Methinks that the populace, taken for granted by Bloomberg and most of the corporatist authoritarians, don't realize how oppressed, increasingly suffering and angry the common folk are.

Bloomberg and the notion of a bipartisan ticket will just as likely be seen as just another Republican offering, which in fact, it is. It surely will not attract progressives, liberals and most independents who overtly affiliate "Republican" but who in actuality are much more liberal in their views and votes.

Let Bloomberg spend his bucks - the trickle down effect is sure to loosen a dollar here and there which actually goes into the "surplus population" and may stave off a bill collector or allow a few gas tanks to be filled. If it helps to deplete his war-against-the-people chest, then all the better.

The people are awakening, blinking the sleep from their eyes and are discovering that they are hungry, threadbare and cold.

That leads to a collective irritability and action against those who would stand between them and essential comfort.

All the best to you, Glenn and to everyone for a progressive 2008!

John Edwards is the only chance we have to keep from falling further away from our constitution and heritage by fighting the vested interests. If another republican wins the presidency, the rule of law will be so far gone that we may never get it back.

I was talking with a friend from a fortune 100 company who left last year because he didn't want to go along with the program. It seems that the strategy of keeping the company agile was to fire 30% of the people every year. My friend was told that he was too nice a guy to fire the required people. Arguments like how long it took someone to learn the job, a couple of years at least, fell on deaf ears. Notice that the tactics of fear that the republicans have used to destroy our government are now being used in corporations to destroy the corporate culture. Shouldn't there be reason and freedom of speech in our corporations? Not if it is further eroded in our country which rewards those who already have too much.

I hope someone will email a copy of this post to Gary Hart and the other so-called "Democrats" who are supporting this effort to have a billionaire buy the Presidency of the United States.

I'd like to see Broder make an attempt to respond to the overall sentiment in his Comments section. Just once I'd like to see him give it a whirl to address those comments, the broad vast majority of them, that are admittedly not terribly flattering but expose his pieces as nothing but GOP tripe in disguise.

Honestly, besides the other lazy investigative journalists who rely on his crap as gospel, who in their right minds listen to this man anymore? Then again, comments and overall sentiment to Hiatt's neoconservative cheerleading hack pieces are no different, yet that doesn't seem to make much of a difference either. And then you have Deborah Howell, the Ombudsman who's "charged with representing the interests of the public by investigating and addressing complaints reported by individual citizens" (Wikipedia), but apparently makes up her own job description as an incessant cheerleader of her own paper and writers at all turns:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR2007122802303.html

And yet we all scratch our collective heads with our dear Howell as we wonder why the subscription numbers continue to tank. Hmmm, I just can't put my finger on the problem, can you, Deb?

Next year I'll actually have the nerve to talk to you if only to thank you for the hearty, gut busting laugh you gave me this morning.

This takes nothing away from the quotes you have reproduced, but Bloomberg is generally assumed to be considering a run with Chuck Hagel, who is pretty old-school on foreign policy despite his vote for the Iraq War.

This NY Sun article from May this year is hardly a ringing endorsement for Bloomberg, especially were he to team up with Hagel.

http://www.nysun.com/article/53802

As a result, I disagree with this characterization:

"Bloomberg is basically just Rudy Giuliani with a billion or two dollars to spend to alter the election."

Bloomberg does not have Rudy's Kerik-style corruption baggage, and at the moment anyway is not a lunatic with respect to Middle East policy.

Where the Bloomberg-Hagel alliance does raise eyebrows is that this is a pairing of a social liberal with a social conservative. However, it's hard to imagine they would diverge on a (traditional GOP) pro-big business agenda, and I'm inclined to believe they see eye-to-eye on foreign policy because otherwise it's hard to understand why they should be drawn to one another.

As you are wont to say, this is not meant to be a post in support of Bloomberg, and whose to know if his political posturing is just that. But to put him in the same whackjob category as Rudy seems a bit of stretch.

A Michael Bloomberg candidacy is an attempt to tilt the election to the Republicans by drawing off enough of the disaffected vote otherwise going to the Democrats to permit a Republican victory. It enables the Borens and Broders to avoid coming out for a Republican nutcase (after all they are Serious people) yet undermine an Edwards or Dodd. If Clinton or Obama appear to win the Democratic nomination the Bloomberg boomlet may magically wither as Clinton is no threat to their base interests and Obama will be so busy painting himself into a bi-partisan corner he can be finessed at every turn. Bloomberg would play a Nader-type role with similar consequences. It is a great idea if you want to see the Republicans continue to occupy the White House.

USA999