Tell W.T. I ask him to buy me a beer.

Tell him to stay out of the jailhouses.

If that's impossible, compare tattoo's.

No shower with beers. I'll share corn.

A Marine vet was approached by a Mennonite dairy farmer. A vet is a vet.

You can help artificially impregnate my Black Angus herd? I'll try to help.

We learn the hard way. Paranoid hypochondriac seeks a million opinions?

Maybe I'll understand it better by and by.

I'll say one thing, I can write just as good as Timberman, (after I've gone over it three times, submitted it to my wife for editing, and then re-written it, and then gone over it three more times, every word. Oh, and if you leave out all the good references, similes, allegories and pop-culture and classical references he uses. Yup, with all those caveats, I can write just as good!) The fact that he can write that way, off the cuff means nothing, nothing, I tell you!

Damn, that guy can write! Anyway, he'll be back- commenting is like speedballs, it warps your psychology and physiology permanently, and you can't give it up. He must be in commenting rehab somewhere.

I'll get his email to you. I know he'd like to hear from you.

Look FISA is important -- in fact a constitutionally critical issue. But there are other Constitutionally critical issues transpiring this week too. Sorry But I have to:

For Karl Rove to invoke executive privilege is to involve the president in a criminal matter -- whether they discussed Siegelman's prosecution. It isn't about whether executive privilege has an applicable precedent, It's whether what we thought was Karl Rove, is in fact the white house. And the only way anyone should believe that it isn't the white house is if they (the wh) require Karl Rove to testify. Since they have in fact done the opposite, it seems the logical inference is that in fact Karl Rove did discuss the Siegelman case with the president. And that... changes the story.

It is amazing, and it is the end of constitutional democracy if this isn't prosecuted fully, but the least the opposition could do is state the case properly. And if the house, and senate, and justice dept, won't state the case clearly, the rest of us should: This means the President knew that Karl Rove, and the Justice dept. intervened in election by using the prosecutorial power of the justice dept. to prevent Don Siegeleman from being elected.

And the only reason it won't get prosecuted is because the Democrats want to have a unitary executive too.

If I had about a month to bang it into shape, and somebody standing over my with a whip. And threatening to shoot me if I put one joke in it. (Not that I could duplicate his experience which he references)

From Timberman in 2006, (what it took me till about, oh 2009 to formulate):

The problem with the Democrats is that they don't have an alternate narrative. If the war in Iraq is an aberration slowly become an abomination, what exactly is America's role in the world? Ask them, and you won't get a single answer.

Most Democrats in the House and Senate seem to accept the post-War narrative which their Party in fact invented -- America on guard against and finally triumphant over World Communism, America the guardian of world peace and democracy, America the ardent defender of the defenseless Jewish state. They question the tactics which put us in Iraq, but not the strategy.

Even many of the rank and file, the Democrats I worked with as volunteers during the last election, for example, believe that we're at war with irrational terrorists, that it is a war, and that GWB just sent the troops to the wrong place. They had/have no problem at all with the Iraqi sanctions, Clinton's air war against Saddam, or stationing troops in the stans on Russia's southern borders.

To put it plainly, the Democrats who have a fundamental criticism to offer of American foreign policy, and the economic policy which accompanies, it are a minority. You find many of us in places like this because our narrative has to be heard here first; it has little place in the councils of the Party at the moment.

The same was true during the struggle over civil rights, and during the Viet Nam debacle; the vilification of Fannie Lou Hamer, or Eugene McCarthy was every bit as debilitating then as Joe Lieberman is today. To this day, many Democrats blame us for the present weakness of the party. If you radicals hadn't split the party, Hubert Humphrey would have won, and the war would have been over in six months; if only you'd been more responsible.

If we want a true opposition to American Manifest Destiny in this country, we'll have to create one, and we'll have to win elections with it. The Democratic Party may be the more hospitable of the two parties to those who actually have an alternate narrative, but only just. These things take time.

This was one of his first letters

He better come back. If he doesn't, I'm stealing all his stuff, you hear that Timberman!

And the only reason it won't get prosecuted is because the Democrats want to have a unitary executive too.

Yes, but what they want, and what they are going to get are two different things. As I remember it, Bush and Cheney actually took very little in the way of power. Everything they got was abdicated to them, by people who, like so many in government, had conflicting interests and responsibilities (or so they thought, anyway). They all abdicated to Cheney and Bush in some areas because they thought it would advantage them in others. That will not happen with Obama, they'll want it all back.

I must go to bed, there's so much to do. Thanks to all, and thanks to bernbart for the many laughs. You're a kick, sweetheart! Stay as sweet as you are, and I hope you never find the spel-chek. It wouldn't be the same.

I think maybe Voice has divined tomorrow's topic.

And Goodnight, William Timberman, wherever you are!