Sniffing cleaning fluid?

Probably didn't think this thing out.

House prerogatives

You hear a lot of complaints about being "left out of the negotiations" and the House "having a voice," but you don't hear much about the long-term unemployed. "Purity?" I think not. "Ego" seems the more likely motivator, as it so often is.

But more importantly, what is their Plan B? Because it seems to me that they aren't going to get a better deal when Boehner is second in succession to the Oval Office, and it also seems to me, in the face of nearly 10 percent unemployment -- most of whom are more likely to vote for Democrats -- Republicans won't blink first.

UPDATE: spelling

Mission accomplished

Ted Koppel is making sense.

Perhaps bin Laden foresaw some of these outcomes when he launched his 9/11 operation from Taliban-secured bases in Afghanistan. Since nations targeted by terrorist groups routinely abandon some of their cherished principles, he may also have foreseen something along the lines of Abu Ghraib, "black sites," extraordinary rendition and even the prison at Guantanamo Bay. But in these and many other developments, bin Laden needed our unwitting collaboration, and we have provided it -- more than $1 trillion spent on two wars, more than 5,000 of our troops killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead. Our military so overstretched that one of the few growth industries in our battered economy is the firms that provide private contractors, for everything from interrogation to security to the gathering of intelligence.

We have raced to Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently to Yemen and Somalia; we have created a swollen national security apparatus; and we are so absorbed in our own fury and so oblivious to our enemy's intentions that we inflate the building of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan into a national debate and watch, helpless, while a minister in Florida outrages even our friends in the Islamic world by threatening to burn copies of the Koran.

If bin Laden did not foresee all this, then he quickly came to understand it. In a 2004 video message, he boasted about leading America on the path to self-destruction. "All we have to do is send two mujaheddin . . . to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qaeda' in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses."

Through the initial spending of a few hundred thousand dollars, training and then sacrificing 19 of his foot soldiers, bin Laden has watched his relatively tiny and all but anonymous organization of a few hundred zealots turn into the most recognized international franchise since McDonald's. Could any enemy of the United States have achieved more with less?

Time and again we have acted as his unwitting dupes.

Because women's health care isn't complicated enough

I think this is pretty ridiculous, but if it gets the needed 60 votes, I can live with it (of course, I won't be needing abortion coverage so that may color my opinion). But sheesh, am I wrong, or does the weird language indicate that Nelson does not want to be the one who killed health care reform. And for that, I'm grateful.

I read the news today, oh boy

I don't know which better epitomizes the fun and exciting world we live in: That the cop who arrested "Skip" Gates on the professor's front porch is the Boston Police's profiling expert, or that a wild turkey is "terrorizing" some town in New Jersey.

Buyer's remorse

"Presumed" Democratic nominee Obama voted for the FISA bill.

Presumably not the Democratic nominee Clinton voted against it.

Clearly, we in the netroots were baited and switched.

Obviously, we nominated some kind of GOP Manchurian candidate. Damn.

By the way, McCain didn't even bother to vote for the FISA bill or the Medicare bill.

Straight talk. What are we to do?...the nation turns its disappointed eyes to Ralph Nader.