The vote on closure failed 53-38, but that still means that we had 53 Senators voting to express no confidence in Alberto "Abu" Gonzales.

Yes, the Republicans have weaseled out of having an official non-binding resolution, but still, a majority of the Senate has effectively and publicly expressed no confidence in Gonzales.

That is what our party leadership should be shouting from the rooftops and in front of every video camera in the nation.

I take it as a given that the majority of the Fundies upset with 20-odd judicial decisions to let Terri Schiavo die are good people. If you see your government murdering someone, then you have an obligation to protest, to hound your elected officials, to generally raise hell - and that is exactly what they are seeing in the media and hearing from their leaders.

And I'm willing to overlook the hypocrisy as a human failing that I share with them in spades. They are willing to overlook the murder of 100,000 Iraqis, the murder of death row inmates, the negligent homicide of the uninsured, and even the very similar death of a six-month old baby in Texas. We are more outraged over what is closest to us, and Terri Schiavo has been in our living rooms. And there are no complications - she's white, she has an easy to pronounce name, she hasn't killed anyone, no one has been associating her with terrorists on a daily basis. It's easy to identify with Terri, even if she is just a piece of meat.

But why are the Fundies so very vocal and insistent about keeping a piece of meat on life support?

OK, so we know that Discover (aka Morgan Stanley), MBNA, Citigroup are all quite vile, donating to Republicans and all that... but what credit card companies don't?

I am perfectly happy to switch cards, but everyone that I research has these problems.

Where is the progressive (i.e., unwilling to support fascists) supposed to get credit? And, I need credit, because I will need a good credit history to buy a place of my own in a few years.

From everyone's favorite intellectual lightweight's most recent column:

Ha-ha. The mental pygmy is up in the nosebleed section, and he might want to be careful since he already looks a little pale... Would he survive a nosebleed?

This is just to reassure the DailyKos community that Susan Sontag is still dead.

She has not been miraculously ressurrected to lead us all into the promised land, nor has she joined to legions of the undead to eat our brains.

Once these repetitive "Breaking News" diaries end, you should no longer rest assured, and instead prepare to either be led to the promised land, or to have your brains eaten by the undead author of 17 books translated into 32 languages.

In an article in the Seattle Times, here, we learn the Gregoire is not a party to the lawsuit brought by the Dems to force the recount of all ballots -- not just the ones that were counted the first time.

Choice quotes:

Sigh. If only there were a way for her to lose without Rossi winning... I'd be rooting for that.

For the last month, we have been inundated with "evidence" of voting irregularities being shouted from the rooftops, smothering the evidence of voting irregularities. The "evidence" keeps getting more and more obvious from secret tapes of machine logs to to some guy's brother-in-law's neighbor, and the conclusions are getting more and more dire. How is vote suppression and unequal access to to voting going to compete for attention with secret tapes of machine logs?

Apparently, the security on these Black Box Voting systems is so lax, and the technology is so backwards that a mildly retarded child with a cell phone could flip votes from Republicans to Democrats in a few key states.

To which I say: JUST DO IT.

While Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org may or may not be doing wonderful things on the topic of electronic voting with no paper trail, she is pushing a bad methodology in the analysis of Florida voting results.

In her article on:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2636130

(more below the fold)

Enough with the "End Red State Welfare" already!

I know you're angry, I know you're hurting, and I know you want to hurt someone else in return, but this doesn't make sense.

This is just "I'm taking my toys, and going home".

(more below the fold, although it seems that dKos wants more up here, since the software is saying that this is a one line diary, 300 character minumum, even though we should only have 3 paragraphs up top, and I carefully wrote it with a catchy opening and a natural break so I have to babble here... sigh)

There is a very nice article up in Freeperville, which succinctly explains why liberals continue to cling to their silly little left wing causes.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1255873/posts

It's all very fun and enjoyable, and the whole article is quoted below the fold...

Pleased as punch that the emerging CW is that he won, and maybe I missed something on a mediocre web-feed (NY Times), but I thought that Kerry made some some serious gaffes, and that Bush did a good job obfuscating Kerry's position on Iraq.

At the moment, I have more money than time, although not huge amounts of either. And, I just moved across the country to Washington State and know next to nothing about my home state's politics, except that I want a monorail.

(Sure it's a giant boondoggle that will will run way over budget, but it's a giant jobs-producing boondoggle that will run way over budget and leave us with a monorail! And, if a real estate developer is against it, can it really be all that bad?)

Where can I donate a modest, but not insubstantial amount of money where it will make the most difference?

Responding to Wesley Clark's recent overtures towards women, Howard Dean wore a charcoal grey pullover sweater today.

This bold new statement by Dean was immediately proven successful, when he won the endorsement of Carol Mosley Braun.

http://blog.deanforamerica.com/archives/003160.html

Braun said: "Frankly, his sweater was better than Wes's".

Dean has had another bat up this week, aiming to raise $700,000 by Friday at midnight, tying it to the seven states that have primaries on Feb 3. The bat is currently at $363,448.

So, I guess it's time for the usual "Can Dean make the bat?" chattering.

My guess: he'll get $540,000 and there will be lots of people making preposterously dire predictions about Dean "only" raising half a million during the first week of the quarter.

Anyone else want to guess?

I'm actually pretty impressed that he's getting this much right after the end of quarter push.

Taking a brief stroll at opensecrets.org, I've decided to send all of my packages through the post office, rather than UPS or FedEx.

UPS and FedEx both donate a lot of money to Republican candidates, through their PACs.

UPS: $820,585 -- 71% to Republicans ($1,621,291 in 2002)

FedEx: $406,250 -- 69% to Republicans ($1,335,000 in 2002)

I shudder to think that I may have contributed $0.03 to Republican candidates through my use of these two.

Hmmm. Various franchise owners and managers of Subway Sandwiches have donated about $6,000 to various republicans this cycle, and nothing to the democrats. I feel a bit dirty eating this sandwich.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11500-2003Dec18.html

Relevant chunks:

n a 2-1 ruling, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Padilla's detention was not authorized by Congress and that Bush could not designate him as an enemy combatant without the authorization.

In yesterday's White House Press Briefing, McClellan was asked the following:

Q: How concerned is the White House about the rising number of civilians that are dying in Afghanistan, and what is the White House doing about it?

And responded with this:

MR. McCLELLAN: One, our thoughts and prayers are always with the families of any innocent person who loses their life. The United States military goes out of their way to make sure that that doesn't happen. And there's been a couple of unfortunate incidents, and our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those who lost their lives.

I think this begs a number of questions...

According to the New York Times, Dean is considering unsealing his records as governor of Vermont.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/03/politics/campaigns/03DEAN.html

(Free registration, or just use login/password: byte_me/byte_me and mess up their data mining)

Facing criticism for another day over his decision on leaving office as governor of Vermont to keep many of his official papers secret for a decade, Howard Dean said on Tuesday that he was now considering unsealing some of the records.

"We're talking about trying to be accommodating," Dr. Dean told reporters here before a town hall meeting. "We think that transparency is important. But executive privilege is a serious issue, and there are private things in there that can't be let out. We are kind of having that internal discussion."

And, most amusing:

His promise to follow President Bush's lead -- "I'll unseal mine if he will unseal all of his," Dr. Dean said in a television interview -- only intensified the criticism, because Mr. Bush's records as governor are, in fact, publicly available.

So we go from a non-issue, to a potential issue: why didn't anyone check to see if Mr. Bush's records as governor were available?