In just 27 months (if not somehow mercifully sooner) George W. Bush will be back to working on his abs full time in Crawford. When he and his team of hard-nosed incompetents have left the stage, the heat of the present moment — the “get them at any cost” mentality — will also fade.
It [...]

“A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.”
– April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a consensus view of the government’s 16 spy agencies

Rep. Katherine Harris was on Hardball this afternoon painting rosy pictures of her campaign to unseat Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson. Host Chris Matthews opened the segment by saying that Rep. Harris had just told him off camera that her poll numbers were surging — that she had cut Sen. Nelson’s lead in half. [...]

“Grim:”
Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist has taken a commanding lead over Democrat Jim Davis among a large swath of Florida’s electorate, a new poll indicates.
Six weeks out from the Nov. 7 election to replace Gov. Jeb Bush, Crist leads Davis 51 percent to 36 percent in the poll of 625 likely voters conducted last [...]

Arnold leads Democrat Phil Angelides 17 percentage points in one poll and 12 in another. This is bad:
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has widened his lead over his Democratic gubernatorial rival, according to two polls released on Wednesday. One survey puts him 17 percentage points ahead.
A Public Policy Institute of California survey of 2,003 adult [...]

The War Prayer: O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be thou near them! O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; [...]

“To hear [Pres. Bush] bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been president on September 11, 2001 or the nearly eight months that preceded it.”– Keith Olbermann
Starting with the 9/11 commemorations, Keith Olbermann has been giving Democrats considerable cover to start speaking out against the GOP [...]

Planting questions: A few days ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, chair of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, had a Q&A session with some lower-echelon staffers at the Pentagon. Now, it is entirely possible that it wasn’t staged and the questions weren’t planted, but … here, you be the judge. This is [...]

So sue me: The House of Representatives is set to vote today on a bill that is either ironically or sarcastically called the Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005, or HR 2679 IH. Nice-sounding title, eh? You’d think it’s intended to protect your right to religious expression, but you’d be wrong.
It’s designed to protect [...]

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They’re inexpensive and easy to procure.
— Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), American poet, writer