David Kurtz (TPM Reader DK) over at Talking Points Memo:

After the 1968 elections, not many Americans would probably have guessed that we would be in Vietnam for another six and a half years. We're at a similarly decisive moment now.

That's why she's thrown her support behind Murtha.  A bold move worth of a leader, no matter what Andy Sullivan thinks.

Wouldn't a better title for this article be "How Can One Failed Presidency Help Save Another: Does Anyone Remember That George H. W. Bush Was a Lousy President, Too?"

Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.

The latest indication that there has been a massive wave of change overtaking Washington:  John Amato at Crooks and Liars catches cable news cutting into its broadcast to bring you a member of the Democratic Party giving a press conference!  What's it been six or seven years, maybe more?  Well I guess it adds a little variety to all the hours, ney months of time, already spent cutting away to the President giving the same speech over and over and over and over...

...and domestic terror suspect.  Sad thing is that if someone who posted to Dailykos was sending packets of fake anthrax to noted conservative politicians and media celebrities, progressive bloggers would be forced on television to defend the entire community and for weeks you'd hear nothing but how dangerously unhinged left-wing bloggers are.  I'm not holding my breath that you'll see Jim Robinson, Kristinn Taylor or noted conservative bloggers like Hindraker or Malkin on the news defending Castagana any time soon.

I hate to rain on everyone's "bipartisan" parade, but when evaluating the veracity of any new direction the White House proclaims its best to remember that its not what the Bush people say, what you think they'll say, or what you think they'll do, but what they actually do.  Now, can anyone explain why the President not only renominated John Bolton but why is the White House pressing a divisive lame-duck session vote on the nomination even though they know they don't have the votes? 

Allen concedes.

 

Ed Bradley, dead at 65.

J.D. Hayworth won't get rid of that shit-eating grin.  And he won't concede Arizona's Fifth Congressional District to Harry Mitchell, who still leads Hayworth by five percentage points. 

Before the Valley of the Sun's beautiful people elected Hayworth to Congress, he was an obtuse sportscaster on the Phoenix CBS (nox Fox) affiliate.  I remember he came to my school once to talk about the Great Rubber Duck Race - an annual non-event in Phoenix in which thousands of rubber ducks are dropped into the canal system of the Salt River, presumably to celebrate the miracle of bringing water to the desert for all those golf courses.   I remember that Hayworth was very, very fat.  And he had the personality of a lamppost.  Of course these attributes made him a natural for Congress.

And now, having lost his bid for re-election, he's like the rest of us.  What will he do, with no bully pulpit to espouse his anti-Semitic and anti-Mexican diatribes?  How will he launder dirty Abramoff money into the pockets of his wife?  Will Hannity and the other wingnuts really want a loser on their shows now?

He doesn't even have the class to bow out.  Step aside, fat man.  Your time has come.

AP calls it for Webb.

Isn't this the time for Chris Matthews, Tim Russert or some other talking head to get up and say something to the effect that if George Allen was a real patriot and son of Virginia he would drop all hints of a recount challenge and graciously concede defeat?

The majors call it for the boy with the buzz cut.  We're in.  Lieberman isn't going to SecDef, so we are set in the Senate.

This presser is amazing.  Retreat on all political fronts.  Hopefully it also means we can advance in the military sphere. 

Bye Bye Rummy.  The resignation this fast says good odds that Lieberman will accept the position of SecDef, denying Democrats the Senate as Jodi Rell, CT's Republican governor would get to appoint a replacement.

 

Red State reader posts front page diary about the Webb-Allen race stating "Let's Not Re-Do Florida."  I agree boys, but I think that its not up to you.  Good luck on that.  I'd expect Karl thinks differently.  Remember, he's entitled to his own math. 

Don't worry folks--Webb's got this one.

Remember 2005?  The Virginia Attorney General's race went down to the wire, with the Republican R.F. McDonnell getting approximately 280 more votes than the Democrat R.C. Deeds.  A statewide recount of 1.9 million ballots gave McDonnell 30 more votes.  Right now, Webb leads by 7050 votes.  Allen ain't going to pull it out.  Plus we are going to get a nice month of hearing about all of the dirty tricks that Allen pulled at the last minute, thanks to the recount hoopla.

As I said on October 14th, our day came.

While browsing TPM this morning I noticed this post of a comment by Grover Norquist in the LA Times advocating that the White House do all it can not to seek compromise on the issues of the day with the Democrats as if governing is about some Leninist drive to exploit inherent contradictions or something.  When will these people grow up?  Not everything in politics is ideology.  Not everything in politics is a zero-sum game!    Running the country is not some playground where you just pick up your toys and go home if you're not happy with your playmates. 

I think this election has shown the GOP that pursuing a "50+1" political strategy and purposely cutting Democrats out of the national debate while politically successful in the short run has given us a disasterous set of policies that do everything but address the needs of the nation and are often contrary to the wishes of the public. 

My big hope after the last six years of "slash and burn" is that we get back to the consensus that a functioning democracy requires debate and compromise.  Does that mean that I might not always like what they come up with in DC?  Sure, but in general I believe that the best ideas and practices will emerge from the essential interaction of different viewpoints and in the end the democratic process should be about finding what works best for the entire country, not just Grover Norquist.

Charles Pierce on Bob Corker:

"....a guy so nondescript he has no shadow."

I've been saying something similar for a number of months now.  Looks like we've got another uninspiring East TN Republican set to collect a paycheck and warm a seat in the Senate chamber and little else.  So it goes....

At the last minute.  Damn.  My ticker can't take this shit.

Looks like a big night for the good guys.  Virginia is quite tight.

Don't believe them.  Good or bad, we just gotta wait.

omg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Like Britney just filed for D-I-V-O-R-I-C-E!!  is anything else happening today?

Massive turnout reported in VA as well.  Sounds sort of wave-like to me. 

Local papers reporting massive turnout in CT.  That's very interesting.

Next week on Fox, Steve Harrigan and the three men in black bring you the second part of our series on terrorist interrogation: What does pulling out a terrorist suspect's fingernails look like and how effective an interrogation technique is it? 

Christ. 

And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman,
and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks,
Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:
For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?
Revelation 6:15-17

Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, all bail utterly on the war:

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with President Bush.

Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing: "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself—what he defines as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"—is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell."

Their day has come.

Sorry its been a busy day, but Christ allmighty! who are these morons who thought it best to post nuclear bomb plans to a government website because they didn't trust the intelligence community to provide them with more inflammatory evidence on WMD's in Iraq?  Jesus Christ, evidently undermining nuclear non-proliferation treaties and agreements were not enough so they decided to post bomb schematics on the web!

Normally I'd say Congress should look into it but wouldn't you know it was chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees with the backing of the President who pushed this plan into being; something about using the "magic" of the blogosphere to prove the proverbial moot point.  What kinda expert analysis of nuclear engineering schematics in Arabic are they expecting from the likes of Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg, Glenn Reynold or John Hindraker?  Seriously? 

As usual the professionals in the intelligence community were stepped on in a misguided effort to once again playdefense for an indefensible  political position which makes me ask the question: "Do you feel any safer?"  I know I don't.  Its clear these people don't have my or your safety in mind whatsoever, and the continued corruption of national security procedures for political gain is breathtaking in its stupidity.  This nation deserves so much better. 

(Updated 11/4/06 RM)

Haggard, 50, initially denied the allegations, telling 9News Wednesday night that "I've never had a gay relationship with anybody, and I'm steady with my wife. I'm faithful to my wife."

But KKTV in Colorado Springs reported that New Life Associate Senior Pastor Ross Parsley told a meeting of church elders Thursday night that Haggard had met with the church's overseers earlier in the day and "had admitted to some indiscretions."

Or how 'bout Drudge last night--he hypes a stunning new story on Iraq's A-bomb work pre-war.

Its the bomb all right--Republicans had demanded a slew of intelligence documents recovered from Saddam's archives to be put on a website to assist them in re-election.  Turns out they described the following:

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.

Suckered.  There's your November Surprise.  Calling Osama . . .