Yeah, lie down and get raped. That's always a satisfying strategy.

The preferred currency of drug and arms merchants. Reagan brought us Iran-Contra - drugs for arms - paid for by wads of $100 bills. How can we forget?

Bush believes the chamber will actually mirror his thinking on issues

Bush is wandering in a snowy fantasy like Frosty the Snowman in a snowball paperweight.

partisan in practice but bipartisan in rhetoric, image and brand. A mature and succesful majority undertands this. Maintain a veneer of moderation and bipartisanship but play it tough in implementation.

I'm getting a bit sick of Emmanuel and Schumer all over the tube...where's Dean?  The 50 state strategy won.

Its a big, big win, maybe not for us, but a big, big win nevertheless.

We still have a lot of work to do.  

thanks for everything.

It is actually meaningful on how non liberals like Webb won. He won by appealing to the netroots demographic in addition to the mainstream. If he pandered like your typical old democrat, guess what, he would have lost the netroot type voter and not gained a single republican voter and lost this election for sure.
What does this say? We know that we need the establishment to win. But the establishment should know they need the netroots(though not  to the same extent) to win the close races. If anyone is being mature and non reactionary about it, it's the netroots. There have been attempts by the netroots to solicit help from mainstream politicians while the mainstream politicians do not return the favor.

Except for lieberman and Ford, almost every Democrat won by railing against the Iraq war and not distancing themselves from netroots even if they did not necessarily stay entwined with them to the extent Lamont was. In short, those were pretty much Lamont talking points. Was Murtha less vociferous on this war? I saw McCaskill who was burnishing her moderate credentials by saying she was pro-death penalty still manage to run a campaign without alienating the netroots and not backing down on attacking the war. What about Tester. Except for Sherrod, how many big achievements did Rahm have?  Was Rahm responsible for the 50 state strategy? Democrats won in areas the Rahm types wrote off.

Webb, McCaskill, Tester won races that do not owe anything to Rahm's expertise.

"Working with the president" is a loser strategy.  Dems in Congress need to live up to their promises and stand up to the president.  He's going to try to screw us, we need to screw him.  

Start passing legislation that conservatives hate.  Make them vote against it and make the president veto it.  Get them on record for 2008.  

Now is the time for party solidarity.

Nancy Pelosi should say 'bipartisanship can begin today. The Republicans just have to learn what it involves, because they didn't all the time they were in control.'

Or: 'I'm ready to begin a new era of co-operation in the House, once the Republicans learn what co-operation means.'

When you strike at the king, you'd better kill him. Norquist and co. aren't shutting up shop unless they're hauled off in cuffs. So, I'd be happy for a brief, brutal period of Republican Rules, just to rub the noses of the loser GOP in the shit they piled up on Capitol Hill.

Let's get all the races won first.  In my district (CT-02) the Republican has not conceded and we're going to have a recount.  I hope that the the netroots and the national dems will suport us local Dems through this. Will the Republicans send thugs to Connecticut like they did to Florida? Let's all put some resources into cementing our "victory" as a first priority.

Matt, Polosi got her part to vote as a core at the rate of 89% unity. "Bluedogs" and all.

Three dozen blue dogs have voted against her on various issues

It is much easier to wander from a minority party than a majority one.  The majority leader has a lot more sticks, and a lot more carrots, than minority leader.  Don't expect to see a lot of defections.

But we still need to try and take the moral high ground. We can't just screw them because they screwed us ad infinitum. We are better than that. We are better than them.

PLEASE TAKE NOTICE, that the Democratic base has absolutely no interest whatsoever in bickering between Emanuel, Hoyer, Dean, the blogosphere, etc.  Fan these flames and throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Everyone should just friggin chill.

Hell no.  The only way you can beat this kind of talk is to counter and demand extra hard-like.  Why don't we demand to put Kennedy on either of those bills instead?  God knows he's a much more iconic figure universally than Saint Ronny could ever aspire to be.  Not to mention he has more crap named after him already.

Come to think on't, why isn't Kennedy on any of our currency?  That ain't him on the nickel, is it?  Gawd, all them dudes look the same stamped in metal, though.

This is the part where a complete lack of experience and following the lead of Rove and Norquist's "Slash and Burn  - Take no prisoners" philosophy makes life difficult for W.

The mid-terms are behind us and I feel it is only fit and proper to reach out  to the Members across the aisle. In the spirit of bi-partisanship and comity I would like to tender the following to our Republican brethren:

Fuck you for your devotion to Gastrodarwinism, the survival of the fattest;

Fuck you for willfully confusing politics and process;

Fuck you for shirking your oversight responsibilities for 12 years straight;

Fuck you for squandering the international goodwill of September 12, 2001;

Fuck you for watching us become mired in an intractable mess in Iraq;

Fuck you for dividing the country, perhaps irrevocably;

Fuck you and your trillions in debt that we and our children and their children will have to pay down;

Fuck you for setting off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East;

Fuck you for intertwining religion and politics to the detriment of both;

Fuck you for excluding the Democratic Party (hey assholes, got that? it's DEMOCRATIC Party not Democrat party) from the drafting of legislation;

Fuck you for giving tax breaks to the rich while ignoring the working people, the poor, the sick, the uninsured, the veterans and the students of this country;

Fuck you for trying to undo the best and most enlightened social policies of the past 80 years;

In short, fuck you for being the small-minded, selfish, prejudiced, impious, un-Christian, nasty bastards that you are.

The adults are home and you've trashed the place. You're grounded.

Welcome to the House Committee on Sex and Music - when we want your fucking opinion on anything, we'll just whistle.

Shea-Porter, McNerney, Duckworth.  Where Rahm prevailed, the Dems lost.  Where Rahm lost, the Dems prevailed.

Sure, there were other races.  But these were the ones that really epitomized the choices.  These are the ones we should be talking about, over and over and over again.

And guess what?  It's not just Rahm.  The netroots also failed to support Cegalis.  While she had her netroot advocates, she didn't have the wholehearted support she deserved.  There's a lesson here for us as well.

Tester is declaring Victory on CNN right now.  So now BOTH candidates have declared victory... that will be huge for the recounts.

Just let Henry Waxman loose on the crooks at Halliburton and Bechtel, Barney Frank loose on banks and credit card companies, and John Dingel and John Conyers loose on every other giant corporation.

The country will be better off for it and the R's will never win another election in my lifetime.

I haven't been watching, so how often have the netroots been mentioned by the talking heads today?

Put reagan on a new three dollar bill as in queer as a three dollar bill.

Norquist's number one goal should be to stay out of prison.

Yep their idea of compromise is for the Democrats to shut up and go along. Man the next two years are going to be good.

http://www.slate.com/id/2153167/nav/tap1 /

He talks about how Rahm refused to apply ideological litmus tests as if the others did. Is that what the netroots did with McCaskill and Webb? Last i checked, Netroots backed Tester and Rahm didn't initially. Netroots backed Webb. Netroots backed Lamont(which he terms as a foolish summer fling - where is Donnie when you need him to condemn insulting rhetoric from the establishment types), but he ignores Harold Ford lost. Oh when his guy loses, then it's because he did better than expected anyway, but when one of our guys loses, moral victories do not matter.

Norquist said the Republicans' primary goal for the next two years should be making the case for GOP control -- not bipartisanship.

This sin't 1994 again, buddy... people are sick of the partisan crap coming from your side of the aisle.  We represent America now.. all of america...  we represent the middle.  You're not going to win it back by being all right-wing and crazy like you did before.

So, go ahead... hemmorage more seats...  have fun!

Thanks,

Mike