The thing is it would be easy for a real Dem — like Rep. Sestak, the retired admiral — to take the seat. Specter is a little too Lieberman-ish for me. But, as you say, we’ll take him!

Now if only Norm Sore Loserman  would just bow to the inevitable in Minn.

Deburca - This nutcase has been spouting off for years but this is just the first time she’s made it into the big leagues with Bachman and the rest.

Ironically, she is the congressional rep of my liberal, feminist mother, who was here in California when my partner and I married on our 29th anniversary last October. Rep. Foxx has already heard from at least one constituent.

Even more ironically, my spouse and I are on our way tomorrow to Winston-Salem to celebrate my mother’s 75th birthday. Back next week — unless the swine flu gets us.

So we were bombed on 9/11 because Bush was weak and inexperienced? 

I disagree with that. I think we were bombed because al Qaeda wanted to undermine our country by terrorizing some of us to the point that we’d betray our own values — like torturing suspects and ripping up our civil rights in the name of "security."

By that measure, bin Laden won. It ought to be easy to find him since he’s probably where all winners go: Disneyland.

Finally, you’re just flat wrong, as usual, about the respect people have for Obama. A poll out today says that a whopping 81 percent of Americans respect our president. That’s everyone but the shrinking 21 percent who aren’t ashamed to call themselves "Republicans," as well as the Aryan Brotherhood types and Klan members who hate the president because he is black.

I lived through the LA riots — when the city burned for three days but there was no 911 to call, no police, no EMS, and we all slept with furniture pushed against our front doors. I also lived through the Landers and Northridge quakes and the hundreds and hundreds of aftershocks. My family and our pets were injured. Walls on my house fell down, windows broke.  What I learned from all this is that fear is useless. It gets in the way of survival.

Bush turned the American right into fear addicts.The whining and whimpering is the very definition of "un-American."

Stop wallowing in fear. Be ready for the worst. Face what comes at you. Be strong. 

Be an effing American. This cowardice is sickening.

Yeah, but when you blame Obama for everything that goes wrong on the planet, it ceases to have meaning when you blame him for anything.

As a former New Yorker who lived three blocks from the World Trade Center, but before the attacks, I can tell you that New Yorkers have a really hard time telling the difference between a local and a national story. Why? Because the national reporters live in New York, and when anything happens to them, they think it’s a national story.

This is a local New York story. If it had happened in El Paso or Des Moines, you wouldn’t even be reading about it.

We had a swarm of earthquakes in the deserts that could have injured thousands of people. They didn’t, thank God. But you didn’t hear about it outside California. Why? Because it’s a local story.

I’d advise New Yorkers  to learn what Calfornians have known for generations: Bad things happen. Sometimes REALLY bad things happen. You can’t live in fear. 

There’s a greater likelihood that you will be hit by a bus tomorrow than that a New Yorker will be killed by a terrorist or a Californian will be killed by an earthquake.

When did Americans — when did New Yorkers — become such wimps!?

Have courage. Accept and understand the truth. The attacks by right wing religious radicals — both Islamicists and Christian nationalists like Sgt. Timothy McVeigh — are not over. 

The Muslim fanatics didn’t attack us because they "hate our freedom." Think about it. What nonsense!

They attacked us and will attack again because of our policies: our alliances with Middle East despots like the Saudi royal family and Mubarak and because of our special relationship with Israel, among other grievances.

The goal of the right wing Muslim fanatics and the right wing American fanatics is the same: replacing democracies with theocratic states where laws are based on the Koran and the Bible, respectively.

Bush did not keep us safe after 9/11 anymore than he kept us safe before the attack when he read the CIA report  in 8/11 with the headline "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike US," crumpled it up and told his briefer, "Okay, you’ve covered your a**."  The only thing Bush can claim credit for in the ridiculously named "war on terror" is being very, very lucky.

That Bush "kept us safe" is just another lie the Bush cabal promulgated to burnish their absymal record and rewrite history.

There were eight years between the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001.

Eight years after 2001 is 2009. Wake up. 

Instead of whining and blaming and acting like children,stand up, get prepared. As I’ve said before, it’s a good thing our grandparents didn’t cower under their beds at the threats from Hiltler and Japan the way some Americans do today in the face of the attacks that are surely coming from religious fanatics from overseas and right here in our midst.

He inherited the Bush recession — worst since WWII — and the enormous Bush deficit.

I’m not one of the growing number of regular Americans who believe Bush, Cheney and the Republicans deliberately crashed the economy after they got fired and booted out, because they knew that the ignorant and uninformed, along with the craven party hacks, would blame Pres. Obama for the disaster they created.

Thanks, Deber, for the generous words and the thoughtful reply.

I think you are right that in order to reverse current trends, the GOP is going to have figure out what to do with the evangelicals. Problem is, they represent a big percentage of the base (30 percent? 40?)  and will be hard to replace with an even larger group.

The other problem is that so many evangelicals have, gently put, un-Christian feelings toward minorities. Outreach to gays and blacks would not be a good mix. The best bet is Latinos. Culturally, many of them have social values that jive with the GOP’s (purported) family values, but the anti-immigrant wing of the GOP base has scared and/or p**sed them off so bad that I wonder if that fence can ever be mended. I’d put the chances of Latinos moving to the GOP in California anytime soon at about 0.0000005 in the next 40 years. The anti-Latino imagery and tone in the ads for Prop 187 destroyed the California GOP.

As noted, I’m a history geek. What I see here is the makings of a new party — but seriously this time, like when the Whigs ran out of steam and credibility in the 1850s. Several new parties were formed, but as we know only one survived, the liberal Republican Party. 

The momentum is in the middle today, so it seems more likely that a new moderate party would come together. The trick is that it needs to start in Congress instead of at the presidential level. The movements that fail tend to be the ones that are focused on a single personality, a la Perot.

I’m just not sure the Republican brand can be fixed. What do you think? Repair/rebuild or clean slate?

What utter nonsense, and so typical. We criticize the president all the time.

I’m furious that he is against prosecuting Bush, Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Tenet, John Yoo and Judge Jay Bybee, just for starters. It is against our values to allow these traitors to walk free while underlings sit in prison for following the orders of these degenerates.

I am absolutely opposed to bailing out the banks instead of forcing them into receivership, which ignorant and uninformed people call "nationalization." Obama, Geithner and Bernake are making the same mistake the Japanese made in the 1990s — the same mistake that caused their crisis to go on for 10 years.

I am angry that he’s allowing retired auto workers to lose their health care and pensions while the auto CEOs keep their millions in golden parachutes.

There’s more but I’m in a hurry.

This  statement by you:

I have NO respect for ANYONE that can not criticize this man on what he has done. It has crossed the line from simple politics and party differences.

Is more classic mirroring and projecting. You and your side sat idly by while Bush systematically destroyed this great country. He divided the country and took us into an unnecessary war where hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed and that cost us a $1 trillion or so that we could certainly have put to better uses, his henchmen betrayed a secret CIA program tracking WMD at a time when we had just been attacked, he stood idly by while New Orleans was destroyed by flooding and he shredded the Constitution by spying on America and with "signing statements" that said out right he was going to ignore laws he didn’t like that were passed by the people’s representatives and signed by who? Him!

The blind hypocrisy of the right is just astounding. 

Thanks, Deber, for wanting to get real, and I’m not being ironic or sarcastic. I’m a geek for political history and strategy so here’s the way I see it.

The mistake you are making is that you are applying Republican psychodynamics to Democrats. Republicans are hierarchical, bow to their leaders and jostle and squabble with each other to move up the line of pecking order.

Democratic infighting is a messy, illogical free for all — like amoebas battling it out. Whoever forms the coalition with the most votes, most influence, most star appeal or wins the last argument — or whatever factors are in the atmosphere that day — wins.

Will Rogers had it exactly right: "I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat."

Bill Clinton summed it up perfectly: "Republicans fall in line. Democrats fall in love."

I understand why you mistakenly believe Obama could oust Speaker Pelosi. You’re probably remembering how Karl Rove had Sen. Majority Leader Trent Lott replaced after Lott opined at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday that the country would be better if segregation hadn’t ended. But it wasn’t the remark itself — Rove wouldn’t object to a racist remark because racism is useful because it energizes the party’s base — it was because Trent Lott did not obey orders from the White House. Karl preferred Bill Frist, who he knew he could control. As leader, Frist was a lapdog to the Bush White House.

The Bush White House role in forcing Hastert out is more oblique. The rumor from inside the GOP congressional leadership staff was that Hastert, the former wrestling coach, let the Foley scandal get out of hand because he was, well, sympathetic with Foley’s plight. I have no idea and really could not care less if those rumors were true or just political spin coming from staffers for House Republican leaders hoping to replace Hastert.

But you will not find a similar instance in Democratic Party history where the Dem White House successfully exerted control over who served in the Dem congressional leadership. I don’t say that because we’re "better" than Gops. It’s a difference in the way we think — the way we work on an organizational level. If a Dem White House tried to meddle in Dem Congressional leadership appointments, all hell would break out, and the president — no matter how popular he was — would lose that battle.

Remember "triangulation?" That was Clinton pitting the Dem leadership in Congress against the GOP. Sometimes he would side with the GOP (example: welfare reform) against his own party. But Clinton had zero influence on who served in the Congressional Dem leadership. He was lucky that the Dems knew the GOP investigations into the Clintons were nothing but craven political games — an egregious abuse of power by Gingrich, Dan Burton, Henry Hyde and the rest — because if there was a sense among the Dems that Clinton had actually done something wrong, they would have voted guilty on the impeachment charges in a heartbeat.

Going back into the history of the Dems, you may or may not recall that even when Carter’s approval was in the 60s, he had nothing but problems for Congress, including particularly the new speaker, Tip O’Neill. A senator, Ted Kennedy, ran against Carter in the 1980 campaign, and thus weakened him and paved the way for the horrendous debacle of the Reagan/Bush, Bush/Quayle and Bush/Cheney years. Most people have forgotten that Carter led Reagan in the polls well into October in that cycle, and it’s arguably likely he could have won had he not been wounded by Kennedy. If Carter had won, we’d have been energy independent of Mideast oil by 2000 and so wouldn’t have invaded Iraq in 1992 or 2003, just for starters.

Going back even farther — remember how the GOP was, as Gingrich put it, "in the wilderness for 40 years" before 1994? (Because around 1954, the public sent the GOP into the wilderness in disgust with Republican Sen. McCarthy’s communist witch hunts.) Well, during the 40 years of (mostly) Democratic one-party rule in Congress, during the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush, the Congressional Dems fought the presidents tooth and nail, no matter what party they were in.

So back to today — you’re wrong, of course, that "Pelosi wasn’t elected Speaker of the House." Please, please, please tell me you know that’s not true. Pelosi was elected by the House, with all the Dems voting for her and all the Gops voting for Boehner. (And her home district is basically the city limits of San Francisco, so she is safe for a 13th term in 2010.)

Congressional approval ratings are always low. Since 1990, Congress has only been above 50 percent one time. But since the inauguration, congressional approval has risen 20 points, to 39. Approval of Democrats in Congress is around 45 pecent, while approval of Republicans is 30 percent. (As I’ve noted, the message of "No, no, no. Hate, hate, hate" simply is not working.)

 As long as Pelosi holds her power base among the Dems, starting with Steny Hoyer and on down, there is nothing — NOTHING — Obama can do to get rid of her. She will oppose him on key issues, as will powerful Dems in the Senate like Feinstein. But there is nothing he can do about changing the Dem congressional leadership.

Your side likes to say Pres. Carter was "weak" and the perceived wisdom was that he got that reputation because of foreign affairs. That’s not really the whole story. Carter had bad relations with the Dems who controlled Congress and was opposed and steamrolled by Speaker Tip O’Neill and Sen. Majority Leader Robert Byrd.

That’s the most likely way Obama could fail — if Pelosi and Reid turn on him. That’s where your side should pin its hopes. The difference is, Carter never served in Congress and had no ties. Obama recognized that. Not only did he, his vice president and secretary of state serve as senators, he also brought in Rahm Emmanuel from the House to be his chief of staff, a.k.a. the assistant president.

One reason you and I are having this conversation is because over the 15 years the Republicans have been in power, we have been studying your side very, very carefully, while at the same time, your leaders have used their propaganda apparatus, Fox and hate radio, to paint us as one-dimensional cartoon characters. We hear your side describe us as the Fox News cariacatures every day, and it sends the signal loud and clear: it’s not just teabagging that the right is clueless about.

This also illustrates that you are leaderless. Karl Rove based his political skullduggery, in part, on ancient techniques described in Sun Tzu’s "The Art of War." One of those principles is this:

Know your enemy.

If you ever figure out who you’re really up against, the tide against you will change. If and when you ever take the time to really understand who you’re up against, you’ll see why the bottom line answer to your question about Obama and Pelosi should have been clear from the start: History proves that if Obama gets into political fight with Pelosi, as long as Pelosi holds her base in the House, he can never win.

He knows this, and so does she.

Yes, Lemon. The Senate Armed Services Committee has released the first report. The report was passed unanimously by members of both parties, including John McCain. The chairman is Carl Levin (D-Mich), so the report is being referred to as the Levin Report. Here’s a link to a PDF of the complete report, and I’m including a great source for analysis below.

The results of the report were stunning.This is where we learned that Cheney and Rumsfeld tried to get 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Muhammed to falsely confess that Saddam was behind 9/11 by having him waterboarded 183 times over a month, or about 12 to 18 times a day. Muhammed did not budge. 

For analysis, start with Jane Mayer at the New Yorker. She is the author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. She blogs at the New Yorker, and has been covering the Levin Report in her blog. Here’s the link.