so yes, indeed. if the ONLY thing we get from him is voting (d) for committee chairs, that's a huge win for us.

I'm sending him money as soon as he announces!!!!!

The Dems will most likely keep the majority.

it certainly wasn't considered in the bag a couple months ago, and it would only take some bad economic news or a key scandal to make losing the senate a very viable outcome.

politicians who in many ways contributed to the mess we are in today, need to retire. We need new candidates, real progressive Democrats who will work for the people. These old jaded politicians are not likely to go against their corporate bosses. They are trained to do what Corporate America wants. They have been part of the problem.

In a country this big with so many great, intelligent people in it, I don't get why we have to keep recycling the same old people. No wonder nothing changes for the better.

However, he has a decent chance of keeping that seat away from the GOP, and electing even a DINO like him means the Senate stays in Dem hands, with the ability to appoint committees, etc. NE is a very conservative state and he's probably as good as we can get there.

who could actually win?

You know who I am talking about!

you're planning to pay it back?

Over who gets the most Loot. It's the .001% stupid...not you

rethought it. He clearly was wrong as to those projections. Not to mention, this year, the most important position might be who will he vote for majority leader. There is NO progressive who is an alternative. If Bob Kerrey can win the seat - and that will be tough - it might be our best possibility.

One thing to remember is that even Ben Nelson voted with us more than even the most liberal Republican - and NE Republicans are not liberal.

Mr. Clarke's most startling statement was that there have been more terrorist attacks against the United States in the 30 months since 9/11 than in the 30 months prior to the attack. You could almost hear a clap of thunder when he went on to say that this happened because we substantially reduced our efforts in Afghanistan and went to war in Iraq, causing a loss of momentum in the war against al Qaeda.

That's his argument. I think he's wrong, but I don't think he is being duplicitous. He is wrong because most if not all of the terrorism since 9/11 has occurred because al Qaeda and other radical Islamists have an even dimmer view of a free and independent Iraq than they do a free and independent United States. A democracy in Iraq that embraces modernism, pluralism, tolerance and the plebiscite is a greater sacrilege than anything we are doing here at home.

Mr. Clarke's views on Iraq notwithstanding, after 9/11 we could not afford either to run the risk that Saddam Hussein would be deterred by our military efforts to contain him or that these military deployments would become attractive targets for further acts of terrorism. I supported President Bush's efforts to persuade the United Nations Security Council to change a 10-year-old resolution that authorized force to contain Saddam Hussein to one that authorized force to replace his dictatorship. And I believe the president did the right thing to press ahead even without the Security Council's support. Remember, the June 25, 1996, attack on Khobar Towers that left 19 American airmen dead happened because of our containment efforts. Sailors had also died enforcing the Security Council's embargo and our pilots were risking their lives every day flying missions over northern and southern Iraq to protect Iraqi Kurds and Shiites.
http://socialize.morningstar.com/NewSocialize/forums/109343/PrintThread.aspx

and support him over the Republican,
so that our numbers to maintain a majority in the senate
have a better chance, or we can go for pure,
and in deciding to make a case against him,
as opposed to his opponent, we can help the Republicans regain the Senate,
so they can exact their extremism on all of us to a point of no return--
It is our choice....but I can say that at the end of the day, supporting this
Democrat ain't about looking for a progressive Mr. Kerrey....
it will be much more about us and our future.

In the forest are the trees.....not the other way around.

smart and electing people who actually get things right. Kerrey got so much so wrong, in any other job he would not even be considered for re-employment.

liked him, but props for the comment, "Santorum, that's Latin for asshole."

Still, this highlights a problem: Who the hell is responsible for cultivating candidates?

People complain, and no one steps up, and then when someone does, people complain some more.

Someone has to run. It's not like these seats are up for grabs by surprise.

On edit, it's "Kerrey."

Kerrey would at least caucus with the Dems possibly giving them a majority in the Senate. Is there another Dem that could actually win in Nebraska?

individual influence and with fairly limited numbers a few DINOS can cooperate to do great damage in general terms but with in the caucus giving corporate money and military/surveillance industrial complex incredibly powerful beachheads.

The money, the fear of losing the seat, the trappings of "bipartisanship", and the corporate media taking the clowns and crooks seriously results in plum commitee assignments, leadership positions, influence on prospective candidates, their fingerprints all over appointments of all sorts, and the money they can throw into the elections of other members gives them a lift in individual to individual clout.

Pretending there isn't dangerous downside is dishonest and simplistic.

Sure they will vote with "us" more often than a TeaPubliKlan (we'll just put fluff aside) but in return what we vote for must be made more in line with the TeaPubliKlan worldview, already we are forced even with a generational majority, to reach into the Republican recycling bin for even our most controversial and "crypto-fascist, terrorist, socialist, pinko-commie, anti-American, far left extremist" legislation.

There is no such thing as winning when the cost of victory is becoming what you oppose. As a tactical exception you can live with the downside but as a guiding strategy, you crash and burn because you sold your soul. You can't even hold the line, much less advance an agenda when these sorts get too much hand on the wheel.

Big picture, and especially long term this isn't a beneficial strategy. The majority of people in this country are losing ground and have been for the entire course of this "Third Way" happy horseshit and the excuse makers and defenders of this whole stripe that aren't of them are seemingly incapable of understanding the power, dominance, and influence of money in our particular societal setup. The tolerance for depravity, abuse, and even demonstrated bullshit is unacceptably and I would say insanely high in economic matters that gets no tolerance even for ignorance on more "social" oriented policy when it is almost impossible to argue that money dominates our country.

The GOP without the southern strategy is not within my tolerance zone but it isn't about me, I suspect it is also deeply conflicting with the prosperity, opportunity, and advancement of our people and the best of western civilization.

Let's say we replace each and every TeaPubliKlan with a corporate and/or neocon DINO, we might actually be no better or even worse off than we are now in most critical areas because the Yin and Yang factor would be gone and nothing would be there to mitigate or balance their influence.

We wouldn't miss a solitary war or opportunity to sell off the commons. Deregulation would march on and on. Our civil liberties would be no less and arguably more under assault since a handful of the TeaPubliKlans oppose such measures too as a result of their anti-government fetish, most likely.
The environment would have no more champions other than knife in the back, smile to the face rhetoric.
They are hardly an iota more friendly to public education than the Reich Wing.

They are free traders and they are zealots for cutting the saftey nets.

All they represent the "center" of is Republican ideology, striding begtween the aggregate of the pre-Reagan Republicans and the neo-Birchers of today, and moving stridently toward the "center" between Bush and the neo-Birchers with a rest stop coming up shortly at the intersection of Ronnie Rayguns and and Grover Norquist en route.
The more we accept into the tent, the fouler the place becomes and the more the left is shoved out.

We "small people" cannot win in this dynamic. It is acceptable as a limited circumstantial holding action with liberals holding down the most powerful chairs and dominating leadership but it is nearly a pisspoor political ideology as the TeaPubliKlan's and over time works to actually advance their nonsense and make it the national concensus.