I have my occasional disagreements with Kos, but something he said sparked an interesting idea.  In thisdiary, he sayeth:

Remember, we don't have the millions to compete with AT&T's lobbyists, and our best-crafted arguments can be easily ignored. All the while, Steny Hoyer buys loyalty by tirelessly campaigning and raising money for his fellow Democrats. So how can we overcome those obstacles?

Along with funding primary challengers, why doesn't the netroots start a lobbying arm of its own?  If Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama can pull in fifty million dollars a month, surely we can come up with enough money to match anything that AT&T, Verizon, Altria, or Big Pharma can furnish.

Imagine how we could emasculate Hoyer and the rest of his cabal if we could put more people on the ground in DC than exists in all of K street.

Reading this article, I began to wonder if maybe she isn't being used to put the religious right in its place.  Ditto Ken Blackwell in Ohio.  Ditto again Michael Steele in MD.

If candidates strongly and publicly backed by Dobson et al go down in flames, I wonder if the GOP is hoping they'll burn up a lot of their credibility and stop sidetracking the party?

Craig Crawford is right.  George Bush can't run again, so let's stop talking about him and go after Republicans in general.  Presumably, we all know why the GOP is bad and why Democrats are good (or progressives are good, at any rate).  If that's true, why don't we stop trying to redo the 2000 and 2004 elections and set ourselves to winning the 2006 and 2008 elections?

I had a sickening thought... what if the Bushes and the GOP are running up huge deficits to force a federal government yard sale?  What if they come to us in ten years and say that the only way to bring the budget back into balance and begin to retire the $10 trillion national debt is to sell off national parks, federal lands, and other public treasures to private corporations?

We really suck.  If we didn't, we'd take this blogosphere and starting today pound the shit out of every Republican in office.  We would gum up the works so that their deficiencies would be obvious.

We would also attack the shit out of their "moral values" by hammering on their churches and church leaders, the same way we should hammer the shit out of the radical Islamic madrasas.

But worse is the Democrats.  Why on God's green earth do we say stupid things like "wait until the Supreme Court goes 7-3 conservative" or "wait until we're bogged down in Iraq for ten years" and then figure that we'll ride the wave to victory?

The Republicans are really good at making their own luck.  If we want to beat them, we have to be that good too.  And we're not.

We suck.

And man, is Martinez a goober.  Castor looks more assured and has a better command of the issues. Martinez just looks unfortunate on camera - bad toupee/combover, car-door ears, and rushing to get through his bullet points without anything like a coherent narrative.  The only time he managed (so far) to sound like more than a reject from Disney's Hall of Presidents was when he got to start bickering over Sami al Arian.

What a moron.

According to today's St. Petersburg Times, four men described as "Middle Eastern" tried to buy an ambulance, two former police cruisers, and an old truck from St. Petersburg College this summer.  The men have since disappeared.

This sounds like pure Rovian PsyOps - in a swing state, in the home stretch, with his guy losing, fake a terrorist plot to get everyone's mind off of what a loser Bush is.

Link to story

[update] This doesn't pass the smell test, and Kossacks (and Dem surrogates) should be ready immediately to talk to the media if this story actually breaks.

and DeMint is being his usual evasive self.  Russert appears to be going after him pretty hard because he keeps apologizing for the wrong things in his teacher comments (no homosexuals, no single pregnant women, etc.) - instead of apologizing for being a horse's ass, he apologizes for talking about a local school board issue.

He's also gotten hit pretty hard on his 23% sales tax, denying that he would vote for any bill that raises taxes on anyone no matter how many analyses get cited to show that his tax idea would do just that.

Tennenbaum is holding up pretty well.  A little shaky here and there, but with a real command of things and she looks straightforward.  DeMint looks like a guy you wouldn't want to buy a used car from.

we need to exterminate the whole Lee Atwater / Karl Rove / Ralph Reed political apparatus.  What do you think of a website (call it "RoveWatch.net" or something similar) that tracks the political candidates he or his ilk work for.  Once one is found, RoveWatch readers would carpet-bomb the local media with as much early negativity as possible -- LTE's, press releases, and the like -- and strangle their candidacies before they ever get off the ground.

We could turn Rove into the albatross he deserves to be.

How about...

"Iraq is just like everything else you've done, Mr. Bush.  Somebody else always has to clean up your mess."

or

"You're not a bad person, but you are a bad judge of character.  Only a bad judge of character would have listened to the people who didn't know what they were talking about but ignore the people who did know what they were talking about."

or

"Mr. Bush is being disingenuous when he tries to link Iraq to al Qaeda.  If we had kept our eye on the ball and rooted out bin Laden and his leadership when we had them cornered in Tora Bora, we would be much further ahead in the war with radical Islam than we are now.  But I think I understand it - why waste a perfectly good permanent war that you never actually have to win when you can use it to squelch and intimidate anyone who might seriously oppose you?"

Why can't we come up with something juicy to distract the public during the RNC and put Bush on the defensive?  Why aren't we saturating the airwaves with a commercial like this:

"Service in the National Guard is honorable and deserves to be treated with respect.  So why did George W Bush treat it with such disrespect?  When other men and women were fighting and dying all over the world, George W Bush was going AWOL from his flight training to work on a political campaign in Alabama and then go to business school.  He never even showed up for his flight physical, and the only reason he didn't get court-martialed is that his daddy was a Congressman."

Tell me that he wouldn't start losing veterans' support left and right with that one.

I'm curious - what do people here think Bush's real political weaknesses are?  Where is he really vulnerable?