Dear Democrats,  You won!  Big time!  Joe Lieberman did not get you there and he did not stand impartially and idly by.  At this point, you are embarassing yourselves trying to woo his return to your fold.  You had to call him to the meeting???   He should be the one begging you to return to the Democratic fold given his present position.  Every other representative in New England is democratic.  He barely won against the democratic candidate before the Wall Street collapse.  Next time, he will not win.  If he does, the Democrats will have a lot more to worry about then Joe Lieberman.   Jumping Joe jumped to the other side without having the gumption to admit it.  But if it looks like a duck, walks with the ducks, and sounds like a duck, well....      

Forget Joe Lieberman.  He has forgotten you.  Get someone leading his committees that is lower maintenance then that prima donna.  With a changing of the guards in Congress, time would be better spent training an impressionable new guy to lead Lieberman's committees, then persuading a self-righteous old guy to advance your agenda.  Once he is unencumbered, Lieberman will be just another Senator and just one more vote.  He will be, well, independent.  So if he wants to continue the illusion he is independent, give him wha the wants.  Not having a chairmanship ought to help him convince himself of he really is independetn.  It would be more honest of him, however, to declare himself the Republican he has been since his re-election.   

Who's going to be right in the Republican Party after the dust settles?  It will not be the self-righteous.  That train has left the station with Palin and Huckabee on board.  Maybe the fairwell of Falwell was the canary in the coal mine.  Clearly the Christian faction(*) of the Republican Party has no head.  Romney, even though Mormans proclaim their Christianity cannot be Christian enough.  So can Palin take the lead?  Maybe of the Christian faction, but not the party.  Of course, she would probably not oppose starting her own party.  A party that just knows what is right, dog gone it.

The debate will rage on the Right for months in a terrific power struggle.  The snake is turning in on itself.  But how could it possibly have held together?  The Christian faction refuses compromise and has developed a great deal of momentum with their unfazed certainty despite facts to the contrary. 

Christians are not politicians and playing with them has gotten them burned.  Bush took power and nothing was done for the Christian agenda. The Supreme Court said the present law allows abortion.  The signal to the Right was change the law, but they did nothing even with everything in their favor: the House; Senate; and Executive branch.  They being the politicians, not necessarily devout Christians, in the fanatical sense of the term.  The smart Christians knew they were tricked and stayed home this time around, but the Zom-Bushes showed up for Palin this election.  In the end, it was all the Republicans had.

How will the Republicans fair next time around will depend on who is left standing.  Can the Party succeed with the narrow agenda of the Christian faction, or will the Christians indeed become the base alientating the voices of reason who either supported Obama or voted not at all.

There is an identity crisis on the right at this time.  Can they sell out completely to the Christians and be successful?  Apparently not.  They will have to find a way to live with each other, or they will break apart.  So much for their party's pandering.  Palin did not deliver the women vote, but she brought the Far Right.  In the end, was this really right for the Republican Party?  Is it really right for the country?  The votes are just about all counted.   Apparently not. 

* The choice of the word "faction" instead of "base" is this author's suggestion that the Christian element is not the "soul" of the Republican Party.  By the efforts of the Christians to "save the soul" of the party, they have diminished the party's power.  The Christians fail to understand the kingdom they seek is not of this world and the world will never accept it.  However, it does not prevent people from doing what is right for a country where all men are created equal, a country of the people, by the people, and for the people.  This is not a country for Christians alone, nor is the Republican Party.  If the Christians had been "the base" there would not have been so many defections when Palin was named.  The Christians are a "faction" and to call them the "base" is to give them more credit they deserve.  In the end, Dubya told us who his base was, the "haves and the have mores", but after the near collapse of Wall Street, th at base had ... uhhhh ... not so much.

On the CCN Politcal Ticker it was written of Sarah Palin's latest speech, "And a little advise for Tina [Fey]," Palin said. "We want her to make sure that she's holding on to that Sarah outfit, because she's going to need it in the next four years."

Sarah Palin is the black widow of politics like nothing ever before witnessed.  First, the mayor of Wasilla takes Sarah under his wing.  In return, she foists him out of office.  Then she is encouraged by Governor Murkowski to get into state politics in Alaska,  He ends up losing his seat to his protege, Sarah.  And now John McCain, her latest victim, will be left in the dust as she strides to her own candidacy.  Sarah will have him up on a pike for all to see. John McCain will be the scape goat of their failed campaign.

There is no arguing with the unblinking, Zom-Bush, Sarah.  Facts mean nothing to her fantasy world.  Regardless of the fact that the majority of people polled recently do not find her capable of taking office in Washington DC, she will only see the turn around she brought to the campaign on arrival, when the crowds were all stunned to see a woman from Alaska draw blood at her first speech, slicing and dicing at her blindsided opponents.  This treatment is what she gives to anyone in her way, and come Wednesday, that anyone will be John McCain.  While these instances may seem like ambushes, having tread on her third victim, how can she surprise anyone at this point with her ruthless tactics.  She might not have a voting record to prov eit, but she's 100% like Bush, except with lipstick.