As we saw during debate on the 'nuclear option', there are procedural tactics that can be used to neutralize a filibuster. Despite appearances, it is Reid who has the advantage here.

The first tactical blunder was declaring the intention to force a reading of the whole bill. Fine says Reid, we will simply schedule the proceedings so that this takes place over Thanksgiving. Coburn can miss his dinner if he likes, but it won't delay or stop progress. Most likely the reading of the bill will be called off at the last minute as the GOP realize that pretending to be concerned about the lack of 'sufficient debate' will have even less credibility if the Thanksgiving newscasts have been full of the Democrats hired in speed reader going through the bill at ridiculous speed.

Thanks to Coburn the GOP have a choice, either they make an early tactical retreat, or they hand Reid an early victory.

Next there is the fact that in theory any Senate motion can be debated and thus filibustered. While this appears powerful in theory, it is in practice a one shot deal. The democrats can bring any motion to the floor that they like. If they are going to ride out a GOP filibuster they will make absolutely sure that they only need to do so once.

Rather than pass a mere cloture motion, the Democrats can pass a motion to timetable the remaining stages. So what if it is not in the Senate rules? A motion to change senate rules only allows one filibuster as the GOP proved when they were threatening the nuclear option.

Riding out a filibuster is a serious affair. It could take several weeks and block all other business. Once will be enough.

So if the rebels overplay their hand and push for a filibuster too early in the game they risk a timetable motion that destroys their leverage entirely. Once there is a timetable motion it is a straight 50 vote plus Biden game. Forget the opt-out discussion, forget co-ops, forget all the nonsense that Lieberman's lobbyist wife would like.

It sounds like the name of a 1960s band. But it is rather more sinister. Recent moves by the self-styled 'teabaggers' come straight from the play-book of Leon Trotsky. The policies may be different, but the techniques of organized thuggery are not. And they are a real threat to the survival of the Republican party.

I have seen these tactics before, the organized disruption of public meetings, shouting down the speaker with imaginary 'facts' and chanted slogans. They were the favored technique of the 'Militant Tendency', a Trotskyite faction that attempted to take over the British Labour party in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

A standard Militant modus operandi was 'entryism', they would identify a constituency party where the leadership was clearly moribund and organize a group of people to sign up for membership. Once they had got about 20% of the membership they would set about driving out the remaining 80% by making party meetings as unpleasant as possible for anyone who didn't agree with them.

These tactics allowed Militant to capture control of the Labour councils in several major UK cities, in particular in Liverpool where Derek Hatton, the 'deputy leader' took the city on a collision course with the Thatcher government, bankrupting the city in the process. Taking the number 2 spot in an organization and letting someone else be the titlar leader is another classic Trotskyite tactic.

The Trotskyites were the principal cause of Labour's defeat in the 1983 general election. A group of Moderate MPs who were tired of the treatment split from the party and formed their own party - the SDP which quickly aligned with the Liberals. The split in the progressive vote is the reason Thatcher was relected twice. But defeating the Tories or implementing any policy goal was a much lower priority for the Trotskyites than gaining control of the Labour party.

The teabaggers tactics are already proving counterproductive as far as the health care debate goes. Deomcrats might have changed their minds on health care reform if they thought they were faced with genuine opposition from real constituents. Now the tactics are known, any opposition is going to be attributed to rent-a-mob.

But that isn't the real objective here. The real objective is to send a signal to the Republicans in Congress - obey us or else you will get the same treatment. It is kind of like a protection racket where the thugs go burn down the competitor's store before making their demands.

Disrupting Democrat town halls will not derail health care, but it will force the GOP reps to align themselves with the leaders of the teabagger mob. And getting all those people riled up and angry is proving to be mighty profitable for the Bill O'Rieleys and the Rush Limbaughs and the rest. They make money from books and from their radio shows and from their fundraising campaigns. If you have a direct mail operation sending out a million solitications a month, you can charge 10 cents a time as administrative overheads.

At this point it is clear that the Iranian election was stolen and that the regime is in serious difficulty. It may survive the immediate aftermath of the electoral fraud, but its essential authority is broken. The Supreme Leader is exposed as a Supreme Fraud.

So what should the US be doing?

Nothing.

In fact it should be doing even less than nothing, it should be making sure that Israel does nothing either.

There used to be a democracy in Iran, right up until a bunch of folk in Washington thought that they would prefer a dictator. So the CIA arranged a coup out of the US Embassy, the details of which were largely concealed from US presidents, let alone the US people for the next forty years. But the fact of the US involvement was well known to Khomeni, he was one of the rabble rousers that the CIA had paid to create the street disturbances that toppled Mosadeq.

Iranians are very sensitive about the possibility of foreign interference. Right now, Ahmedinejad must be hoping that some foreign government is going to save him with some statement that can be used as 'proof' that his opponents are foreign spies. Its just about his only way out.

Back in 1980, the revolution was starting to flag. People were getting fed up of the mullahs. There were rumblings of a second coup. What saved the mullahs was Saddam Hussein's invasion. Once the country was at war, everyone was forced to rally round the flag and the leadership.

There is going to be pressure from Lieberman and his neo-con allies to amp up the pressure on Tehran. I would not be surprised to see more talk about the necessity of a US attack. This really has to be resisted. In the run up to the election, neo-cons such as Bolton and Wolfowitz were calling for Ahmedinejad to win. They would much rather see an aggressive militarist regime in Iraq than a peaceful one, they are aggressive militarists themselves.

It looks for the moment as if the reform forces have dug in for a general strike. That is much harder for the Ahmedinejad faction to deal with than riots.

Over the past week it has become ever clearer that the Bush administration torture program took place during the time that Cheney was searching for 'evidence' of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

Now consider what a friend who works as a defense analyst just pointed out to me: The principle objective of SERE was to expose troops to the techniques used for brainwashing, not defense against interrogation.

The military has long understood that the best way to protect military secrets is not to reveal any information that is not strictly necessary to any personnel who might be captured. Torture is not an effective means of interrogating POWs, any information is almost certainly worthless by the time the victim is finally broken.

The Vietnamese objective was to break the US airmen to extract 'confessions' and 'denunciations' for propaganda. The Pentagon began the SERE program in an attempt to avoid or at least mitigate similar embarrassments in future conflicts.

It is not just the timing of the torture that is suspicious therefore, the techniques themselves are suspicious. At a time when Cheney is known to be looking for any evidence that might be used to support a claim of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link the Pentagon stops using the techniques known to be most effective for interrogation on their prime Al Qaeda prisoners and instead begins to use techniques known to be  most effective for brainwashing.

The timing and the techniques provide two pieces of the puzzle. The destruction of the torture tapes provide a third. The fact that the administration had employed torture was already known at the time that the tapes were destroyed. The surviving records will almost certainly reveal the names of the staff involved. Destruction of the tapes clearly served no intelligence purpose and was clearly not going to be sufficient to derail the investigation into the use of torture during interrogations that had already begun. The only reason to destroy the tapes would be if it demonstrated that the purpose of the torture was for something other than interrogation, such as brainwashing the prisoner into confessing to the existence of a fictious Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship.

If the purpose of the torture is in fact proved to have been brainwashing rather than interrogation it changes the game entirely. The infamous Yoo and Bybee memos do not provide immunity for the use of torture in a brainwashing program, nor does the immunity provided by Congress.

All of which makes the current GOP attacks on Pelosi more understandable. The GOP can probably survive a truth commission into the use of torture for interrogations, but it knows that even its bedrock support in the heartlands is not going to forgive it if the scope of the commission expands to considering the fabrication of evidence used to make the case for a disastrous war.

Obama may justifiably consider the successful release of Cpt. Philips to be a major success. Now he must take the next step and put the surviving pirate on trial in a US court.

There are many reasons for this, but the most important of these is the fact that criminalization works. During the 1970s many European countries were affected by terrorism. Britain adopted a US style model declaring war on the terrorists, using torture and imprisonment without trial. The Troubles lasted another thirty years and only ended for good after the 9/11 attack shut down the NORAID fund line. West Germany faced an equivalent threat, a terrorist movement with considerably broader popular support but refused to treat the matter as anything other than a criminal affair. The Baader-Meinhof gang was rapidly captured and eliminated.

Even more striking is the change in the number of deaths in the Northern Ireland conflict after the UK Labour government adopted West German 'criminalization' tactics in 1976. The number of deaths dropped to a third the previous level even though the piolitical tensions actually increased during the IRA hunger strike - an action for the 'right' to poliltical status.

The US needs to send a message that it is going to abandon the failed policies of the Bush-Cheney era and adopt the criminalization policy that was successful in Northern Ireland. Putting the remaining pirate on trial is precisely the right message to send.

A secondary reason to put the pirate on trial in the US rather than Kenya is the suggestion that this might be done to save having to explain US military/police tactics. There is nothing to appologize for. The pirates were threatening to use deadly force. The US authorities had the right to use deadly force regardless of what other circumstances might have existed.

At this point the pirates and their sympathizers are suggesting that they might take 'retribution' for the attack. That would be unwise.

Everyone in the GOP is still all a twitter about the latest WH attacks on Limbaugh.

It is not a new strategy though, it is exactly the game that the GOP attempted to play during the campaign with their endless Rev Wright and Ward Churchill fantasies.

The difference is that Democrats really don't have a problem criticizing Wright, or Churchill or even Michael Moore while the Republicans dare not speak against Rush. By some measures of power, that makes Rush their leader.

In practice I would suggest that Grover Norquist and Larry Kudlow are probably a bigger influence on policy. But its the same mechanism - anyone who refuses to kiss the ring faces a real risk of a primary challenge.

Is it just me or did Limbaugh just do the Democrats the biggest favor imaginable? Already being tagged as the 'real leader' of the GOP, Limbaugh has just opined that Ted Kennedy will die before the healthcare bill passes and that as a consequence the bill will become the 'Ted Kennedy Memorial Bill'.

Now as of yesterday morning, that was the most likely outcome. Kennedy is severely ill, passing the health care bill will likely take a year.

But now that Limbaugh has come on the scene, not too subtly wishing Kennedy dead, the political cost of Republican filibusters just went up. One can imagine the political theater of forcing Republicans to make good on their filibuster while CNN gives daily reports from the Ted Kennedy death bed. Will Kennedy see his life long dream or will the Republicans succeed in their act of wanton political spite?

What this phony war is really about is that the Republicans know that they need to get back to partisan politics but only if they can get the establishment media to tell people that the Democrats are equally to blame.

The news that Lady Kennedy will be taking her uncle's seat in the US House of Lords will be greeted with pleasure by feminists everywhere. Unlike the UK which insists on the principle of male primogeniture, the US has for many years espoused the principle of equality amongst its aristocracy.

Lady Kennedy will be raised to the peerage by Governor Paterson of New York, who was himself appointed to the position after his predecessor was criticized for over paying a prostitute.

Reid's Lieberman policy appears to be to do everything he can to prevent Lieberman being able to claim that he has been unfairly treated. The lobbying activities of Clinton and Obama appear to be designed to the same end.

The critical thing here is not so much to keep Lieberman in the caucus as to force him to accept that his actions deserved punishment. Kicking him out of the caucus entirely would allow him to play his pathetic little center-of-attention martyr act. Letting him stay in the caucus but taking away everything gives him the opportunity to walk away in distain and claim a moral victory.

Offering Lieberman the Veterans affairs committee is an interesting choice. The GOP cannot offer Lieberman anything remotely comparable in status or influence even if they wanted to, but to accept it requires Lieberman to accept a significant demotion and he cannot do that without accepting that what he did was wrong.

Lieberman could just walk away from the insult. But that makes him look like a complete dork in everyone's eyes and particularly so with Clinton and Obama allegedly arguing his case. If he walks away from this he is clearly an irrational fool who could not be argued with.

It is a very clever little trap that only works because Lieberman is so wrapped up in his sanctimonious little ego. He can try to bluster but he knows that Reid holds all the cards here. If Joe tries to drag it out too long, the replacement chair for Homeland Security will be announced and so will the chair for Vets. At that point any leverage he might have had is gone for good and there is no reason for the GOP to offer him diddly either. In fact their best strategy would probably be to keep Joe dangling on and on.

Lieberman's only real card is to threaten to resign and effectively give his seat to the GOP. But that is a trick he can only play once and whoever replaced him would likely be gone in 2010.

Bottom line is that at this point the only thing Lieberman is achieving is to provide a useful distraction from whatever else the GOP might want to do.

Now that the election is over, it is time for Republicans to start engaging in their favorite pass-time - offering unasked for advice to Democrats.

Before you start the usual denunciations of 'concern trolling', please take a moment to think about the possible motivation for this behavior. Is the advice offered from the goodness of their hearts (clearly not as they don't have them). Is it expected that Democrats would take advice from Republicans at this particular instance? So far the only advice on offer seems to be 'don't behave like we have just behaved for eight years', which is to completely miss the fact that the whole point of the campaign was to do as closely the opposite of the GOP approach as is possible.

No, the real reason the GOP offers this advice is that it really wants to receive some advice in return but does not quite know how to ask.

So this morning, please take some time to offer a Republican some gratuitous, unasked for political advice. You will feel better for this generous donation of your time, believe me.

My view is that if they want to rebuild the party and make it electable again they should introduce a rule that anyone who attacks the patriotism of an opponent is immediately expelled from the party, likewise anyone who employs guilt by association character assassination smears. The party must utterly reject McCainism if it is to become a viable political force again.

Don't worry, the whole beauty of concern trolling is the fact that there is not the smallest chance that the intended recipients will listen to, let alone follow the advice offered. I am writing this Monday night. If all goes to plan Tuesday, the Republicans will by now be settling down to a nice uncivil party war that makes Palin's stump appearances look like a blessing by the Dalai Lama.

OK so you have a room-mate who doesn't see the point of voting. And you want to get him down to the poll because even though your state may be a solid lock for Obama, the Senate and House races still matter and every vote really does count.

Or perhaps they have voted, but you want to get them phone banking, or getting out the vote. What can you do?

Well the answer is that there is no single answer. In California the answer might be 'do you really want to see Prop Hate win?' Another good standby might well be to point out that the GOP simply isn't going to learn any lessons unless it loses badly enough for it to hurt.

But one tactic that you can try this time round is to point out that this election is the Woodstock of our generation, it is the falling of the Berlin Wall, it is the civil rights march on Washington. The choice now is to decide to be a part of that history or not.

Worse than the possibility that McCain might be lying about Porker Palin and her bridge to nowhere, is the possibility he may be telling the truth, as he sees it.

For the past eight years the US has been run by an administration that shut itself up in a bubble. Only facts that were consistent with the existing world view inside the bubble were admitted. Inconvenient facts were ignored or denied.

McCain seems to be facing a similar difficulty with his inability to accept the fact that he may have been mistaken when he hailed Palin as an enemy of earmarks. He certainly wanted to believe it was true.

Instead we discover that Palin was for the bridge before she was against it. Or more accurately she was for the bridge before it became clear that Alaska would have to pay for it with a part of its huge state budget surplus.

The facts are very clear: Palin is just another politician who did her job representing the people of her state as best she could, including asking for earmarks. But McCain does not want to believe the facts, he wants to beleive she was opposed to the bridge on principle rather than merely facing reality.

This is not the only example of bubble-McCain. McCain wanted to believe that Baghdad was safe so he told everyone that he took his stroll through that market without protection when in fact he was surrounded by 100 troops and wore a bullet proof vest. 23 Iraqis died as a result of that boast.

Earlier Democrats were comparing John McCain to Candidate McCain. They should start comparing John McCain to Bubble McCain, the press would find that easier to understand. They know about the bubble first hand.

Have you noticed that whenever McCain makes a gaffe he always tries to pass it off as a joke?

According to the McCain camp he was joking when he said $5 million was rich. A joke? I don't think so, McCain had been invited to a political interview to give serious answers to serious questions. He was auditioning for President of the USA, not for a late night spot at the comedy store.

And when McCain was called on his smear ads his response? 'You gotta have a sense of humor'.

And when McCain sang 'bomb bomb Iran', another joke. Hey if McCain is so funny, how come nobody is laughing.

I don't think McCain is telling jokes here, what he is doing is what we Brits call sniveling. Whenever challenged about his own behavior, McCain always comes out with a whiny excuse to say why it isn't his fault.

If he isn't telling a joke, McCain is making sniveling references to his time as a POW: oooh, don't say anything nasty about me, I was a POW don't you know! Which in snivel means 'I will accuse my opponent of being unpatriotic secure in the knowledge that he cannot respond in kind against me'.

Snivel snivel snivel.

Rove swiftboated Kerry, turning his greatest strength into his greatest weakness. Now he has done the same in this election - to McCain. McCain used to be seen as a war hero, after Rove he is now the king of snivell, trying to become President on a sympathy vote.

McCain has built his entire political career on playing the victim. First as a Prisoner of War, then as an honest man who somehow got caught up in the middle of the Keating affair, then as the only Senator dedicated to battling pork against his party. It is a constant theme, and one that has worked for him every time.

McCain is understandably worried that the GOP base will fail to turn out for him. So his strategy is to claim to be the victim of unfair charges of racism. The only problem being how to get Obama to accuse him of racism without the press also accusing him.

Like every other post-segregation politician playing the race card, McCain is using code. Some of the code is obvious, but other parts are not:

The Spears/Hilton 'celebrity' ad juxtaposes two notoriously promiscuous white women with Obama to play to an old Klu Klu Klan claim that black men just want to rape white women. Lieberman's comment was carefully chosen: 'just relax and enjoy it': the sterotypical words of a rapist to his victim.

The point here is not to play to the remaining hundred or so Klansmen, its to bait the Obama camp into making a response so that McCain can play the victim. When Obama refused to take the bait, they pretended that he had and McCain chanted 'race-card, race-card, race-card'.

The followup to the 'rape' ad is the 'Moses' ad. This really makes no sense as a campaign ad. The main message seems to be that McCain couldn't find Obama doing very much that is embarassing. Even the clip where Obama is talking about a shining shaft of light, he is clearly being ironic - the only other person in shot is laughing.

There are only three strong images in the spot - Obama, the desk in the White House and a very very white Charlton Heston playing Moses. The subliminal semiotic is 'black man, not a leader' followed by a very very white man who is.

McCain's race baiting is all about his unenthusiastic GOP base. They are not too excited about McCain already and they will become even less happy with him after he moves to the center to try to win the election.

McCain's only chance is to get the GOP base to support him by presenting himself as the unfair victim of dishonorable race-card tactics by the Obama team.

So to do this they deliberately race-bait in a manner that makes the intention clear without definitively crossing the line as far as a GOP supporter is concerned. Anyone with a brain knows that kicking the only black reporter out of the press area (and the white reporter who asked why it was happening) and the Britney/Hilton 'rapist' ad were intended to be interpreted as racist. But such subtleties are lost on the reptilian brain stem employed by members of the GOP base.

The objective here was to elicit a chorus of 'racist'. And when Obama refused to oblige they invented the charge and McCain repeats 'race-card race-card race-card race-card' at every opportunity.

Hence Obama's response that the tactics are cynical, not racist.