Well, I read that Joe's corporate donors and some well known GOP donor sources were pouring money into Joe NoMoMomentum's campaign even when it looked like he'd likely lose.

I have a theory of a face-saving twist that Joe will switch party and run as a Republican as the GOP has embraced him while the rank and file Dems have shunned him thereby forcing the party to as well. The current GOP opponent is a dud. They really don't have much time to find a new one. And while it still means Joe loses the Senate seat, it sets him up for a sympathy fave for possible McCain running mate.

I wish the Dems who supported Lieberman in the primary would think a little deeper and ask themselves why the GOP and the Bush Administration soooo upset over Lieberman's loss? Why do they care so much about a Democratic primary? Why does Dick Cheney care so much which Democrat represents Connecticut that he intimated to Wyoming reporters that a vote against Joe Lieberman is a gift to Al Qaeda? Doesn't the Evil One save that rhetoric strictly for Republicans facing Democrats?

Connecticut is a pretty solidly blue state, it's not like it's Ohio or Tennessee. Why is the loss of Lieberman so troubling to the Republican party?

If I were Ned Lamont, I'd ask these questions in every television ad. They've tied Joe to Bush, now tie him to Cheney.

Well Mr. O'Donnell, you're one of my faves and I sure as hell hope you're right. Well done. Rasmussen has Lieberman ever so slightly up right now. Well Joe can hang out with old pal Bill Bennett again - I'm sure Mr. Bennett has probably already placed a wager or two, and has got the latest Vegas odds.
I wonder how Joe felt when he got DeLay's endorement last week?

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\Connecticut, First Post-Primary Poll Shows Tight Race
Rasmussen Reports began polling the Ned Lamont-Joe Lieberman general election match-up last night. After 375 interviews, preliminary numbers show Lieberman ahead of Lamont by 3 percentage points. Republican candidate Alan Schlesinger is a non-factor in the single digits.

The last Rasmussen survey of a three way general election found Lamont and Lieberman tied at 40% with Schlesinger at 13%. It appears Lieberman is gaining ground primarily among GOP voters.

Rasmussen will be back in the field tonight to complete the survey and hopes to post final data on their website before midnight.

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2006/08/10/in_connecticut_first_p...

At this minute, eight Democratic Senate incumbents who voted in favor of the Iraq resolution are seeking re-election: Cantwell, Hillary Clinton (N.Y.), Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Bill Nelson (Fla.), Tom Carper (Del.), Herb Kohl (Wis.), and of course Joe Lieberman (Conn.), now as an independent. And of those eight, exactly one—Lieberman—faced or is facing a serious primary challenge because of the war.

Four of the seven (Clinton, Feinstein, Carper, and Kohl) represent blue states where anti-war fever is running high. Why aren't they fighting for their political lives?

Because the Connecticut primary was about one man and one state. It was about Lieberman's excessive fawning over the president.

it will influence, at least for a time, how Democratic candidates in some (but by no means all) states talk about Iraq. And Ned Lamont, for his own vote-getting sake in Connecticut's general election and for the Democratic Party's sake, needs to be more careful about giving people a reason to flash peace signs and chant "Bring Them Home!" at his rallies in the future.

Subject:	Lieberman and language
From:	dougcarmichael
Date:	Aug 11 2006 2:10PM

Why call the current democratic leadership moderate and the Lamont side left? It makes no sense. The war in Iraq was not moderate, but wrong minded. The war on terror is not moderate, but misguided effort to quell a real problem. The economy is not doing moderately, but disastrously anti distributive and anti environmental.

Dead With Ned

Why Lamont's victory spells Democratic disaster.

By Jacob Weisberg

The result suggests that instead of capitalizing on the massive failures of the Bush administration, Democrats are poised to re-enact a version of the Vietnam-era drama that helped them lose five out six presidential elections between 1968 and the end of the Cold War.

Many of them appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously. They see Iraq purely as a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11, as opposed to a tragic misstep in a bigger conflict.

Consider the parallels to Connecticut's 1970 Senate election. That year, the two-term Democratic incumbent was Thomas J. Dodd, the father of current Sen. Christopher Dodd. A classic Cold War liberal and pillar of the establishment, the senior Dodd was challenged in the Democratic primary by the Rev. Joseph Duffey, an anti-war minister whose youthful supporters included Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham, and one Joe Lieberman. Facing defeat, Dodd dropped out of the Democratic primary and declared as an independent, much as Lieberman now plans to do. By splitting the Democratic vote, Dodd helped swing the election to the Republican nominee, Lowell Weicker.

In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington (Paperback)

4)  (Rubin) Especially helpful in this book is its emphasis on the importance of educating the American public as a pre-requisite to the politics of making the right economic decisions for America. Rubin quotes Clinton as saying that one of his (President Clinton's) greatest lessons learned from his two-term Presidency was the need to do the public education (political strategy) before the public politics and deal-making. Senator David Boren (today President of the University of Oklahoma) and Mr. David Gergen have made this point earlier ("Preparing America's Foreign Policy for the 21st Century"), but Rubin's focus merits strong emphasis, because in combination, our mediocre policy structure and our mediocre public understanding combine to create not one but two devastating Achilles' heels for US economic security policy-making.

7) I noticed some very strong observations from Rubin on the inability of the Department of State and of the Central Intelligence Agency to provide him with core information that he needed on Indonesia, among other fiscal hot spots. Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore turned out to be much more useful to him in understanding the context and possibilities. From this Rubin draws the lesson that the Department of State needs to get smarter about economics, and that a new kind of Foreign Service Officer is needed, one that is not just following political matters, but economic matters. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that State needs to migrate from the old POL-MIL mind-set, to a new POL-ECON mindset. CIA must of course get much better at understanding demography, public health, economics, and infrastructure issues down to the province and township letters, something that will require them to finally take Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) much more seriously, and to become competent in 29+ languages.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

The bottom line of this book, and I will cite some other books briefly, is that democracy and prosperity are both enhanced by shared rather than restricted information. The open commons model is the only one that allows us to harness the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth, where each individual can made incremental improvements that cascade without restraint to the benefit of all others.

One final supportive anecdote, this one from the brilliant Michael Eisen, champion of open publishing. He captured the new paradigm perfectly at Wikimania when he likened the current publishing environment as one in which scientists give birth to babies, the publishers play a mid-wifery role, and then claim that as midwives, they have a perpetual right to the babies and will only lease them back to the parents. What a gloriously illuminating analogy this is

I will end by tying this book and this author to C.K. Prahalad's "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid." That other book focuses on the fact that the five billion poor are actually worth four trillion in disposable income, versus the one billion rich worth one trillion. C.K. Prahalad posits a world in which capitalism stops focusing on making disposable high-end high cost goods, and turns instead to making sustainable low-cost goods. I see the day coming when--the avowed goal of the Wiki Foundation--there is universal free access to all information in all languages all the time.

this book is the tipping point for communal moral capitalism. Yochai Benkler is--along with Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, Lawrence Lessig, Jimbo Wales, Ward Cunningham, Brewster Kahle, and Cass Sunstein, one of the bright shining lights in our constellation of change makers.

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris

4) The author provides a very comprehensive review of both the Koran and the Bible, citing many specific passages, and concludes that even "moderate" Muslims are inherently trained to believe that "unbelievers" are to be converted or killed. This is, incidentally, the first stage of genocide, where the one to be killed is put into a class with vermin to set the stage for acceptable massacres.

The author documents the origin of the yellow star to "mark" Jews as having been in Baghdad, and only much later adopted by the Nazis.

One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy by Thomas Frank

He deconstructs the "New Economy" in persuasive detail and caused me to re-evaluate some of my earlier readings, especially of Kevin Kelly and others in the WIRED generation who articulate with blind faith the democratic value of the network, but fail to see, as Robert Samuelson and this author would have us understand, that outsourcing is union busting, and the actual effect of the network has been to make it possible for corporations to outsource middle class jobs while importing poverty through illegal immigration. The net loser is the Nation, because one of its most important sources of national power, an educated engaged citizenry, is being sold short.

• Cuba, too, has large nuclei abroad, mainly in the United States, where Cubans stand out for their industriousness and creative ability. They represent a potential of singular magnitude that, as in the case of China, could contribute notably to the island's development with their financial resources and, most important, with their know-how and democratic experience.

The economic reforms could be an anteroom to political reforms. There is a reason why the more conservative elements within government have always refused to apply the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences, concealing from the people what has happened in those two nations.

The fact that economic reforms could be instituted would in no way limit the efforts of the Cuban democratic movement toward liberty and an unrestricted respect for human rights.

“Democrat Party” is now nearly universal. This is partly the work of Newt Gingrich, the nominal author of the notorious 1990 memo “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” and his Contract with America pollster, Frank Luntz, the Johnny Appleseed of such linguistic innovations as “death tax” for estate tax and “personal accounts” for Social Security privatization. Luntz, who road-tested the adjectival use of “Democrat” with a focus group in 2001, has concluded that the only people who really dislike it are highly partisan adherents of the—how you say?—Democratic Party. “Those two letters actually do matter,” Luntz said the other day. He added that he recently finished writing a book—it’s entitled “Words That Work”—and has been diligently going through the galley proofs taking out the hundreds of “ic”s that his copy editor, one of those partisan Dems, had stuck in.

William F. Buckley, Jr., the Miss Manners cum Dr. Johnson of modern conservatism, dealt with the question in a 2000 column in National Review, the magazine he had founded forty-five years before. “I have an aversion to ‘Democrat’ as an adjective,” Buckley began.

Dear Joe McCarthy used to do that, and received a rebuke from this at-the-time 24-year-old. It has the effect of injecting politics into language, and that should be avoided. Granted there are diffculties, as when one desires to describe a “democratic” politician, and is jolted by possible ambiguity.

But English does that to us all the time, and it’s our job to get the correct meaning transmitted without contorting the language.

That’s understandable, but it helps explain why we have a defense budget that is over half a trillion dollars, forty per cent higher than it was in 2001. More than half the federal government’s discretionary spending goes to the military, and, while a sizable chunk goes toward the fight against terrorism and the Iraq war, too much has nothing to do with the demands of a post-9/11 world.

Money is going into Special Operations and intelligence, but far more is being spent on high-tech weapons systems designed to fight enemies (like the Soviet Union) that no longer exist—eighty billion dollars on attack submarines, three billion apiece on new destroyers, and hundreds of billions on two different new models of jet fighter. Advocates insist that we need to be able to contest any “near peer” rival. But the U.S. has no near-peers—or, indeed, any distant peers, as we now spend more on defense than the rest of the world put together.