The Copps talk, then, can be seen as a roadmap for demands he and Adelstein are making as the price for approving the merger, as merger approval conditions, if you will. They won't get everything they seek, but they will get some. Perhaps as early as next week, if AT&T gets serious in negotiating with them.

There seems to be an unspoken agreement among drivers about the risk they are willing to accept on the highway. It's a stupid risk-reward equation, but there it is. The reward of getting there a few minutes earlier balanced by the risk of sudden, horrible painful death. The same balance seems to be taking place on the Internet.

Consensus leaves room for what you might call trolls, people who are violently opposed to the change I seek, who very much want to pull things in another direction.

I'm averaging one of these a minute My daughter's account, which she doesn't check, has 861 copies of this since just yesterday. This looks like spam as Denial of Service attack.

What if it's all true, that the 2000 election was a fraud, and you went along with it. The American electoral system was subverted, and you went along with it. The middle class was destroyed and you went along with it. The Earth was tipped into a Global Warming Armageddon and you went along with it. The American economy was bankrupted and you went along with it. Better not think about it.

This is at least as serious a threat as 9-11 was, so we start in the same place. A commission, drawn equally from both sides, appointed either by Congress or the parties (I don't care).

Thanks to the coming closing of the network, the MSNBC "talent" has been engaged for the last week in a steel cage anchor death match, with jobs at 30 Rock the prize.

Ethics comes into play only when you have a choice. It's whether you tell yourself the truth about yourself – and many people don't.

The guess here is that it will take some time before the Southern Exurbans allow themselves to be led by the Big State Moderates. This is normal when a party's Thesis is destroyed and it goes into the wilderness.

All the tricks being deployed by the present Administration are a full generation old. They never had anything new to offer. Rumsfeld and Cheney are little Nixon-ites. Reality is what you claim it is. They really believe that. You may have your math but I have THE math. Faith-based governing rather than reality-based governing.