The rightwingers are now gleefully pointing to what they see as Pelosi's "cut and run bait and switch" tactics in picking Reyes, a man who supports putting 30,000 more troops into Iraq for the specific purpose of hunting down the death squads.

First of all, it is not cutting and running when you are a guest of someone's house and they ask you to leave. The Iraqi people, through the polls and through their voices, have spoken. They have asked that we leave and that we let them determine their own future. It is not cutting and running, therefore, to respect the wishes of our troops, the American people, and the Iraqi people and leave as soon as possible.

Since Russ Feingold will not be running for President, I will now be endorsing Al Gore for President for 2008. I am asking anybody who supported Russ Feingold for President to support Al Gore for President so we can restore the rule of law to the White House and restore the system of checks and balances to our Constitutional system.

Like many of us, I was not enthused by Al Gore in 2000. I voted for Nader as a way of pushing the Democratic party to the left and thus creating a Green Revolution. I thought that Bush would not be that bad of a President anyway, as he would be bipartisan and supposedly be above the fray. In the meantime, we could move the party and the country to the left and everybody would be happy.

Charles Krauthammer wades into the fray between the retired generals criticizing the Bush administration and those who say that generals should keep their mouths shut. In a bizzare form of reasoning, he praises those who would praise Donald Rumsfeld's so-called military genius and then turns around and says that those who criticize them are setting a dangerous precedent akin to Saddam and other such dictators.

This, of course, is a case of selective outrage. Typical of the New Morality practiced by the Republicans, they make up all sorts of moral rules that we have to follow very strictly. But in their books, if you're a Republican, it's all good. If Krauthammer wants to be credible when criticizing generals who speak out, he needs to go after General Myers as well as the generals criticizing Bush. It works both ways.

The Washington Post is reporting graphic details about the exploitation of some UAE migrant workers, who work on $4 to $7 a day. It seems that some workers who worked for the East Coast and Hamriah Company, who filed for bankruptcy, will not even get paid at all.

A sweltering fog still shrouded the East Coast & Hamriah Co. labor camp when, dressed in the equivalent of their Sunday best, the migrant workers set out after dawn Tuesday. They didn't shower beforehand. Water was cut last year to their shantytown, now abandoned by their employer. They didn't eat breakfast. They have no electricity to cook.

There is a major problem that the left is dealing with in the Immigration debate - they do not understand the type of the enemy that they are going up against. And many here who would favor more restrictions on immigration do not understand the xenophobic and racist biases that many an ti-immigration groups have.

There is plenty of room for reasonable policy debate on the Immigration issue. But the debate must be waged with facts and figures from either Progressive or non-partisan sources. People who use the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) do not understand the prejudices inherent in their studies. The CIS, as well as many other anti-immigrant groups, were founded by one man - a known White Supremacist by the name of John Tanton.

Fred Hiatt can't make up his mind about the Democrats. First, he says that the Democrats are soft on national security and would cut and run from Iraq at the first opportunity. This was back in November. But now, he has turned around and written another piece in tomorrow's Post saying that all the Democrats want to do is build more weapons than the President ever would have dreamed of building.

In winning the debate over Iran, there is only one talking point you need to remember: Iran is not building any nukes. All of the scientific evidence points to this fact. Iran does not have the capacity to make centrifuges for its own reactor, let alone make weapons-grade uranium.

Donald Rumsfeld talked about the role of the Bush administration in history in his op-ed yesterday. But given the fact that Iraq had no WMD's, given the fact that there is no crisis in Social Security, and given the fact that Iran is not building any nukes, the Bush administration will go down in history as the administration that cried wolf.

After further review and agonizing soul-searching (which explains why I didn't write a diary yesterday), I have decided that I can no longer support Russ Feingold for President. I am well and truly beaten. I did not realize that a twice-divorced candidate would be such a big liability. I fear that it would be such a great liability that we would be beaten even worse than McGovern and Mondale did.

As much as we might agree with Feingold 100% on the issues, he is simply not electable. People want a candidate who represents America, and they would always go for the man who best represents their ideals. This includes having a traditional family. After all, if a man can't run his family, then how can he run this country?