Bill Keller, who nearly got the job of editor of the New York Times (he lost out to Harold Raines) wrote a pre-election column about those in Congress he'd most like to see be thrown out, unlikely as it was. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/02/opinion/02KELL.html
They include Tom Delay; Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana; Representative Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado; Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and ...
"Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California: Last year Ms. Pelosi became the second-ranking House Democrat. Was this based on her intelligence, her legislative acumen, her leadership, her oratory? No. Her colleagues regard her skills as average at best. But she has a gift for raising money. She doled out generous sums to fellow Democrats from her own political action committees. (Until last week her two PAC's were contrived to circumvent federal spending limits, which of course she professes to support.) Ms. Pelosi didn't make Congress a self-lubricating money machine, but she has done as much as any sitting Democrat to perpetuate it." ----- Also, I didn't finish my e-mail response to Carrol and sent it prematurely. Here's the rest.
Carrol:
>Leftists _must_ build a new left that forever breaks with any hope of
>operating through or with the DP. Probably that means simply, for the
>time being, ignoring the electoral arena _entirely_.
Nonesense. As much as I don't like the Democrats and like Nader, the Labor Party, etc., if the Senate gets 60 conservative votes - enough to override fillibusters - things will get a lot worse. And I'm not willing to take the risk that it won't go, say from dismal to good, like it did when it went from Coolidge to FDR. It could go from Weimar to Hitler. It's irresponsible to believe otherwise (and that's not a moral judgement).
Peter