Donald Rumsfeld said our strategy in Iraq isn't working. He's gone, but Stephen Hadley said Sunday Bush will consider his suggestions, as well as those from the Iraq Study Group which are due on Wednesday.

The Wall St. Journal now reports(free link) that many senior Pentagon officials are at the opposite end of the spectrum -- saying more troops and more money is the only way to win in Iraq.

Outside the military, most of the debate is focused on a U.S. troop withdrawal. But inside the Pentagon, the recent dismissal of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has given some new life to arguments by military officers who say the U.S. must pour more troops and money into the country to expand the Iraqi army -- the one institution in Iraq that has shown some promise -- and stabilize the capital.

Hillary Clinton has begun discussions with New York Democratic leaders about running for President in 2008.

I think she will run. She remains a favorite in early polling, but will it last?

I think a Hillary/Obama ticket would be a formidable one. Who else can you think of as a vice-presidential candidate for Hillary?

Also today, Evan Bayh of Indiana announced an exploratory committee to decide whether he will run for President. The Wall St. Journal has more on Hillary and Bayh.

Update: The New York Times reports on the Obama complication. And Arianna is not impressed by the Times coverage.

It doesn't surprise me that Hugo Chavez won by a big margin in Venezuela.

With 78 percent of voting stations reporting, Chavez had 61 percent to 38 percent for challenger Rosales, said Tibisay Lucena, head of the country's elections council. Chavez had nearly 6 million votes versus 3.7 million for Rosales, according to the partial tally.

Turnout among the 15.9 million eligible voters was 62 percent, according to an official bulletin of results, making Chavez's lead insurmountable.

Here's more on Chavez and his promises for his next administration.

I know we're headed into a 1 week lame duck session of Congress, but this lame duck of a bill is just a stupid time waster.

The House has scheduled a vote on [NJ Rep. Christopher H.]Smith's fetal-pain bill, which, among other things, would require abortion providers to inform patients of the controversial assertion that the procedure may cause pain. Providers would also have to offer anesthesia for the fetus, which the patient would have to accept or reject in writing.

But GOP leaders put the measure on the fast track to passage, which means it will need the vote of two-thirds of the House. Even if the bill wins that much support, it will go nowhere in the Senate, Republicans concede.

Sen. Arlen Specter is still trying to pass a warrantless wiretapping bill. Happily, that looks like a no-go as well.

This is interesting:

As of right now, it looks like Florida will face Ohio State for the NCAA football championship:

Florida passed Michigan and returned to No. 2 in The Associated Press Top 25 and the coaches' poll on Sunday. While the Gators had a slim lead of three points over Michigan in the AP poll, they were 26 points ahead of the Wolverines in the USA Today poll -- a margin that could help get Florida into the national title game.

The coaches' poll is one of three components used in the Bowl Championship Series standings, along with the Harris poll and a compilation of six computer ratings.

A report in the Los Angeles Times, citing a BCS source, said that Florida will indeed be the No. 2 team in the final BCS standings that will be officially announced later Sunday.

Full disclosure, I grew up in Florida and am a diehard Gators fan but this gives me no pleasure. Opinions deciding who plays in a championship game? Please. It is long past time for a playoff.

This is an Open Thread.

At talking points memo, David Kurtz links to this fairly egregious article in the New York Times, titling his post "The Ties That Bind":

New on the Web: Politics as Usual

THE Netroots.” “People Power.” “Crashing the Gate.” The lingo of liberal Web bloggers bespeaks contempt for the political establishment. The same disdain is apparent among many bloggers on the right, who argued passionately for a change in the slate of House Republican leaders — and who wallowed in woe-is-the-party pity when the establishment ignored them.

You might think that with the kind of rhetoric bloggers regularly muster against politicians, they would never work for them. But you would be wrong. . . . [T]his year, candidates across the country found plenty of outsiders ready and willing to move inside their campaigns. Candidates hired some bloggers to blog and paid others consulting fees for Internet strategy advice or more traditional campaign tasks like opposition research.

Here is a listing of some of the most influential bloggers who went to work for campaigns this year, what they were paid according to campaign disclosure documents, and praiseworthy posts about their employers or critical ones of their employers’ opponents.

There is a very nasty implication of bloggers for sale to that article and David Kurtz chooses to endorse that. That is darned egregious of him. But he has shown disdain for the Left blogs for some time. He has never been a friend of the Left blogs. His right, but something to keep in mind when you read his work. He is an Establishment type through and through.

A panel at Wake Forest explored the death penalty in the context of a criminal justice system that produces wrongful convictions. Panelists included Darryll Hunt, who served many years for a rape he didn't commit, and Jennifer Cannino, whose mistaken identification sent Ronald Cotton to prison for 11 years.

For a while friends convinced Cannino that she did not owe Cotton an apology. They would tell her Cotton, who had had run-ins with the law before his wrongful conviction, may have ended up with a longer and better life in prison. ...

After PBS' "Frontline" featured Cotton's story on a 1997 episode, Cannino and Cotton finally met. Cotton held no grudge against her and they became what she described as "beyond what I could actually call a friend." ... "He literally is the person who taught me on that afternoon in 1997 about forgiveness, about mercy, about grace," said Cannino.

You may recall that the New Hampshire Republican Party jammed telephone lines used by the state Democrats' "get out the vote" effort on Election Day 2002. The dirty trick sent more than one GOP operative to jail.

New Hampshire Democrats also sued the GOP. Republican lawyers argued that the Dems should recover nothing beyond the cost of renting the phones that the GOP rendered useless. The judge accepted the opposing argument: the Election Day calls were the culimination of seven months of work, seven months that were wasted when the calls couldn't be made. The judge will let the Dems seek the costs they incurred in the seven month get-out-the-vote drive, excluding costs (like signs and office rent) that can't be directly linked to the Republican phone-blocking scheme.

The ruling allows the Democrats to ask for millions of dollars in damages, rather than the $5,000 they spent on telephone rental.

Update: As a reader notes, the case settled soon after this ruling, with a GOP agreement to pay $125,000 to the Democrats and to donate money to two local charities.

As Atrios says, Joe Lieberman is a buffoon:

LIEBERMAN: I believe that America is a mighty enough nation that we should never fear to talk to anyone. But anyone who believes that Iran and Syria really want to help us to succeed in Iraq, I just is missing the reality. Asking Iran and Syria to help us succeed in Iraq is like your local fire department asking a couple of arsonists to help put out the fire. These people are flaming the fire. They are the extremists. They are supporting terrorists in Iraq, in Lebanon and of course in the Palestinian areas.

HAGEL: That’s not the point. Of course the Iranians and Syrians are not going to come to our assistance. Of course not. But they are going to respond in their own self-interest. All nations respond in their own self-interests. Tallyrand once said that nations don’t have friends. They have interests. He was right. It’s not in the interest of Syria or Jordan or Iran to have a failed state that would be a complete mess for the middle east.

Why did the Iranians help us in Afghanistan? Why did they cooperate with us in Afghanistan on intelligence matters and other issues? Because they didn’t want a failed state next to them which comes with all the problems. They didn’t want heroin moving into their borders. What we’re not getting here, is we’re not getting a full and comprehensive wide-lens appreciation of interests.

To follow Lieberman's thinking, no conflicts would ever end.

NOTE: I published this piece last year.

There is a passage in Umberto Eco's 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum that has always had a great resonance for me, as a companion piece to Richard Hofstader's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." I think, as edited, it can be understood without intimate knowledge of the plot:

To invent a Plan. The Plan justifies you to such a degree that you can no longer be held accountable, not even for the Plan itself. Just throw the stone and hide your hand. If there really were a Plan, there would be no failure. You never had Cecilia because the Archons made Annibale Canta-lamessa and Pio Bo unskilled even with the friendliest of the brass instruments. You fled the Canal gang because the Decans wanted to spare you for another holocaust. And the man with the scar has a talisman more powerful than yours.

A Plan, a guilty party. The dream of our species. An Deus sit. If He exists, it's His fault. The thing whose address I lost is not the End, it's the Beginning. Not the object to be possessed but the subject that possesses me. Misery loves company. Misery, company, too many dactyls. Nothing can dispel from my mind the most reassuring thought that this world is the creation of a shadowy god whose shadow I prolong. Faith leads to Absolute Optimism.

So says Eric Foner about George W Bush:

He's The Worst Ever

By Eric Foner
Sunday, December 3, 2006; B01

Ever since 1948, when Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr. asked 55 historians to rank U.S. presidents on a scale from "great" to "failure," such polls have been a favorite pastime for those of us who study the American past.

The New York Times has the full text of Donald Rumsfeld's last memo to the White House, written 2 days before he resigned.

Background here.

“In my view it is time for a major adjustment,” wrote Mr. Rumsfeld, who has been a symbol of a dogged stay-the-course policy. “Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.”

Nor did Mr. Rumsfeld seem confident that the administration would readily develop an effective alternative. To limit the political fallout from shifting course, he suggested the administration consider a campaign to lower public expectations.