The Senate will vote on an amendment - the Cochran Amendment (Thad Cochran is a GOP Senator from Mississippi) to its toothless version of the Iraq supplemental funding bill today. Debate is going on now.

The debate is on a current Republican amendment to strip the bill of its nonbinding provision of setting a goal of removing all combat troops involved in the Iraq Debacle by March 31, 2008. Oh by the way, the provision is NON-binding!! And it is likely to be stripped out!!

Sam Rosenfeld finds the closeness of the vote on stripping the NON-binding withdrawal date significant:

[T]he saga of the congressional war supplemental bill has really taken a dramatic turn in the last two days toward a confrontation with George W. Bush himself over a Senate-House conference bill that does in fact include language calling for withdrawal from Iraq.

This is what we are reduced to -- making NON-binding goals for withdrawal from the Iraq Debacle a SIGNIFICANT achievement! This is the big pragmatic win! You have to be kidding me.