All the rest of the country is seeing is a long (and apparently growing) list of Democrats that haven't paid their taxes... but are in favor of raising everyone else's taxes.

Keep trying to blame it on someone else... let's see how that works out.  Why don't they just pay their damn taxes like the rest of us.

Making excuses for our own party, just because they are party of our own party is exactly what people hated about the Republicans.  It is amazing how soon we've forgotten that...

Tax liens are a matter of public record, so I am hard-pressed to understand how it went unnoticed or undiscovered for so long; between Geithner, Daschle, Killefer and now Solis, I have to wonder where the follow-through was on those vetting questionnaires.

Forget about what Bush's nominees were or were not allowed to get away with; it's completely irrelevant.

What's relevant is instituting a process for vetting the nominees that proves Obama's intention to change the culture, or the tone, or whatever the relevant "change" is.  Imagine what it would have said about that commitment if Obama had, first of all, not been so eager to announce the nominations without in-depth vetting, and second of all, been so thorough in that process that he could have avoided the embarrassment of what has happened over the last couple of weeks.  Isn't that how you prove your commitment to the highest ethical standards and changing the way business is done in Washington?

I guess all we can do is imagine, though, since Obama's vetting process - except for the one Hillary Clinton endured - seems to be paying little more than lip service to standards that were supposed to be of paramount importance to Obama.

Suffice to say that this is a public relations problem for Democrats that could be easily remedied by, let's say, the timely indictment of Dick Cheney for divulging the covert identity of a CIA agent, or the incarceration of Donald Rumsfeld for his part in misleading the country into an unnecessary war in Iraq, or the extradition of George W. Bush to The Hague for trial before the International War Crimes Tribunal.

Tax gate and stimulus has dragged down the party.

Maybe they'll push through the dog that is the stimulus but all these political (and totally avoidable) slipups have made people wonder if the change they voted for was just a pipe dream.

obama was dumb enough to do this, i'm sure at the behest of his campaign people. given the sleazoid nature of the bush administration, it no doubt seemed like a slam dunk at the time.

the one candidate not stupid enough, or dishonest enough to do it, hillary clinton, was flayed by the press, the blogs, and the obama campaign, for her "dishonesty".

now that clinton's position has (not surprisingly) proved to be the correct one, we're stuck. pres. obama, and his supporters, are just going to have to suck it up, and do what they said they were going to.

or, in the alternative, admit it was all BS, just for the purpose of fooling the rubes and getting elected.

interesting that "evil" sen. clinton, so far, is one of the few of pres. obama's cabinet nominees with a squeaky clean background, for both her and former pres. clinton, in spite of all the noise made by the republicans.

No doubt it was handled stupidly but it also infuriated me watching something like that take a potentially great VP down.

if it's small, what difference does it make?