... is here:

eschaton08.blogspot.com/

Send good vibes and burn incense for the Blogspot gods 'til his normal site comes back online.

Read Atrios explaining what happened after the jump:

Speaking of Howard Dean, at least our brothers and sisters across the pond get it:

Labour drafts in US election architect for 'our midterms'
Howard Dean to advise party on campaigning strategy ahead of key May vote
Tania Branigan and Julian Borger
Saturday November 11, 2006
The Guardian

Labour has enlisted one of the engineers of this week's Democratic victory in the US midterm elections in an attempt to boost its flagging fortunes before the local elections in May.

Howard Dean, the former presidential candidate and one of the men credited with masterminding the trouncing of the Republicans, will visit the UK next month to brief party officials about his pioneering campaigning techniques.

So Rick Santorum has this campaign for re-election going on, and it ain't going too well. Maybe -- call me crazy -- that has something to do with his habit of running away from spectators in undersized gorilla suits.

Lemme explain. So Americans United for Change (AUFC) -- the people who helped to bring you the smackdown on the Big Bush Social Security Privatization Campaign of 2005™ -- says it's time for payback for all the people who tried to rip off our senior citizens last year. The form of the payback: a giant inflatable gorilla ... chasing the big privatizers down wherever they go.

First up for the treatment: our boy Ricky.

Another call for accountability today in the Bush administration, this one from a man with eyewitness experience with flood disasters: Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack (D), who belonged to the Iowa state senate when catastrophic floods hit the Mississippi River in 1993.

Quoth Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), Speaker of the United States House of Representatives [emphasis added]:

Lawmakers have to ask themselves if it's worth sinking possibly billions of federal dollars into rebuilding New Orleans, a low-lying city which would remain a vulnerable hurricane target even after clean up, House Speaker Dennis Hastert said Wednesday.

"It doesn't make sense to me," said Hastert during an interview with the Daily Herald editorial board. "And it's a question that certainly we should ask."

Discuss.

By way of Chris Mooney, a new policy on teen sex that boils down to stupidity of mammoth proportions:

Must report to law enforcement ... ?!?!! Right — as though police down there have nothing better to do ...

DraftHoward.com just posted strong talking points that read almost as a direct rebuttal of the L.A. Times hit piece on Dean in the Friday paper. The debate, in the draft guys' eyes, has nothing to do with left vs. right. Our challenge, rather, is choosing between reform and yet more of the status quo.

The blogger at No Retreat, No Surrender just lobbed a sharp, pointy dart at the Simon-Rosenberg-for-DNC trial balloon (emphasis added):

... he is not the man the grassroots should want for the job. He is still not firm against the President's war and the GOP has a lot of firepower if he becomes Chair.

Need more detail? Read on ...

Even more remarkably, pro-Bush voters edge out the voters who would choose a generic Democrat by less than the poll's margin of error. The numbers, +⁄- 4.5%, courtesy of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

VOTE FOR

Republican George W. Bush
Feb. ’04: 47%
Oct. ’03: 49%

Democratic candidate
Feb. ’04: 44%
Oct. ’03: 41%

LIKE TO SEE BUSH REELECTED

Yes
Feb. ’04: 48%
Oct. ’03: 48%

No
Feb. ’04: 46%
Oct. ’03: 44%

=–=–=

For more information:
Schapiro Research Group ⁄⁄ The AJC Political Insider

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) had a column in the Wall Street Journal last week that shows how well he earned his keep as senior advisor to President Clinton on policy and strategy:

By arguing over which piece of George W. Bush's tax cut they would retain or rescind, the Democratic presidential candidates are passing up a big political and economic opportunity. The candidates should stop rearranging the Bush tax cuts and start proposing fundamental reform of the tax code.

... Democrats need to become the party of tax reform and make President Bush own the cumbersome and regressive tax code he has created. The theme of the Bush tax code is this: With the help of their accountants and lawyers, the special interests win subsidies, shelters and loopholes, while middle-class families are buried under a crushing tax burden and piles of complicated IRS forms.

... Elections are about the future not the past. An argument about the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would force Democrats into two strategic traps. First, they would forfeit the mantel of owning the future and would mire us in an argument about the past. Second, we would be walking into the president's argument on tax cuts versus tax increases. Wholesale tax reform enables the Democrats to frame the presidential election on our terms while sidestepping the political landmines his tax cuts have set for us.

... With the code now spanning more than 45,000 pages, Democratic support for fundamental tax reform should go hand-in-hand with calls for simplification. ... It should also be framed as a values argument. As the scope of tax avoidance reaches massive proportions, we are left with one set of rules and obligations for the middle class and a far different set for special interests.

Democrats never win by waging battles for higher taxes. The party needs to stay away giving Bush a chance to raise that prospect, because it makes no sense to fight a campaign on Republican terms. By framing the debate instead around the need to make the tax code fairer, Democrats would create an opportunity to throw President Bush on the defensive, by forcing a conversation about issues -- the president's perceived slavishness to friends in the business community, his lackadaisical response to the corporate scandals -- that touch on doubts already in the public mind.

Polls show us a public ready to debate tax fairness, in fact, if only a candidate would make the pitch.

• More than half of Americans, NPR says, consider the tax code so riddled with flaws that "Congress should completely overhaul it."
• People trust Democrats more than Republicans by healthy margins, according to a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll [*.pdf], to make the tax code fairer, to get rid of loopholes and shelters, and to lower the tax burden on middle-class and wealthy families alike.
• Solid majorities of Americans [*.pdf] strongly support junking language in the tax code that allows companies to relocate to offshore havens, and eliminating the cap that protects income above $87,000 per year from Social Security taxes -- while less than half show the same ardor for making the Bush tax cuts permanent.