There are some weak links in the republican chain that were all expecting to lose reelection a few months back. The polls start to swing back to the dems and they will sell their leadership out in a heartbeat.

A jobs bill and a 3% reduction in unemployment will do that.

You are right, Obama needs party discipline, but he can also break the republicans discipline if he can gain the upper hand.

commercial? i've gotta hand it to you, you have to have pretty eclectic tastes to call mine "commercial". i mean, i bet when i first got into ac/dc they were being outsold by "rites of spring" by about 10 to 1. :)

i tend to fixate these days on particular trancendant performances. here's my current fave, i need to hear it at least twice a day just to keep my head together.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZIzF2uC9MM

if i could marry this woman and her entire band i would. i'm sure they're all dead by now.

btw, you know of course what an agnostic dyslexic insomniac does, right? :)

hmmm, you've given me an idea and i don't much like the implications of it. "shooting fish in a barrel"- yes, that's exactly what it was like. so i guess that's what people really like to do. they don't want to have their "butts chapped", they don't want to be challenged.

i haven't seen any research on it, but i'll bet this isn't the only blog that grew and flourished from, say, after 9/ll until obama's election and then kind of dried up as people lost interest- as their "barrel of fish" was taken away, in other words.

i certainly can't prove a correlation, and if there is one there are many other possible explanations than the one i'm suggesting. if anyone else has any ideas i'd be interested. i do think the subject is a bit too large to be explained by things like getting a dog or paying off holiday expenses. i understand (other) people have personal lives too (norm) that affect their blogging but like i said i don't think 1gm is alone but part of a pattern. after learning the ropes of blog commenting on 1gm i started posting comments on other blogs, just 6 or 8 months ago. more than once, and more than twice in fact i saw variants on "gee, i don't know where the hell you've been, buddy, but you missed the big show. things used to be really hopping around here and now it's gone to hell".