Politics.
Some Democrats in Congress want to isolate Dodd for not being a good little fascist lapdog like so many of them:

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/01/15/dodd-facing-fight-within-his-caucus-on-fisa/


(hat-tip to http://sideshow.me.uk/ for the link -- this site consistently has great political links, and I recommend it most highly. Thanks to donfitch for tipping me off to this site about a year ago)

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Very weird that my sample ballot listed "Polling Place: None / By mail". I don't remember having previously voted by mail. Has there been a major election I just couldn't miss but have now forgotten since November 2006, when I have a sure memory of voting at a local precinct? The last election here was for school boards, and I didn't vote because I knew nothing about any of the candidates, and none of them had a public statement or platform that was much more specific than "I want to give our children the best education possible in a fiscally responsible manner", so I sat that one out.

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Still unsure on the Hillary/Edwards thing. So much of all this is just making a semi-educated guess what they're going to do when they're in office . . . Leaning her way a bit because I feel she'll be the best on environmental issues (compare her record to Edwards on nuclear power in particular; and this is where Obama loses any chance of me voting for him except against a Republican), and because I expect her to be at least as good as Bill was on reproductive freedom, and he was great there, even vetoing the anti D&E bill that had broad public support, for all that he supposedly was overly poll driven (he was, but on this, and stopping the rape camps in Bosnia, and on intervening to help end dictatorship in Haiti, a mess we were certainly partially responsible for, he did the right thing in the face of very strong poll numbers against him)(note that these were interventions in the affairs of other nations that actually made things there *better*, and without bankrupting the US, and that were not done for financial gain of the administration and their buddies), and because despite her stupidity on Iraq her overall Congressional record has been the best of anyone still in the race other than Kucinich, I think, and because the rest of her stated agenda basically is as good as or nearly as good as Edwards' and I have more faith in her to successfully enact it, even though her rhetoric isn't nearly as in line with my way of thinking as Edwards (and even though I do have to give him credit for greatly improving the overall tone of the debate, which I do, and even though I've known, gone to school with, and worked with quite a few trial lawyers and quite a few corporate lawyers, and I tend to very much like genuinely crusading trial lawyers, which I believe Edwards is). And honestly, if the whole thing comes down to a wash, which might be how I feel on election day, there are four things working against Edwards:

(1) "I like her better" isn't a reason for anyone *else* to vote for her, or under most circumstances even for me to -- I endorsed Dodd previously w/out any sense of him as a person at all -- but in a toss-up, this suddenly matters, plus, more imporatantly,

(2) I think she's the toughest, mentally strongest candidate out there, and that *does* matter; and

(3) the same reason I initially dismissed *all* the white guys candidacy -- unless they are noticably better, of course I'd rather vote for the candidate representing a historically (and still today, if a bit less so) oppressed group, if for no other reason than so she can prove the bigots (see Chris Mathews, among others) wrong once she gets in office, and

(4) both Hillary's most vocal critics and the kind of attacks they throw at her tend to really, really, *really* annoy me, and I shall take pleasure in their dismay.

Again, none of these are decisive unless it is otherwise a toss-up, but I think it might be. Both of them realize that dogged, determined partisanship is what won the environmental and civil rights battles of the 60's and 70's, (in case anyone missed it, this isn't just a dig at Obama's repeated call for bipartisianship, which is only going to be possible if one side caves and that's usually the dems on such things as the Patriot Act and Iraq and the drug war and tax cuts for the rich combined with service cuts for the poor and the Reagan/Bush decimation of environmental regulation, so please NO to bipartisanship; but also at Obama's expressed admiration for not just Reagan's rhetoric, but his expressed admiration for Reagan's reaction to the big government "excesses" of the 60's and 70's), both of them were both stupid and political cowards on the Iraq war vote (Obama would get credit for voting otherwise here if he'd done *anything* since coming to national prominence to convince me he would have been less of a political coward in their spot--he might have been less stupid, because he certainly has a brilliant political mind, but then a *lot* of people were wrong about how that would play out, and the pressures on him would have been very different on the national scene)(to the at least two and I think more still-Kucinich supporters out there--yes, you're right, he was there and he voted the right way and he's honest and his agenda is indeed better than anyone else's all round, no argument, and I don't blame you a bit for favoring him), and otherwise their positive/negative ratio tends to balance out about the same, if with minor differences here and there.

It would be nice if one of them would join really solidly with Dodd, though, swearing to stick by him to the better end on the telecomm immunity issue and even pledging to try and whip up support for this cause, and an appeal for turning back the tide on the rising police state, among the general populace.