I have figured out a way to get the Republicans to understand why they should lead the fight against the current version of the FISA bill.

Emphasize that Obama is likely to win the presidential nomination, and point out that the Democrats could end up with a majority in the House and a strong majority in the Senate.

Then, have Dennis Kucinich or some other progressive get up and start a campaign to have Obama use FISA to investigate Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Karl Rove, Fox News and other purveyors of hate. Point out that these folks are worthy targets of FISA spying because they seem to be nurturing hate groups that appear to have ties with potentially terroristic neo-Nazi groups in Europe.

Once the wingnuts start thinking that the Democrats will somehow try to use FISA against them, maybe they'll understand why it's a bad thing.

Today, I see a highly recommended diary about a Democrat from Tennessee who is questioning whether Obama has ties to terrorists.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Republicans have to do everything they can to paint Obama as a Friend of Al Qaeda because John McCain is a former friend of Charles Keating, and Keating apparently was a customer of BCCI.

BCCI was what you might think of as "Al Qaeda: The Early, Financial Institution Version."

It seems to me that one huge question right now is: how do we make fun of a presidential candidate who is threatening to perpetuate policies that could end civilization as we know it without also making fun of the effects of cancer and torture?

Maybe some people on Daily Kos truly hate John McCain, but, at this point, I think that probably 95 percent of us here want to see Obama crush him in the polls in November, but for him to go on and have a happy, prosperous life with his children and grandchildren. And I certainly don't want to write anything that's aimed at McCain but unintentionally hurts other people who are dealing with the effects of cancer or torture.

It would be great if a user with more mojo would start a diary or story like this, but, as far as I can tell, no one else has, so here's a try.

I'm sure that one reason Hillary Clinton is still running is to stay in the race in case she can get the Democatic nomination through some unexpected twist of fate. Another reason may have something to do with campaign finances. But a third reason is probably to show us what she's made of.

I think that Obama himself has already shown the way to start to get HRC to let her guard down: to treat her with kindness that she doesn't expect.

Maybe it would be helpful if Obama would come here and to other Web message boards and, under his own name, officially post a statement saying something like the following: "I know all kinds of unpleasant things get said during a campaign, but I was serious when I said that Hillary Clinton was my friend before the primary season started and will be my friend once it's over. When you write about Hillary, please understand that you're writing about my friend."

I was going to put this in an unrelated comment to an existing tax diary. But, anyhow: here is an idea free for the use of anyone who likes it.

Encourage people to pay taxes and view paying taxes as the privilege that it is by doing more to make paying taxes fun.

Even a lot of Democrats seem to fail to understand that we pay a lot of taxes because we have a government that does all sorts of great things, such as sending people into space, maintaining national parks, and helping retirees.

Instead of us Democrats just saying, "Let's be realistic, we have to come up with the revenue to keep our government going," why not think like United Way or PBS and give people immediate incentives to pay taxes?

Suggestion: The Democratic party should require participants in the presidential primary process to promise to support the Democratic nominee, whoever the nominee turns out to be, or at least to avoid recommending or implying, at any time during or after the primary, that voters should vote for someone other than the Democratic party nominee, unless the party orders him/her to do so.

If the nominee turns out to be a Nazi, or an evil space alien, or something shocking along those lines, the other Democratic candidates should not have to support the nominee.

Otherwise, the losing candidates should swallow hard and at least speak no evil about the nominee.

Primary participants also should have to promise not to run as independent candidates if they lose.

The party should enforce this rule by including a provision giving it the right to seize something important (such as $1 million, or maybe the candidate's house or car) from the candidate if the candidate betrays Democratic voters by breaking away from the party whenever the party gives him/her a message s/he doesn't like.

Suppose Obama comes out way ahead tomorrow.

I think the Bush Rovie Viguerie Hate Machine -- aka the shadowy Swift Boater public relations agencies -- will start implementing plans they probably already have to focus the hatred people have been accustomed to beaming at Hillary Clinton at Obama's wife, Michelle Obama.

The Hate Machine slimed HRC, then Tipper Gore, then Howard Dean's saintly wife (just because she sometimes did things other than campaigning), then Teresa Heinz Kerry. Now Michelle Obama is moving into the crosshairs, and I think the Hate Machine will hit her much harder, because her husband is so beloved and appears to be such a difficult target.

I think it's ultra important that Obama's campaign and the Democratic Party know how they want to handle those attacks before the attacks begin.

Certainly, there are differences between our candidates, and they (and us supporters) can say mean and dumb things. But I think Clinton, Edwards and Obama have plenty in common, both in terms of politics and in terms of their personal lives. If they signed up for a Web dating site, the site would probably arrange to have them go out on dates with one another.

So, why do they all seem to be so angry with one another? I think it's super important that they and we keep in mind that it might be partly because the Bush Rovie Viguerie people could be employing dirty tricks squads to maximize inter-campaign hostility.

If you reading this happen to be Hillary Clinton, or John Edwards, or Barack Obama, and you're privately mad at one of the other candidates because of mean things the other candidate has supposedly said about you, please ask yourself: how do you know if you know what that candidate really said?

I just today got an e-mail from Gary Kreep's "United States Justice Foundation," which seems to use the same e-mail list as RightMarch.com and other wingnut talking point spreaders.

See this SourceWatch description and this article  about a judgment resulting from the USJF's harassment of women seeking abortions.

It looks as if the USJF has rounded up the money to Swift Boat HRC, using contributions from Norman Hsu and relationships with people from Dubai as the hook. The e-mail campaign also seems to be aimed at disrupting Barbara Boxer's office, because it calls for recipients to flood Boxer with complaints.

It seems as if the MoveOn.org/BetrayUs hysteria is yet another example of the Viguerie/Rovie hysteria machine at work.

The people who run the hysteria machine are happy if they have some genuine Democratic scandal to work with, such as the Lewinsky scandal. But, if they don't have obvious material, they'll sift through the news of the week, texts of speeches, ads, etc. to find something they can work with.

They are, basically, like the producers of the WEEKLY HYSTERIA SHOW, a kind of 60 Minutes or Saturday Night Live of rightwing hysteria. Probably most (maybe all) of what they do is as legal as whatever it is the 60 Minutes and SNL people do, but it is possible that some monkey business is going on, and maybe the Democrats could deal with the Weekly Hysteria Show better if they thought more about how it's produced. I, of course, have no direct knowledge, but, in the body, I give my best guesses about how the WEEKLY HYSTERIA SHOW might operate.

I might have missed something. But, anyhow, if this hasn't happened yet: all of the major Democratic presidential candidates ought to get together and declare to one another that, if people like Coulter or the Swift Boaters truly slime any of them, they are all slimed, and that they mutually will unite to denounce the sliming. They ought to start by issuing a joint statement expressing concern about Ann Coulter's "joke" about wanting John Edwards to be assassinated.

Really, if a well-known liberal columnist were ever to write such a terrible thing about Giuliani or Romney, the Democratic candidates ought to put out a joint statement denouncing that, too.

The Democratic candidates have nothing to lose by uniting against hate speech and Swift Boating and everything to gain.

I'm one of the members of the Jewish, pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian contingent here who tries mightily to support the proposition that, if France and Germany can be staunch allies, the Israelis and Palestinians can find a way to get along, too.

This can be a thankless position to take. I finally tried looking for some Palestinian sites by Palestinian people who are in the middle with me. I found some great, lawyerly human rights type sites and some news sites, and some moderate sites by Arab people who are not Palestinians but claim to speak for the Palestinians. But I've had a hard time finding English-language sites that are actually by Palestinians, in Palestine, that take what I would consider to be a humanistic, down-to-earth, progressive approach to all of this.

Anyhow, I have found what I think is a really great site, by Laila El-Haddad, at Raising Yousuf, Unplugged: diary of a Palestinian mother, and I think it would be nice if people here gave it some hits.

A new document release release of documents gives some details about how the New York Police Department monitored peaceful protest groups around the time of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. This all happened under NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's watch, and I think all of this stuff should completely disqualify Bloomberg from winning an election for national office.

The New York police, for example, ended up jailing thousands of peaceful political protesters -- including Summer Starr, the daughter of a founder of the Hawaiian Republican party -- in a filthy, possibly toxic pier house on the Hudson River.

Now, we find that:

The NYPD kept tabs on the biggest names in hip hop as well as peaceniks, anarchists, anti-war bloggers, a city councilman and at least one hippie pie-tosser as cops girded for protests at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

If you're reading this and have mojo: please help investigate and discredit MoveAmericaForward, or pick up on this diary and diary more about the organization (if you see its ads) to help reduce its ability to make mischief.

I saw the group's new ad, "Win in Iraq," on cable TV in the Midwest over the weekend, and the ad was like a sample ad out of "Goebbels' Guide to TV Advertising." The point of the ad is that people who oppose the wars who hate the troops and want them dead and will lead to the United States being nuked.

Hail Ripley posted a highly recommended diary in January that talked about Move America Forward in connection with the KSFO "hate TV" controversy, but I just feel as if the TV ad campaign is so awful that it ought to be getting attention here now.

I'm just getting over some kind of cold from heck during which I had a 104 degree fever but otherwise was never quite obviously sick enough to call the doctor.

But I am hypochondriacal enough to try to use Blogsearch to see if I have some kind of thing other than the usual "winter sucks" bug. It looks as if there is, but it's hard to tell. To me, one possible indicator is that the metadiscussions got crankiest as my fever was peaking, which made me wonder if some of the angriest comments were posted by people also running 104 degree fevers.

Anyhow, I was wondering if in your area you'd noticed people getting colds from heck, or maybe even run into someone energetic enough to go to a doctor and identify the bug from heck?

John McCain has introduced S. 4089, a bill that would require ordinary message board Webmasters to go through roughly the same formal notification process for kiddie porn posters that an ISP now has to go through.

CNET has published an article pointing out how burdensome this kind of bill could be for small-time message board managers.

On the one hand, kiddie porn is awful and ought to be stopped. On the other hand, I think we have to figure out how to keep well-meaning people (and, of course, devious creeps) from giving wouild-be authoritarian dictators the tools they need to use a combination of censorship, fear and fear of censorship to suppress open opposition.

I think one thing that's happening on Daily Kos this week is that, after months of holding our breath and wishing for change of any kind, some of us are remembering that we're really Greens, some that we're liberals, some that we're moderate liberals (that's me), some that we're moderates, and even some that we're conservatives who simply saw that the Bush Rovies were running the country into the ground.

I think that Democrats will do a lot better if we continue to show that we, unlike the Republicans, understand that working with friends who happen to hold different points of view is what democracy is about. We ought to minimize the number of litmus tests and maximize the amount of love and respect we beam in every possible direction.

The journal Science has published an article suggesting that just about all sources of seafood may run out by the time the youngest Daily Kos Readers are getting ready to retire:

Overfishing May Harm Seafood Population
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID

WASHINGTON (AP) - Clambakes, crabcakes, swordfish steaks and even humble fish sticks could be little more than a fond memory in a few decades. If current trends of overfishing and pollution continue, the populations of just about all seafood face collapse by 2048, a team of ecologists and economists warns in a report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.