I am not making this up.

Two recent stories from the New York Times -

"The full Senate is poised to consider the nonbinding, yet strongly symbolic, repudiation of Mr. Bush as early as Wednesday. Democratic leaders agreed to tone down the language in the resolution, hoping to make it more acceptable to Republicans in an effort to send a strong, bipartisan rebuke to the White House."

“This is not designed to say, ‘Mr. President, ah-ha, you’re wrong,’ ” said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat and chairman of the committee. “This is designed to say, ‘Mr. President, please don’t go do this.’ ” You will remember that this Senator Biden is the same one who last summer was seen on video commenting in a re-election fundraiser that you could not "go to a Dunkin Donuts or 7-11 without a slight Indian accent". And that was an attempt to endear himself to the constituent.

Were the Senate, the greatest deliberative body in the world (as it claims to be), it would take a real action but instead Biden and crew (In addition to his Dunkin Donut remarks, this guy was the one who thought it OK when running for president to simply lift full speeches from other politicians - most notably Neal Kinnock, the British MP. There were also questions about whether this light of reasoned principle plagarized in his legal writing class.) simply want to take a "strongly symbolic" action. This is not Biden's action alone - the full Foreign Relations committee participated in this farce.

Two points should be mentioned - first, I would disagree with this action were it symbolic or not. And I also recognize there is also a delicate balance between the President and the Senate on these types of matters - but this "strongly symbolic" action is simply nonsense. It shows how low the state of legislative debate has sunk.

and then there was this surprise ---- John Kerry, confirmed the obvious, he has finally figured out he will not be candidate for president in 2008 -

“We came close, certainly close enough to be tempted to try again, there are powerful reasons to want to follow that fight now,” (most of them based on the raw personal ambition that I have exercised over the last thirty years of my career) Mr. Kerry said, invoking his 2004 race, at the conclusion of a 30-minute speech attacking Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy on the floor of the United States Senate.“I’ve concluded that this isn’t the time for me to mount a presidential campaign. It is the time to put my energy to work as part of the majority of the Senate and do all I can to end the war.” Oh, by the way, the Formerly French Mr. Kerry did not say that polls put him down to levels where he would have to gain three points to get to a positive number. Kerry has been a fraud since the early 1970s when he stayed in the Watergate hotel while his "troops" in the VVAW bivouaced in mud in the shadow of the Washington Monument. The reason he is not running for president is obvious to all but him.