When will the Village stop churning out these “both sides do it” pieces?

Bob Gates successfully convinced Brown on the implementation process, which should concern people a bit, especially as Gates might not be around to do the implementation. Gates did say that he would not “slow-walk” things, but what about his successor? What if a President Palin reaches office without implementation in place, and she just never certifies it? I don’t know if that’s likely, but it’s something to watch.

The military’s survey on attitudes toward gay and lesbian service members is slated for release today, and early reports are that they don’t really care about changes to the policy that would allow their colleagues to serve openly.

Finally, some good news coming out of November’s election: Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) will replace outgoing Sen. Blanche Lincoln on the Senate Agriculture committee as chair.

Blanche Lincoln’s loss was immediately called in Arkansas. John Boozman gave the second pickup for Republicans of the night, though two others were held off. John Raese has lost to Joe Manchin in West Virginia, and Linda McMahon lost to Richard Blumenthal in Connecticut. Republicans held Georgia, New Hampshire and North Carolina Senate seats, the [...]

Protected the progressive brand. Consistently fought for progressive values and applied the same yardstick to both Democrats and Republicans, demonstrating that progressives aren’t just fickled hacks who only care about demagoguing issues they will readily sell out in a cynical attempt to gain power for themselves.

Blanche Lincoln just joined Republicans to scuttle the defense bill, and with it the DREAM Act and DADT repeal–both purportedly Administration priorities (to say nothing about the Defense bill itself). Moreover, no amount of money is going to get Blanche out of her electoral hole this year. And her patrons, the Waltons, have plenty to give her all by themselves, without picking the pockets of Boston liberals.

So why is Joe Biden wasting some of his precious time and political capital helping a woman who, yesterday, broke with the party on the defense bill?

Nobody in the history of electoral politics, and I mean nobody, believes that telling people to “get over it” will get them to the polls. (Well, nobody but Spiro Agnew.) And you can bet your bottom dollar that come 2012, when Obama’s own electoral future is on the line, that won’t be his message.

Bill Halter appeared on the morning panel, and I got to steal a few minutes with him. I asked him about the difficulty running against candidates who “progressive-wash” themselves. Blanche Lincoln came out with this derivatives title that she “wrote” right before the primary, blunting Halter’s message of Lincoln as a Wall Street fighter. Halter said that the complexity of the specific issue made it even harder to counteract the message – it was hard to wrap Arkansans heads around the fact that Lincoln left a big loophole in her Section 716 of the bill, for example, or that she didn’t filibuster the bill when Maria Cantwell was doing so precisely because her derivatives title became unenforceable. This is something that progressives need to figure out, because incumbents have done this over and over again to inoculate themselves from criticism from the left.

Several new polls of the Arkansas Senate race have been released, and they all point to the same conclusion: Democrat Blanche Lincoln is going to lose her re-election bid and lose it badly. Get ready for Republican Senator John Boozman.