Garbo Talks: For those of you who've wondered what an Exchaton post might look like if he bothered to make an argument more substantive than "Wankers", "W.AT.B." or "Thread Away", this morning's local paper of record has an op-ed slice of Prof. Black, about the primary campaign against Joe Lieberman, that's well worth reading.

He hits all the right notes ("Lieberman's problem isn't bloggers, it's the voters of Connecticut, who seem to be increasingly tired of his support for some very uncivil policies, including federal intervention into the Terri Schiavo case, the administration's operations at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay and, yes, that disastrous invasion of Iraq"), eschews trite idioms (no reference to the "netroots"), and avoids even a semblance of the seething rage that has proven so cancerous to the progressive blogosphere. However, the lack of any positive reason for why the Republic needs Ned Lamont in the U.S. Senate is telling. Has there ever been a cipher with so devoted a cohort of loyal supporters as the Cable King? If Ned Lamont were running against Ben Nelson, a Democratic Senator whose record is quite a bit more conservative than Holy Joe's, would Lamont's "voice" and "vision" be as needed? Would anyone care?