Ned Lamont not only has a comfortable lead among Connecticut Democrats, he is now dead even with all Nutmeg State voters, this poll finds.

Atrios links approvingly to this bit of unsubtle homophobia:

Randy Andy still seems to be having trouble figuring out if he's Roy Cohn or Oscar Wilde -- persecutor or persecuted. He's not alone: These days it seems like half of Right Blogistan is busy hurling accusations of betrayal and cowardice at the other half, while that other half is trying hard to ignore the many times it fired those same charges across the DMZ into Left Blogistan.
Well, let me help you out, Andy. To paraphrase Grady, the ghostly caretaker from The Shining: You're Roy Cohn. You've always been Roy Cohn. You may have managed to stuff your slime down your own memory hole, but you can't erase the electronic traces of it, which reveal that you aimed your little Wildean bon mot at Susan Sontag, Nom Chomsky, Michael Moore and Eric Alterman -- none of whom sympathized, immediately or later, with Al Qaeda, except in the diseased tissue of your own shrunken brain.

For whatever reason, Andrew Sullivan seems to turn the Kewl Kidz of the lefty blogosphere into W.A.T.B's. Over-the-top rhetoric that would make Ann Coulter blush always seems to find its way into attacks on someone who has recently become the blogosphere's most eloquent opponent of Bushism.

But I forgot: he once said nasty things about liberals in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. BFD.

Lance Who? With only a formality stage tomorrow, Floyd Landis is set to become the third American to win the only international competition Americans still do well in, the Tour de France. His comeback Thursday from eight minutes down is the stuff legends are made....

Dinosaur Rock:

I've really been saddened, in fact, by how often, when I drill down into anti-Lamonter motivations, I find their ideological and electoral motivations mere sandrock obscuring a core rage at this affront to tradition and orderly succession. I didn't believe this even a few months ago, but I've been forced to conclude that what scares folks about Lamont is that he represents an assault on privilege -- Joe Lieberman's, to be sure, but also theirs, no matter what sector of politics they currently represent.

In some ways, Lieberman is the canary in their coal mine, and if his sanctimonious song stops, so too may all of theirs. They never reacted this way to the Club for Growth primaries, or the Unions' promise to work against Melissa Bean, or NARAL's threats to primary Casey, because they were comfortable with the role and global motivations of those groups -- they were part of the structure, and they sought only to make it work better for them, not substantively challenge its mechanisms. The bloggers, however, are different, more unpredictable, less obviously invested in the perpetuation of this fine political system we have. And so they represent not a challenge to Joe Lieberman, but a challenge to the establishment as a whole. And that's why the establishment as a whole is howling.

--Ezra Klein

In fact, I bet if you look at ten or twenty of the most important political battles in the history of Western democracies, you'll find that most of them occurred within the same party, rather than in the actual battle for power itself. I'm reminded of what the Establishment forty years ago was saying when Eugene McCarthy had the audacity to challenge a sitting President for his party's nomination, in defiance of whatever conventional wisdom at the time said about how someone gets elected to that office. McCarthy was also a fairly undistinguished politician, like Lamont little more than a cipher, and his "followers" were motivated more by a desire to defeat LBJ than to bless the Republic with their candidate's ascension to power. LBJ didn't take the threat seriously until it was too late, and his career ended forthwith.

Little Green Firedogs (Pt. 2): On Bill Clinton's decision to campaign for St. Joseph:

Big Dog may not have taken it personally when Lieberman stabbed us all in the back with his speech on the floor of the Senate during the impeachment hearings, but many of us did. Loyalty to machine politics runs deep.

"Stabbed us all in the back?????" Of all the reasons one should support Ned Lamont, the fact that his opponent attacked President Clinton for lying under oath about an affair with an office underling should be way, way down on the list.

Hey, I love Elvis, thought he was the best President of the last half-century, hated Ken Starr and his GOP masters in Congress, and strenuously opposed the impeachment of the President. The entire matter was a ginned-up attempt to nail a politician they hated, and should be correctly regarded as one of the most distateful periods in American political history. Thanks to the GOP, the use of the impeachment mechanism to remove a President will be seen as a partisan stunt for a long time to come, something that a Congressional majority does to register its displeasure with a President of the opposing party.

But anyone who is so morally abtuse as to regard Clinton's behavior during the Lewinsky Affair as appropriate, not worthy of censure, really has a hollow core. In the autumn of '98, Clinton didn't do anything to earn our loyalty with his boorishness and dishonesty, so how can anyone other than his most obsequious retainers feel that Lieberman "stabbed us all in the back." Fighting for liberal principles doesn't entail putting on our collective kneepads everytime a Democrat is under attack for his sleazy transgressions.

It's a shame that the ratings for this year's Tour de France are in the toilet, because this year is the first time in awhile that there's actually a competition for the title, and an American might actually win it again.

Meltdown: Matt Stoller has a good exegesis of the shocking collapse of the Lieberman incumbency. Whoever said that this was like watching your standard-issue incompetent Democratic campaign consultant, but from the outside, really nailed it.

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?

Somalia 1, Rwanda 0: Absolutely my last soccer post for awhile.

In the wake of the unfolding tragedy in Lebanon, it's comforting to know that there are still people in the blogosphere who can post something so utterly and confoundingly clueless. Holy shit, indeed....

Bush Works Blue: Actually, the really embarassing thing is his eating with his mouth open. A classless, vulgarian buffoon.

UPDATE: Omigod. I remember how perturbed the British were twenty-five years ago when President Carter gave the Queen Mother a peck on the cheek. Now we've sunk to the level of having a President who's giving an unwanted neck message in public to the German Chancellor, just on the heels of dropping a vulgarity in the presence of the Prime Minister of Great Britain. And that's the level of respect he gives to the world leaders who are his allies. I'm now wondering how it would effect my license to practice law if I turned in my passport....