The smartest proposal I've seen is Murtha's:

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pennsylvania, said he is working on a proposal, first reported in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, that would tie the president's request for billions in additional war funding to current troop readiness levels.

Under Murtha's proposal, if troop readiness levels in the United States were to fall below a certain fixed percentage level, Congress would restrict funding for more troops in Iraq.

Murtha said his proposal is not about cutting off money for troops but about building up a "strategic reserve" in the military. He called it "diverting funds to things needed in the United States to get troops ready. That's what I'm prepared to do."
Rahm Emmanuel supports it (from a WaPo article):

Rather than try to restrict funds for the troops (which he sees as a political blunder that would delight Republicans), Emanuel instead favors a proposal by Rep. John Murtha to set strict standards for readiness -- which would make it hard to finance the troop surge in Iraq without beefing up the military as a whole. The idea is to position the Democrats as friends of the military, even as they denounce Bush's Iraq policy.

Oops, block quotes got messed up above. Anyway, here is the WaPo link.

I love this story about Maliki giving the Bush administration a taste of their own medicine.

I've discovered I disagree with about 90% of what ECB says, but even I think it's so amazingly ridiculous that when a woman because a focus of media attention (in this case Pelosi for being Speaker), the attention is immediately put on her f'ing wardrobe. Save that sh!t for the red carpet.

Speaking of double-standards on female politicians, I noticed that the media often publish the most unflattering possible pictures of Hillary Clinton. In today's Guardian there was a very large photo of her in a prominent location, and it was zoomed in very closely on her face -- not just framing her face, but zoomed in to just include from her forehead to her chin, so that you could see how many wrinkles she has and in general it was just a very unflattering picture. They obviously chose such a severe picture deliberately, and I can't imagine they would do such a thing for a middle-aged male policitian.

Why don't they call Hillary, Senator Clinton? That's what they do for every other frickin Senator.

When your sex organs are on the inside, The Man has to find something on the outside to focus on - thus boobs, fashion, looks, etc.