Running for a super majority kinda grosses people out. WE WANT TOTAL POWER! Good luck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses

The house democrats have a relatively strong majority, yes. Not a veto-proof majority, but substantial nevertheless.

The senate democrats, on the other hand, have the slimmest of slim majorities, if you count Lieberman (who you really can't count on) and the senator from South Dakota who had a stroke and spent most of the last 6 months half-unconscious. This is more a theoretical majority than any kind of real power.

And obviously the moron occupying the white house, who vetoed multiple attempts to outlaw torture.

You can make a rational argument that the democrats in the Washington state legislature are pissing away their power as majority party, since they hold all the cards right now. But the democrats have no real power of any significance in the other Washington.

Wrong question.

It isn't who are they running against, it's who are they running for. And the answer to that is all Americans who have had enough of the current "leadership", executive branch in particular, who have failed to provide us with a road map to ending this war.

Obviously Burner is running against Reichert, one of the Republicans that continues to block these bills.

For example, in the executive summary, there's this section:

Using U.S. diplomatic power:

Much of the remaining work to be completed in Iraq requires the effective use of diplomatic power. Many of Iraq's neighbors are currently contributing to instability and need to be persuaded to assist instead in stabilization.

How would this "persuasion" work? Unfortunately the plan itself does not have a parallel structure to the executive summary. I looked in pages 12 to 16, trying to find any mention of how to contain Iran and Turkey from destabilizing the country. There's a mention on page 13 of this:

vi. Energize countries to support national political reconciliation in Iraq.

However, this is quite vague. I don't think the current Iranian government will go along. How do we "force" other governments to go along? See page 15:

>>We must create a regional dialogue that forces all the neighbors to come together.

Another item that is puzzling is this, on page 14:

>>We propose the expanded use of nonmilitary
personnel working at the grassroots level to strengthen the capacity of towns and villages to resist
the insurgency on their own, as well as an internationalization of the effort.

This is quite nice, but who is going to keep these brave souls safe? Especially if there's a troop drawdown going on which seems to be one of the first actions that occurs under this "plan"?

There are some parts I simply don't have the knowledge to assess, but do take at face value. I think the poison gas Saddam unleashed on his citizens, and the destruction of the marsh Arab culture, and the attacks on Kurds, did impact women and men equally, so I think this on page 16 is probably a fair statement:

>>Iraq, prior to the invasion, was one of the more egalitarian societies in the Middle East with respect to
women.

The closing section on preventing future Iraqs has a big gaping hole about the intelligence. Pure and simple, we did not have correct information about Saddam's weapons programs. So the big question is how do we get the truth about Iran, North Korea, Al Qaeda and other threats? I would include China's military as a long-term threat as well. THere's nothing in the plan about intelligence service reform. However, intelligence is vague in some cases. So how do we get electeds to make smarter decisions under uncertain information?