Southpaw mentioned the debt (edging up on $8 trillion). That’s the accumulated borrowing of the treasury over many, many years.

You’re talking about the deficit–the projected difference between revenues and expenses for this year only. The improvement of $94 billion was against a phony “projected” deficit and is made possible, in part, by a higher than expected level of payroll tax collections. You remember payroll taxes, don’t you JD?

The Democrats go from the Haunted Tree to the tree.

BTW. Hillary Clinton will hand him his simpering butt on a big fat platter. He has NO CHANCE.

Dugger, Self Acknowledged Expert On Democrat Politics

I think there is an important role for Gore: he’s a great thinker, good speaker, great guy for preaching to the eggheads among us. Like the college professor he probably would have been if his Senator daddy hadn’t gotten him into the family business.

Seriously, Clinton (like Reagan, and Kennedy) was born to be President of the United States. Shrub was born to own a baseball team, Dean to be a political organiser, Clark to be Secretary of State or NSA, and Gore to be the college professor whose lectures you most enjoy. Good things happen when people follow their own destiny, know their own strengths and weaknesses and limits, and make their way into the roles that best fit their talents. Disasters happen when– through weakness or lack of confidence or hubris or laziness (or all of the above)– they end up stumbling along their parents’ path into a line of work that just doesn’t suit them.

Both Gore and Shrub got pretty goddamned far in trying to outdo their daddies, but they both Peter Principle’d out at the moment of truth, where their committment to their path was finally tested: Gore in actually getting into office, and Shrub in actually governing.

All that said, the world would be a hell of a lot better off with a President Gore. After 9/11, Shrub squandered his political capital on the Iraq quagmire and push through tax cuts and the PATRIOT Act. Gore would have made more productive use of the post-9/11 unity by finally pushing through alternative-energy stimulus and conservation bills, and maybe even forcing through a bill to increase the fuel efficiency standards and eliminate the fucking SUV loophole (a luxury SUV is *not* a “light truck”, assholes!)– for national security reasons.

In other words, I miss my rightful president, and I’d vote for him again. I only hope he has a strategy to kick the press’s collective ass this time when they start making shit up. Again.

Yeeeaaarrgghh!