Sen. Olympia Snowe ends run for re-election

[sofa king]

109. That's a viable possibility.

Another thing making a stand-up filibuster a requirement might do is it could potentially kill off one of the most annoying but least well known maneuvers available to Senators, the anonymous hold.

The "hold" stems directly from the threat of a filibuster. In a nutshell, a Senator can place a hold on a bill and it effectively is put on ice, so that the Senate doesn't have to lose further business-time by actually filibustering it.

I've been pestering Ruy Texiera with a hypothesis of my own, which is that the Bush coup policies actually did an excellent job of killing off Republican voters, particularly white males in southern states, where life expectancy for them has dropped below 50 years in a couple of cases. They're less likely to seek government assistance and less able to negotiate a bureaucratic process, with all its reading and logic (both of which are foreign languages to conservatives). If I'm right, Ruy's Emerging Democratic Majority is accelerating faster than anyone is willing to guess.

So far, he doesn't seem to be buying it, though.