I'm glad to see Carl Levin say that changing course in Iraq is "the first order of business," and his renewed calls for a phased withdrawal to begin in four-to-six months are welcome. It's a beginning, and any beginning to the end of this war is a good one.

Only problem is -- where's the end?

Despite all the nonsense about how "corruption," "conservative Democrats," and "religious voters" swung the 2006 elections for the Democrats, there can really be no argument, among honest minds, that Iraq was the signature issue of this campaign. Even though most prominent national Democrats had to be dragged by their hair into engaging the issue, the candidates and staffers and volunteers on the ground, especially in the newly blue districts, will tell you that voters are tired of the war, they want something done about it, and they want it done soon.

But what to do?

The Americans can't return the three years that Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost lost, locked in a cell in Guantánamo Bay. But they could at least give back his poetry.

"Please help," said Dost, who says he penned 25,000 lines of verse during his long imprisonment. "Those words are very precious to me. My interrogators promised I would get them back. Still I have nothing."

New technology, indeed. There's more:

Apparently, though, it's not possible for the Administration to stop settling old scores.

Reuters yesterday ran this report, titled "Entergy Appeal for New Orleans Aid Rejected":

One of the things we've been hearing all morning out of Washington is that one needn't have been a judge to be on the Supreme Court.  True enough.  By my count,  it's happened 42 times out of 109 total justices,  most recently when William Rehnquist was named to the court.

But I do think it's safe to say that rarely (if ever) have a Supreme Court nominee's qualifications and accomplishments been so . . . well,  feeble.  Now,  I'm no judicial scholar,  but I can read a resume.  Here's how Miers stacks up with the other 42 SC nominees with no judicial experience.  You can read Miers' dossier here.

I watched your performance in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina this week with revulsion and astonishment.  On Thursday,  when given the chance by CNN to voice your urgent request that the President of the United States do something about your constituents who were dying,  instead you appeared almost medicinally calm while praising the non-existent president for his support and thanking him for all his help and admiring how he knew what was going on in Louisiana.  This was after three days of the president and his administration doing nothing,  the same day the director of FEMA and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security admitted that they had no idea that there were 15-20,000 people camped out at the New Orleans Convention Center.

It's possible that I've just missed this one,  but something struck me about the WaPo story that quoted the "senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion." Has the verb "absorb" in a transfigurative sense become one of these "dynamic" buzz words,  or is it a verbal peculiarity of one man in particular?