I plan to contribute in the next primary election against these "Blue Dogs" for any progressive candidates they may oppose them. They are contributing to opposing Obama's agenda for their own political gain and I want to see a new path away from these conservadems!

Um, OK, who gave this guy the keys to TPM posting abilities?

What IS this crap?

A mighty "smackdown" from Reid!! Yes, that's what happened. Will those stupid hippies finally shut up and let Reid's genius method of losing every fight he ever enters flourish? Let's hope so, and in the mean time, here's a totally bogus story about it based on absolutely NOTHING! yay.

If they fold, it will be clear that the progressive movement in the Democratic Party is just for show, while centrists rule.

That they could not respond immediately with a rejection of the remarks shows that they have become wholly owned Dem Party organs, which, because the Dems are dominated by centrists, means these "progressives" are ineffective and just for show.

I thought we were saving most of the infighting for the Republicans. Can't we all just get along? Or at least not overreact.

these groups should leave [the "Moderate Dem Working Group] alone," Reid said. "It's not helpful to me. It's not helpful to the Democratic Caucus."

But a group formed with the intention of portraying Obama as a scary leftist is hugely helpful to Democratic Caucus.

Now I'm gonna have to blow the dust off my checkbook and send some money to the next group that goes after the Senate Blue Dogs.

PS- STFU, Harry.

Fire up the Senate business card press. I think I see a new moniker for Reid:

Helpful Harry

So why can't Reid find his Cajones,when Burris was seated,while Franken still needs to be seated,and when the GOP has been uncooperative?

I guess it's easier to fight his own !!

What Harry, his Blue Dog buddies, the GOP asswipes, and even the Obama Administration needs to understand is this: there's more Change where the last batch came from if they don't clean up their acts. I think Obama gets it, not to sure about the others, though.

Performance, honesty, and integrity are the new Red, White, and Blue. Get to work, children of Congress.

I'll bet Harry Reid has some redeeming qualities. Why does he hide them?

Those of you busting on moderate Dems and crying the limited extent to which your dream progressive agenda is being pursued... I suggest you talk to A LOT more Americans than your usual circle.

This IS a center right nation, that hasn't changed. Given the negatives on the Republican plate (the dragging on of the wars, collapse of the economy, lack of improvement in standard of living for avg Americans, lack of core support for McCain and the presence of other options like Ron Paul)... the election should have been a BLOW OUT.

It was not.

Instead of recognizing the inherent moderate right reality that is the American electorate, the lefty left is crowing that their narrow lead in the Senate and close election of a President is a mandate.

Don't you see that moving too far to the left and punishing Blue dogs etc. is just the mirror image of the Republican strategy that appears to be working soooo well for them (hint... that was sarcasm).

As reality-impaired as GWBush was, I think he still represents the emotional heart of many Amurrricans, and I still wager there are far more Amurrricans out there than folks that would agree with readers of TPM.

From a New Yorker profile of Harry Reid: Today in Searchlight, which is about a mile long, one can see the two-room cinder-block schoolhouse that Reid attended, a small casino on the main street, and a McDonald’s. Almost all the houses are double-wide mobile homes, with no landscaping.

There were about two hundred people left in the town when Reid was born, in 1939, the third of four sons of Harry Reid, Sr., a gold miner with an elementary-school education, and his wife, Inez, who did laundry for some of the local bordellos, which were by then the town’s primary business. Reid’s boyhood home was built out of scavenged railroad ties; it had no indoor toilet and no hot water. There were no telephones in Searchlight until the nineteen-fifties. When Reid’s younger brother, Larry, broke a leg in a bicycle accident, the leg was never set. “We didn’t go to doctors in those days unless it was a matter of life and death,” Reid said. “And he just lay there. It was so painful, and you couldn’t touch the bed. And that’s the way it just was for several days.” (Larry and another brother are retired; the third, an alcoholic, died in 1977.) Reid’s parents drank and his father often got into brawls. “He didn’t like people coming around and wouldn’t let us answer the door even if we were home,” Reid said. When he could no longer work, because of silicosis, a miner’s cough, Reid’s father stopped drinking, but at the age of fifty-eight he committed suicide, with a gunshot to the head. “He was always depressed,” Reid said, adding that his father’s depression was evident to him only in hindsight. “We always joke that Dad sobered up and killed himself.” His mother tacked to the wall a blue pillowcase with gold fringe and a message of perseverance that originated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “We can. We will. We must.”

Because the school in Searchlight went only up to eighth grade, every week Reid hitchhiked forty miles to Henderson, a factory town, where he boarded with relatives while he went to the public high school. “I always knew I wanted to get out of there,” he said of Searchlight. “I knew that from the time I was a little kid.” In Henderson, Reid met Landra Gould, the woman whom he eventually married. Reid said that Gould’s parents, who were Jewish, liked him until they realized how serious the couple was—“They wanted their daughter to marry a Jewish boy”—and tried to end the relationship. Her father, Landra Reid told me, “would tear up Harry’s letters, hang up the phone on him. They had a fight in the front yard.” Reid has said that the fight ended when he knocked his future father-in-law, a chiropractor, to the ground. Landra says, “I remember a lot of yelling and pushing.” In 1959, when Harry was twenty and Landra was nineteen, they eloped. After a honeymoon dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Las Vegas, Landra called home to report the news; within days, she got a letter from her parents saying that, despite their misgivings, their daughter’s happiness came first. Reid now wears his father-in-law’s ring.

In Henderson, Reid also met Donal (Mike) O’Callaghan, who arrived at the high school to teach government and boxing. O’Callaghan, who had lost a leg in the Korean War and was just ten years older than Reid, became a hero to Reid after he faced down a school bully. Reid, a catcher on the school’s championship baseball team and a guard on the football team, learned to box from O’Callaghan, who helped him win a partial athletic scholarship to a junior college in Utah and later helped pay his way through law school. O’Callaghan, like Reid, had larger ambitions: in the seventies, he served two terms as governor of Nevada, and he went on to become the executive editor of the Las Vegas Sun and a sometime columnist for the paper. When he died, last year, Reid eulogized him as the best friend he had ever had. McCue told me that the only time she ever saw Reid cry was at the news of O’Callaghan’s death.

While Harry was in college, he and Landra converted to Mormonism. “The thing that was so impressive to me—in addition to the spiritual aspects that I’d never experienced before—was the emphasis on family,” Reid said. “The biggest jump for me,” Landra Reid said, “was to try to understand the connection between Judaism and the Old Testament and the New Testament, and how to make any sense of how Christianity fit into it.” She added, “Before we got married, we had talked about it and decided we were not going to let religion divide us after what we’d been through. If we found something, we were going to find it together.” Until both of her parents died, Harry Reid said, the family observed the Jewish holidays. “My two oldest children have great affection for things Jewish, and my three younger children are aware of their mother’s lineage, and all of them are very proud of the fact that they are eligible for Israeli citizenship.” On the doorway of their house in Searchlight, the Reids have a mezuzah.

The Reids’ house, a Mediterranean-style two-bedroom home that faces the open desert, is situated on a hundred acres at the end of a long dirt road. They had it built four years ago, after living for years in a double-wide. Reid’s friend Jay Brown, a Las Vegas lawyer and a Brooklyn native, said, “You should have seen the trailer,” and complained that simply getting there ruined the tires of his car. Reid is a former marathoner—he ran twelve races before an injury and then a fall sidelined him. Now he takes an hour-long walk each morning, often with Landra, whose presence appears to put him in a lighter mood.

Listen Harry & staff who are reading this, [and I am told you are]:

Your efforts are not helping me either. I am a Democratic Party official at the grass roots level. If you don't like us knocking or banging on your door---TOOO F&#CK!^G bad. You are part of the elite that put us all in this friggin mess.

Make your decision, either get in line with the ordinary Americans or go over to the elite and protect them, but you can't do both.

I have told this to our Senators, onethis is the same surprised the status quo elite when Obama forces beat the elite Clinton. We are not afraid of contested races....By the way read Sikota's book on Uprising.