Bernie Sanders is filibustering the tax bill, on the Twitter

You can watch it live on C-Span, or just follow the grumpy old Socialist  as he posts his tweets whenever he hands the lectern over to Mary Landrieu, who thinks the Obama-GOP compromise is "almost morally corrupt" even though she voted for the original Bush tax cuts.

Anyway, this how the filibuster should work, if the U.S. Senate were actually functional while being dysfunctional: The senators try to break the other side by reading from the phone book Sarah Palin's book, the sergeant-at-arm carries them a piss pot, and everybody has visions of Jimmy Stewart dancing in their heads. Instead, whenever Mitch McConnell starts to whisper "Filib-...," Harry Reid throws up his hands and the Democrats go home in a sulk, watching sadly as the GOP carves another notch in its belt.

You go, Bernie! Show them how the game should be played.

President Kucinich?

The New York Times raises the spectre:

Just last weekend, three liberal writers made the case for taking on Mr. Obama in 2012. Michael Lerner, longtime editor of Tikkun magazine, argued in The Washington Post that a primary represented a “real way to save the Obama presidency,” by forcing Mr. Obama to move leftward. Robert Kuttner, co-founder of The American Prospect and one of the party’s most scathing populist voices, issued a similar call on The Huffington Post, suggesting Iowa as the ideal incubator.

On the same site, Clarence B. Jones, a one-time confidant of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., suggested that liberals should break with Mr. Obama now, just as Dr. King and others did with Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. “It is not easy to consider challenging the first African-American to be elected president of the United States,” Mr. Jones wrote. “But, regrettably, I believe the time has come to do this.”

Meanwhile, in Iowa, a group known as the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, originally founded to aid Democratic Congressional candidates in 2010, has started broadcasting an advertisement that shows Mr. Obama, in 2008, promising to reverse the tax cuts for the most affluent Americans. The group isn’t advocating a primary challenge just yet — but then, the choice of Iowa as a market seems intended to send a pretty clear warning to the White House.

Spectre. We haven't heard that word since James Bond.