It may not seem like much, but I was pretty charged up about actually winning an IM discussion regarding Iraq and veterans with a right-wing friend of mine.  I couldn't have done it without dKOS, either --- I know, I've tried before and my head usually explodes before I can make any coherent points.  Which is why I'm excited and wanted to thank you all for providing the necessary clarity, talking points, and inspiration.  And heck, it's a Friday afternoon -- seems like a great time for such a thing.

Quotes and retrospective after the fold.

Just saw this article in the WashingtonPost about a single mother connection service that enables women to house-share with other women with young kids --- didn't see any other diaries about it so I thought I'd, uh... expound... for a bit.  The article itself is mostly unoffensive; it points out that many single mothers find life easier if they can share mortgages, activities, and parenting responsibilities with another single parent.  It gives major (and well-deserved) kudos to to the founder of Co-abode.org, an online service that makes all this possible.

It may have been purposeful, to not soil this admirable story with a air of controversy, but not once in the whole article are same-sex households where the two parents have sex with each other mentioned.  And maybe it's just me, but it seems that there are obvious parallels worth mentioning.  Excerpts and commentary on the flip.

This will be my first posting to daily KOS - I couldn't find a diary on the subject, so I'm sorry if I'm duplicating.  Like many West Coast office-dwellers, most of my coverage of the Gonzalez and Rice Senate floor debates came from this website (thanks, lesliet, and others willing to transcribe!), and during these debates I saw several comments which went unanswered about "Do Senators respond to out-of-state calls?" and "Email them right now - I've emailed them 5 times."

Let me first start with a disclaimer --- I haven't been on the Hill in coming up on 5 years, so some of what I have to say may be dated (as to Senate office treatments of emails and such), but I invite any Kossacks (That is the right term, yes?  I'm new here.) who have more recent experience to please contribute their observations.  That said, I thought I'd offer my 2 cents about what really happens when people contact a Senate office --- I spent the better part of a year answering the phones in the D.C. office of a prominent Democrat from a small state.