We really didn't lose the battle, the grassroots launched a campaign like one never seen in DC, the phone system was jammed for several days, including Sunday, voice mail boxes filled, email servers crashed, extra staff were hired to answer phones, long idled fax machines ran out of ink and paper, their chips overworked and rebellious, creating codes rather than admit failure and fatigue. Washington is not used to hearing from the "sheeple" -the passion and outrage expressed by the rank and file was a deafening roar, the sound and fury of democracy demanding a fight rather than retreat and timid resignation against a ruthless opponent. It may have been a turning point in a sad chapter of the American democratic experiment. If the grassroots rank and file can maintain the fight for democracy, 2006 may be the beginning of the end of the Bush cabal and the start of true representative democracy, the fulfillment of an interactive dream hatched by what might appear to be a Kurt Vonnegut styled dreamer, anonymous, yet omnipotent, in plan and execution.

Now to Salazar.

Just last week Ken Salazar called Alito an abomination, so I ask you, do you want a senator to vote for cloture when it means the difference between confirming an abomination and filibustering one? For those that worked so hard to influence senators all over the country, you deserve a huge pat on the back, they started on Friday with only two senators talking filibuster, Kerry and Kennedy, today there were 25. If you missed Kennedy's floor speech today it was huge, I'll try to find a transcript. 25 courageous senators is something to build on, I was hoping that Ken Salazar would have been number 26. We lost a battle but we have not lost the war. A passage from a speech that I keep close by to inspire me when I feel down about the direction of my state and country.

"Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal."

"These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

"Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, and the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. And I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the globe."

Robert F. Kennedy S. Africa 1966