ony Blair deserved to be re-elected in the British election, even though he was disingenuous  when he took the Brits into a highly unpopular war that was unjustified. On the plus side he has lead Labor through eight years in office, during which time he has really managed the British economy well. He is an excellent political leader with a great deal of personal appeal and he has played a leading role in bringing the Labor Party back from fully eighteen years of being in the political wilderness. The message of his historic third successive victory, the longest winning streak in Labor Party history, is simply that he still dominates the center ground of British politics but will need to be more candid in the future when it comes to crisis issues, like war and peace. He won because, as unpopular as the war remains, the opposition parties, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, didn't give the impression that they would have done a better job or that they had real answers. Their leadership was uninspiring. Mr. Blair has returned to 10 Downing Street visibly chastened, despite the victory at the polls, with his parliamentary majority slashed by about 100 seats. His advisors attribute that largely to his close association with President Bush in advocating the war. And our president is highly unpopular in Britain.
From the very beginning antiwar sentiment in the United Kingdom has been more intense than in the United States. Just this past February a crowd estimated to be in excess of a million people protested in London.

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The filibuster is the practice of extending debate by the minority party to delay a proposed action favored by the majority. A strange name that dates back to the marauding West Indian pirates of the past and their swift boats. It has long been the sharpest weapon in the Senate's procedural arsenal. It has always been controversial. Last week, interest groups on both sides of the filibuster fight used national ad campaigns targeted to the home states of key senators. At stake is the capacity of a minority to delay or block a vote. In the Democratic Radio Address a few days ago, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo called the filibuster "a vital part of the 200-year old system of checks and balances in the Senate, that allows the fullest possible debate of judicial nominees." Until 1917 there was no way to end a filibuster, but in that year the Senate adopted a rule that debate could be ended with a two-thirds majority vote - the action known as "cloture."
There has hardly been much partisan consistency in how the respective parties have viewed the filibuster - each has been for and each has been against, when the situation suited their interests.
In 2005 we are faced with what the Republicans view as "The nuclear option"' proposing lowering votes to a simple majority of 51. I'm against that, just as I was against the Democrats when they
called for the elimination of all filibusters in 1995.