So which will it be and what are his chances?

Ohio's governorship, currently held by Democrat Ted Strickland, will be up in 2010, as will the Senate seat now held by Republican George Voinovich. Voinovich is set to turn 74 in 2010, and on the surface, Portman's better bet is to hope the Senator retires, since capturing an open Senate seat may be easier than unseating a potentially popular incumbent Governor. And if - as the odds now suggest - a Democrat wins the White House next year, history strongly suggests that the 2010 mid-term elections will benefit the Republicans, thus boosting the Ohio GOP's chances in the Senate race. Also, given the trajectory of Portman's career- in addition to his post in the current Bush administration and stint in Congress, he also served in the first President Bush's White House - he'd probably be a better fit in Washington than in Columbus. (That said, one of his predecessors in the job of budget director, Mitch Daniels, is now Indiana's Governor.)

Still, Republicans might want to push Portman towards running for his old House seat, in Ohio's Second District. For Portman, that would probably be a dead end, but the Second District takes in some conservative turf and by all measures the seat should be a GOP stronghold, even in the current occupant, Republican Jean Schmidt, has proven herself to be a thorough embarrassment and an electoral liability. (In the 2005 special election after Portman left, she nearly lost to Democrat Paul Hackett, and last year she staved off Democrat Victoria Wulsin by just 2,500 votes, a two percent margin.) This is a district the GOP should never have to think twice about, but Schmidt's continuing presence on the ballot puts it in jeopardy and creates a drag on her fellow Republican candidates.

The problem for the GOP is that Schmidt seems to have just enough support to hang on to the nomination. Last year, former Congressman Bob McEwen challenged her in the GOP primary and lost by five points. But Portman is in a different class. He would almost certainly beat her in the primary and go on to take the seat in the fall, thereby relieving the moribund Ohio GOP of at least one of its many headaches. Portman could always make a run for statewide office from his House seat, but it's doubtful that he'd consider going back after a series of high-profile jobs.

So it looks like we'll all have "Mean Jean" to kick around for a while longer.

"On a national basis, if Mr. Bloomberg wants to run, the one thing he has to overcome that I don't have to overcome -- lets say he has to spend three, four, five hundred million dollars on his own, he's capable of spending. And lets say he gets good name recognition, and people actually like him and people vote for him, and lets say he splits up the vote three ways, 33, 33, 33. If [Ross] Perot got 19 [percent], I'm sure Mike Bloomberg is capable of getting 33.

"But if nobody gets 270 electoral electoral votes, and it goes to the House of Representatives, there's no independents in the House of Representatives. How do you become president?"

-- Azi Paybarah

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey sees the non-binding House resolution opposing the Iraq troop increase as a defeat for the Democrats.

Discussing the 246 to 182 vote, which included 17 Republican defections, Armey said, "The White House is doing good then, if they held it to 17. I think they felt if they could keep it to 20 or below then they are in good shape. I think that settles the deal."

"They didn't get enough of a show of Republican votes, so that it will drift into the category of little-noted-no-longer-remembered," he said.

The Democrats have convened an unusual Saturday session of the Senate in an attempt to make sure that doesn't happen.

--Jason Horowitz

Two of the top three belong to Democrats from Massachusetts -- Marty Meehan ($4,894,187) and Edward Markey ($2,369,412). The other belongs to Frank Pallone of New Jersey ($2,412,888).

Out of the ten best-funded members, four are from Massachusetts and two are from New Jersey.

Among other things, the concentration of money-hording members in MA and NJ seems to be a result of the very real back-logs of representatives lining up for nonexistent opportunities to win promotion to the Senate.

In Massachusetts, it's Ted Kennedy and -- now that he's not running for president -- John Kerry who are gumming up the works for the foreseeable future. In New Jersey, where there have been a couple of unexpected vacancies in recent years, Bob Menendez is settling in for what looks to be a long stay and just-turned-83-years-old Frank Lautenberg is planning to run for re-election.

I'm sure the DCCC wouldn't mind if the members game them some that money. Anyone else have any suggestions for what Meehan, Pallone, Markey and company might do with their inert millions?

-- Azi Paybarah

Still unknown, however, is whether Republican Michael Ferguson has survived in the central Jersey-based 7th District, a less solidly GOP area. His opponent, Assemblywoman Linda Stender, has mounted a credible campaign in what is now the only unsettled race in the Garden State.

-- Steve Kornacki

-- Steve Kornacki

After receiving an invitation to join Yvette Clarke on the steps of City Hall next Tuesday (pdf) for a women-centric promotion that we couldn't pass up posting ("A women's place is in the House...The House of Representatives!"), we decided to talk to Clarke PR rep Juda Engelmayer about the abrupt change in strategy that coincided so neatly with his arrival to the campaign.

Here's what he said:

Got that?

—Nicole Brydson

The invitation reminds supports that "Congressman Rangel is raising funds to help win the 15 seats necessary for the Democrats to regain control of the House of Representatives."

And, not incidentally, that "in a Democratic Majority, Congressman Rangel will make history as the first African-American and the first New Yorker since 1881 to Chair the Ways and Means Committee."

—Nicole Brydson

Between the “whereases,” the resolution’s meaning—if impersonal—is as unmistakable as it is tragic:

“Whereas nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress during the first half of the 20th century;

“Whereas, between 1890 and 1952, 7 Presidents petitioned Congress to end lynching;

“Whereas, between 1920 and 1940, the House of Representatives passed 3 strong anti-lynching measures;

“Whereas protection against lynching was the minimum and most basic of Federal responsibilities, and the Senate considered but failed to enact anti-lynching legislation despite repeated requests by civil rights groups, Presidents, and the House of Representatives to do so …. ”

The Senatorial act of contrition got itself a certain amount of attention and probably automatic approval, but there was scant comment on why the Senate didn’t pass an anti-lynching law and the House of Representatives passed so many. The device that prevented passage in the Senate was the filibuster, exercised by Democratic Senators from the Southern states. The majorities during those years didn’t use a “nuclear option” to end the filibuster; the majority was willing to allow a minority in the Senate to use the rule to oppress a non-white, unrepresented minority outside the Senate. With that history, it takes a talent for casuistry to accept the argument that the filibuster should be retained as the necessary means of safeguarding individual rights. Sometimes the filibuster helps your cause, and sometimes it works against it—and that’s all that can be said about it.

The lynching apology was passed on a voice vote. Which Senators voted and which did not wasn’t recorded, thus affording a degree of cover for Senators who later might find it expedient to deny having come out against mob violence and lynch-law injustice. Eighty-some Senators did sponsor the resolution, even if they didn’t go on record as voting for it, and future opponents could hold their sponsorship against them.

At least 15 Senators didn’t sponsor the resolution. Every one of them was white and Republican. Two of the white non-sponsoring Senators were Orrin Hatch and Robert Bennett of Utah. Both are Mormon and, even though their church has recused itself from its teaching that black persons are “devils,” the impression persists that Mormons dislike people of color. By not sponsoring this innocuous resolution, these men have reinforced the outsider’s impression that theirs is a religion that consigns some people, by virtue of their race, to hell.

Among the other non-signers, none have names that would strike you as Jewish or Muslim or

Hindu. New Hampshire’s John Sununu, of Arab extraction, didn’t sign, but he’s not a Muslim but a Catholic. The other Senator from New Hampshire, Judd Gregg, a Congregationalist, wasn’t a sponsor, either. Since they come from a state with an insignificant African-American vote, they can afford the political luxury of honesty and act according to their convictions.

Neither Senator from Mississippi signed the resolution’s list of sponsors. Trent Lott—who lost his position as majority leader because he praised the life and works of South Carolina’s longtime segregationist, Strom Thurmond, and then apologized—has now backslid. The refusal of either Senator to sign a statement condemning racial murder makes you wonder about Mississippi’s claims to have changed, although the state recently convicted Edgar Ray Killen for taking part in the 1964 lynching of three civil-rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. The murderer is 80 years old and the crime more than 40—a reminder that almost none of the men and women who murdered those thousands were punished or threatened with punishment or were ever in peril of disapproval in their communities or in Washington, where for long decades they were protected.

A bunch of slit-eyed Republicans from the cowboy states didn’t sign. Nor did the two Senators from Texas. The senior Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, is, according to political gossip, teetering on running for governor. Perhaps by keeping her name off the sponsorship list, she thinks she can drawn Mexican voters toward her out of their antagonism to African-Americans. The Republican’s automatic answer to such suspicions is to chant, “Big tent! Big tent!” To which Jon Stewart remarks that it isn’t that the big-tenting Republicans pit minority groups against each other, it’s just that black people don’t enjoy camping out.

The Republicans, thinking they can get to choose either black or Hispanic support, have chosen to go Hispanic. Sooner or later, they will bump into the fact that a large percentage of our Hispanic population is also black, and we shall see what happens then.

The Republican performance on this harmless resolution reinforces Howard Dean’s recent remark about the G.O.P. being white and Christian. His words, which were received with such indignation, are more or less a statement of fact—and not even a new one. Everybody in politics knows that the Republican Party set out to win the anti-black South years ago and has done so.

Racial antipathies in their less violent forms have been strengthened by the party’s alliance with Southern religion. White Southern Christianity has a history of supporting slavery, the black codes, discrimination and intolerance toward people of color stretching back 200 years. In the 1950’s and 60’s, when some northern and western Christian denominations remembered their abolitionist past and backed the civil-rights movement, the white churches of the South did not, and it is they who have supplied the moral dynamic of modern Republicanism.

Some African-Americans, including a few who have family members who were lynched, greeted the resolution with satisfaction. Others were less than bowled over by it. Under a headline reading “The crime you committed against us in May vastly outweighs your weak apology in June,” the Black Commentator, a valuable Web site, writes: “Why are some Black folks so happy to hear an apology from people who don’t mean it?

“There are nearly a million African Americans in prison … a gulag of monstrous proportions, clearly designed to perpetuate the social relations that began with slavery. We demand an end to those relations, not an insincere, risk-free ‘apology’ that sets not one prisoner free …. The vast bulk of us see the ‘apology’ for what it is—a scam, with no substantial benefits, and less good faith.”

The Black Commentator’s politics would try the patience of some white Democrats. Even so, you need not be a person of color to cogitate on the worthlessness of the apology.

After its admission that its failure to act allowed thousands of people to be hung, castrated, slashed, dragged, burned alive, shot, kicked and stoned to death, the Senate followed up with nothing. Is an easy one-minute announcement that we’re sorry enough?

These are the murders of thousands of people who have families living among us now. This is not an atrocity like the sack of Rome by Alaric in A.D. 410, something so far in the past that nothing can be done except pick up the remaining bits and pieces of evidence and put them in a museum. The genocidal mass murders of the Cathars or Albigensians in the 12th century committed by the Roman Catholic Church are dust. There is no one to bring to justice, no one to make restitution to, to pay compensation to. That is over, but our crimes are still fresh.

There is no statute of limitations on atrocity. Crimes only become ancient and beyond restitution when the wounds inflicted are no longer carried in living hearts. The massacres of Armenians by the Turks and the Turkish government occurred almost 100 years ago, but for many Armenians those things were done yesterday. The same is true for Native Americans.

We know the names of many—probably most—of the murdered people. We have the means to find their families and offer a substantial financial compensation. There is compensation for the Holocaust’s survivors and families. We have compensated the families whose relatives died in the World Trade Center, where fewer perished than have been lynched and where it was not Americans who committed the crime. That’s well and good, but then what do we owe the victims of crimes committed not only by American individuals, but by the government as well?

The Holocaust ended in 1945; lynching did not. Emmett Till was beaten to death in 1955; the same death was inflicted on Mack Charles Parker in 1959; Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963. The Nazi Holocaust was conducted by the government of Germany while the people who knew better wouldn’t or couldn’t stop it. The American holocaust was conducted and/or protected by state governments, the U.S. Senate and the rest of the federal government while the people who knew better wouldn’t or couldn’t stop it.

The survivors and descendants of the lynched—which includes some Jews, some Italians, homosexuals, labor-union organizers and political dissidents—have paid socially, psychologically and financially for the violence done to their families. They are owed better than a piece of paper embossed with the Senate’s letterhead.

Santorum: Tom's a very good leader. I don't think anyone can question that...

Imus: He's a weird little dude.

Santorum: He's not a weird dude. He's a good guy.

Imus: He just looks to me like a guy that has some kind of weird, kinky, sexual thing going on.

Santorum: I don't think it's appropriate to talk about the majority leader of the House of Representatives that way.