Nobody is happier to see Old Sheets in trouble than I am. However, comparisons with Jack Javits are not instructive. There was always a significant group in the NY GOP which hated Javits, both for his liberal politics and his rather difficult personality. When Rocky died, the relative conservatives in the GOP saw their chance to knock off Javits. Also, the Democrats were always able to put up obscure candidates like Ramsey Clark and poll over 35-40% against him.

Byrd has no such party opposition, and his history shows no electoral threat.

However, if the GOP can bluff the Dems into spending large amounts of resources in West Virginia, it makes it much harder for them to spend money in Florida, Washington, Minnesota and Nebraska where their seats are at large risk.

Make his age an issue and he's toast. It nearly cost Jim Bunning his seat last year.

Why should she speak to D'Amato - do you think she needs lessons in bribery, kickbacks and corruption?

Now that I think of it, if you're running against Byrd, you probably do need those skills.

Keeping Byrd on the front line, talking up a storm to a national audience, is probably the best thing for Republicans looking ahead to 2006, since his ramblings have gone in recent years from windbag pontifications about the constitution, with healthy doses of Athenian law and other oblique refrences tossed in, to wild conspiracy charges and panicked claims about a looming totalitarian state that have turned him into MoveOn.org's crazy great-grandfather.

West Viriginans can tolerate a pompus jerk who brings the bacon back from D.C., but Byrd's act has been so cringeworthy of late, I dobut he can hold on unless the Democrats lock him in a closet for the next 18 months.

While there are only a few people I'd wish gone from the capitol as much as Bobbie Sheets (The Swimmer, Leaky Leahy, his fellow West Virginian Rockefeller 3, and of course, Jim McDermott in the other chamber) I don't believe it'll happen unless they take him out feet first, and they'll have been dragging him in and out like the title character in "weekend at Bernie's" for months before they admit he's gone.

Shelley's father Arch Moore, an authentic political genius, lost one of the tightest races in WV history for US Senate to an aged hack, Jennings Randolph, due to an unholy al;liance of the hard left and the coal industry, who were in Randolph's pocket due to all his favors for them through the years. He's his daughter's best advisor and you can bet he's cautious of her squandering an opportunity now when she can easily defeat whatever hack replaces Byrd.

On the upside, most folks I hear from in WV hate his anti-war anti-Bush stance and find him an almost intolerable embarrassment now...so long as he kept his yap shut and brought home the bacon his past was regrettable but forgettable..now I don't know if bribery is enough to keep him in.