this is a VERY interesting article

and very sad too. when you're a member (long standing too) of the republican party and you see what the current administration has done (irreparable damage) and what the possible (but NOT likely) current administration (pain =mccain+palin) could be and you just throw in the towel.....well then.......

Tom Davis Gives Up

By PETER BAKER
The Republican cloakroom of the House of Representatives is a strangely narrow room that bends around a corner and hardly seems like much of an antechamber for the barons of American politics. Members negotiate tight spaces between the furniture, stepping around one another to find an open seat to while away the breaks, maybe pick up a newspaper or chat with a colleague.

On a desultory afternoon last month, Representative Tom Davis cruised through the cloakroom on his way to the floor to manage a bill, a mobile telephone pressed to his ear as he waved me to follow. We entered the chamber where war, slavery and impeachment have been debated, and he headed to the lectern while I sat a couple rows back. Davis clicked his phone shut and addressed the mostly empty chamber: “Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak on H. R. 5683, the Government Accountability Office Act of 2008.”

After a couple of minutes, Davis was back in the cloakroom, plopping down in a chair, propping his feet up on a coffee table and popping open a Diet Coke. He sighed at the tedium of the exercise and then thought back to the first time he ever managed a bill on the floor. It was 1995, and he was a freshman Republican congressman from Virginia, swept into office by Newt Gingrich’s revolution. “What a thrill,” he said, his eyes lighting up at the memory. “I thought, You know, maybe I belong here. Now it’s kind of like, Oh, I gotta do this?”.....