Month: July 2010

Katrina Justice

by digby

Back in 2006, I wrote a post called “Sordid Truth” about the reports of mob violence during the first days of Katrina when the levees broke:

During those horrible early days after hurricane Katrina hit, I’m sure you remember the endless stories of looters and thugs and criminal gangs roaming the streets terrorizing the population. The right wing blogs had a lot to say on the subject.

There was one incident in particular that seemed to grab the imagination of the rightwingers. It was reported on all the cable news networks and inspired many blog posts like this one:

Did New Orleans police shoot and kill contractors who were walking across a bridge to inspect and seek to fix the broken levee, or did they kill those who had fired on the contractors? A few hours ago, news services and networks reported that five or six contractors had been shot and killed by the NOPD. Shortly thereafter, news services reported that the NOPD had actually shot “thugs” as a (Fox News host described them) who had fired on the contractors.

I do not know what happened, and am not assuming that the revised story is the true one. This is the first time I have heard of police or National Guard soldiers shooting anyone. For days, I have heard stories of black criminals firing on rescue crews in helicopters and boats, on police, and shooting and bludgeoning National Guard troops. One National Guardette ran away from the armed criminal who had hit her over the head with a pipe, and had shot her comrade. Did the Guardette even have a loaded weapon?

My expectation was that the police or soldiers would shoot a non-violent white or Asian, before they would shoot an ultraviolent black, but I was beaten to the punch by blogger Zach at Our Way of Life, who predicted Friday,

“If anybody gets shot for looting, they will be white or asian. Just remember you heard it here first.”

The current report on the bridge shooting at Fox News is only 14 words long.

“Hurricane relief efforts turn toward the gathering of bodies; police report shooting eight armed men on New Orleans bridge, killing at least five.”

In what sort of hellholes do people try to murder rescue crews, and people trying to fix broken levees? In America’s third world cities, that’s where. In the South Bronx in New York City, twenty years ago, Hispanic thugs used to attack fire engines speeding to put out fires with Molotov cocktails. Of course, it was white men putting their lives on the line to save Hispanics and blacks. Just like in New Orleans these days, apparently.

Considering how the mainstream media are doing their best to suppress the stories from coming out of New Orleans, I wonder if we’ll ever find out anything approaching the whole sordid truth.

It was my opinion at the time that this kind of hysterical, racist talk contributed greatly to the delayed response. (The beasts were taking over!)

I don’t know if the “sordid truth” of this incident will ever fully be known either. But a New Orleans grand jury believed there was enough evidence to indict several policemen for murder yesterday …

It was a mess in New Orleans those first few days. I’m sure there was plenty of violence and mayhem. But the media and particularly the fevered right wing media were all too willing to believe even the most ridiculous tales and they spread them with a glee usually reserved for presidential sexual indiscretions. They bear some responsibility for what happened.

(And needless to say it wasn’t confined to the right wing blogs. Peggy Noonan famously wrote a piece called “The good, the bad, the lets-shoot-them-now” in the Wall Street Journal.)

The good news is that today, the Federal Government brought charges:

Six officers with the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) were charged today in connection with the federal investigation of a police-involved shooting on the Danziger Bridge in the days after Hurricane Katrina, the Justice Department announced today. The incident resulted in the death of two civilians and the wounding of four others. The indictment charges four officers – Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Robert Faulcon and Anthony Villavaso – in connection with the shootings, and charges those four officers and two supervisors – Arthur “Archie” Kaufman and Gerard Dugue – with helping to obstruct justice during the subsequent investigations. The indictment alleges that officers Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon and Villavaso open fired on an unarmed family on the east side of the bridge, killing 17-year- old James Brissette, and wounding Susan Bartholomew, 38; Leonard Bartholomew III, 44; the Bartholomew’s daughter, Lesha, 17; and the Bartholomew’s nephew, Jose Holmes, 19. The Bartholomews’ 14-year-old son ran away from the shooting and was fired at, but was not injured. The second shooting occurred minutes later on the west side of the bridge, where officers shot at brothers Lance and Ronald Madison, killing Ronald, a 40-year-old man with severe mental disabilities. The indictment alleges Faulcon shot Ronald Madison in the back as Ronald ran away. Bowen is charged with stomping and kicking Ronald Madison while Ronald was wounded, but not yet dead. Ronald later died at the scene. “As our investigation of the Danziger Bridge incident shows, the Justice Department will vigorously pursue anyone who allegedly violated the law,” said Attorney General Holder. “Put simply, we will not tolerate wrongdoing by those who have sworn to protect the public.”

I don’t expect the rightwingers to ever admit that they were all too willing to believe that New Orleans was overrun with black criminals terrorizing all the citizenry, (thus requiring the police to “shoot them now” and ask questions later.) But it’s good to know that he government has stayed on this case and is at least putting law enforcement on notice.

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Winning Isn’t Everything, It’s The Only Thing

by digby

Greg Sargent has been making the argument for a while that GOP obstructionism is helping them at the polls because people actually blame the majority Democrats for failing rather than blame the Republicans for succeeding.

I think he’s right about that and there are two reasons. I’ve argued before that Americans worship winners and they don’t really care about unfair process. This is the nation that reveres the quote “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” I think the best example is the stolen election in 2000, in which most people seemed to believe that the partisan manipulation of the system in Florida and the biased Supreme Court decision were actually a fairly decent way to figure out who should be president in what was essentially a sudden death playoff — the one who did whatever was necessary to make it happen was the one who was most qualified, simply by dint of his ability to come out on top at the end of the “game.” (We see that same ethos on Wall Street and among those who think it’s perfectly fine to torture and hold innocent people in jail indefinitely.) In America, the operating principle is that the ends justify the means.

Similarly, the party in power is expected to do what’s necessary to pass its agenda. If it can’t, it is held responsible for the failure, not those who stopped them from doing it. This is particularly true in the present circumstance. The president blaming the “do nothing congress” only works when the congressional majority is of the opposition party. When it’s your own party, you just look like a weak leader and people think the underdog Republicans are simply “playing the game” better and so deserve to “win.”

And there is another dimension to this which especially applies to the Obama administration. Since he ran explicitly on the promise to end the bickering, change Washington and create a post-partisan consensus, people see the failure of those things to materialize as a measure of his failure to deliver on his promise. This president is more hampered than most in making the (legitimate) argument that the Party of No is to blame for the nation’s troubles. I didn’t subscribe to the “personal magic” theory of the presidency, so I had no illusions about Obama’s ability to keep this promise. But I think a fair number of people believed it and the rest think it’s the job description to beat the opposition with hardball politics. Failing at either makes him the loser, not the other side.

Obviously, Obama has to say something to explain why a common sense policy like unemployment benefits can’t pass in a country with nearly 10% of workers out of a job. But I don’t think blaming Republicans after the fact is anything close to a real winning argument, even though it’s not fair. And you can’t exactly tout your other accomplishments when people aren’t seeing any results in their own lives — it just doesn’t track. So he’s in a tough position. But they need to come up with something other than “the Republicans won’t let us do our jobs.” Americans don’t want to hear excuses, even when they are justified. For better or worse, it’s just who we are.

Update: Chris Bowers has an interesting post today that runs along a related track. It turns out that the non-ideological among us — the vaunted independents — vote their personal pocket books. So blaming it on Republican obstructionism — or appealing to “moderation” for that matter, isn’t going to do the Democrats any good with those folks:

Democrats want to help the center-right members of their party win by allowing them to appear “moderate” to swing voters, and thus water down every piece of legislation the party proposes. However, all Democrats, including the center-right Democrats, are all going to lose big because they failed to enact progressive public policies that would have resulted in putting more money in the hands of voters. Whatever benefit the blue Dogs get at the ballot box for appearing “moderate” will be canceled out, several times over, because voters are pissed that they have less money in their wallets.

The dominant ideology of swing voters is disposable income. As such, enact public policies that increase real disposable income, or else face defeat at the ballot box. It really is that simple.

And that, needless to say, explains why the Republicans are obstructing everything in sight. The worse off the people are, the better they will do. It’s not like their leaders didn’t telegraph that from the very beginning.

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Ratigan’s Righteous Rant

by digby

You have to see it to believe it:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Today he’s ragging on GE. I wonder how much longer he’ll last.

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Burrowed Treasure

by digby

Back in the 90s, when Drudge was just a young wingnut princeling, the scandal mongers used to have to launder their lies through the tabloid British press before it could be considered clean enough for the mainstream US media to slaver over. That’s obviously changed in the past decade with the advent of Fox and the successful effort to force the so-called liberal media to follow its lead. But it’s working, particularly when they are smart enough to create scandals that appeal to people’s prurient or racist lizard brains.

Media Matters very helpfully lays out the new pattern for us:

1. Right-wing bloggers, talk radio hosts, and other conservative media outlets start promoting and distorting the story.

2. Fox News picks up the story and gives it heavy, one-sided coverage.

3. Fox News and conservative media attack the “liberal media” for ignoring the distorted story.

4. Mainstream media outlets eventually cover the story, echoing the right-wing distortions.

5. Fox News receives credit for promoting the story.

6. The story is later proven to be false or wildly misleading, long after damage is done.

This same pattern has played out several times before, with some variations. Three prominent examples from the past two years are the ACORN videos, Barack Obama’s “relationship” with William Ayers, and the “Climategate scandal.”

Obviously, FOX has been invaluable because it can mobilize its robots to harangue the MSM when they fail to properly pick up on these tall tales whereas back in the day, they had to entice the stenographers with lurid tales of sex and gothic small town corruption to get them to take the bait.

The latest of these stories is the so-called cover-up by the DOJ of the Black Panther voter intimidation crimes (alleged by one of the high level Bush operatives burrowed into the bureaucracy) in which the wingnuts have wrapped themselves like it’s the shroud of Rosa Parks. The weeping, the wailing, the rending of garments over the horror of poor white folk being driven from the polls by Big Angry Black Supremacist Movement has them virtually speaking in tongues.

Media Matters traces the whole story, including the recent pick-up by the MSM. And what they found is that the case was dismissed before Obama took office, which pokes a few holes in the right wing narrative that states the Obama homeboys took over the DOJ and issued orders immediately that they were never to bring charges against black people again. Not that anyone cares at this point. Everybody’s just screaming ACORN ACORN ACORN! and the subtle racism continues apace.

And perhaps even more importantly, they are just plain lying that this is some kind of whistleblower case. As I wrote earlier, this burrowing was always going to be a problem (which many of us pointed out at the time of the US Attorney scandals and one on which we hoped fervently the administration would bite the bullet and clean house anyway) and this story shows just how pernicious it is. Adam Serwer points out:

A final point, and this is why the politicization of the Bush years is so relevant. The Washington Times has sought to portray the NBPP case as a matter of career attorneys being overruled on a legit case by political appointees — a reversal of the charges made about the Voting Section during the Bush administration. Of the four names of Civil Rights Division attorneys on the original NBPP complaint, all have significant ties to the right or to the politicized leadership under Bush: J. Christian Adams worked for the National Republican Lawyers Association, as did Grace Chung Becker, whose nomination by the Bush administration for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights was blocked because of her support for restrictive voter ID laws that disenfranchise minorities; Robert Popper previously worked on opposing minority voting districts; and Christopher Coates, who underwent a political conversion while at the DoJ and ended up being what Bradley Schlozman referred to as “a true member of the team” at a time when the Bush administration was conducting a purge of the liberals in the Civil Rights Division.

Whether one perceives as legitimate the “whistle-blowing” element to this case depends in part on the perceived neutrality of the players — from the supposedly “bipartisan” but functionally conservative U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, to the staff members who filed the case. Describing these people as “career attorneys” is meant to suggest their decisions were apolitical when in fact they were all people who were hired or whose stock rose during an era of politicization.

So once again, the mainstream press misses the real story, chasing the breathless manufactured scandal instead.

I can’t help but wonder how much this has contributed to the decline of faith in journalism. People may not know the details and may not even be willing to entertain the facts, but they can tell when something doesn’t feel right — even the ones who want to believe it. They’re happy for their team, to be sure, but it doesn’t make them respect the news business. Certainly those who know the real story don’t.

Update: Honest, fair-minded CNN analyst Eric Erickson says “fuck the blacks, they don’t vote for us anyway,” and suggests that the GOP use this story to reprise the Willie Horton campaign.

The Democrats will scream racism. Let them. Republicans are not going to pick up significant black support anyway. But here’s the thing: everyone but the Democrats will understand this is not racism. This isn’t even about race. This is about the judgment of an administration that would rather prosecute Arizona for doing what the feds won’t do than prosecuting violent thugs who would deny you and me the right to vote while killing our kids.

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Deadly Force

by digby

Do you remember that confused 87 year old woman who was killed with a taser last week for failing to drop her gun?

A Clackamas County, Ore., sheriff’s spokesman says an 87-year-old woman who died after she was stunned in a confrontation with deputies was armed with a pellet gun, not a real handgun.

Keep in mind though that they claim it wasn’t the tasering that killed her but rather her heart disease which was adversely affected by the 50,000 volts. You can’t expect the police to know that an 87 year old woman might have heart problems.

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“Not Having Sex Doesn’t Make You Sick”

by digby

According to this report by Dana Goldstein, the forced pregnancy forces are gathering strength to fight the next battle in reproductive health care — access to contraception. Of course, access to birth control is supported by nearly 80% of the public and most people think it’s nuts to even think about making it difficult to obtain. But these people take the long view about about such things and will move those goal posts slowly as long as abortion rights are in play — which they most certainly are.

But, never fear, the goal is clear:

“I don’t want to overstate or understate our level of concern,” said McQuade, the Catholic bishops’ spokesperson. “We consider [birth control] an elective drug. Married women can practice periodic abstinence. Other women can abstain altogether. Not having sex doesn’t make you sick.”

I’m thinking that maybe the Catholic Bishops ought to think twice about that particular argument. After all, there is some evidence that for a fair number of their clergy, celibacy does contribute to sickness. Serious sickness. The Church isn’t exactly a credible voice on these issues anymore.

Update: Amanda has more.

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The Torture Report

by digby

http://www.thetorturereport.org/

There is one comment at Youtube. It says:

There hasn’t been an Islamic terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11/2001 and perhaps it’s because the U.S. government has used all of its capabilities to upset the terrorists’ objectives.

There you have it.

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Small Town Life In Real America

by digby

Be very careful when you call the police to come to your home. It might not go the way you think it will:

Janice Wells called the Richland Police Department when she feared a prowler was outside her clapboard house in the rural west Georgia town.

The third-grade teacher had phoned for help. But within minutes of an officer coming to her backdoor, she was screaming in pain and begging not to be shocked again with a Taser. With each scream and cry, the officer threatened her with more shocks.

[…]

The officer in question is Ryan Smith of the Lumpkin Police Department. Smith was called to back up an officer from the Richland Police Department because the sheriff’s office in the county, Stewart, had no deputies to send.

Ok, maybe the woman was acting crazy, holding a gun? Threatening the cops?

Not exactly:

Some of the details contained in police department records conflict with those provided in interviews. And only the end of the encounter between Wells and the officers is captured on video.

But all agree that the struggle between Wells, 57, and Murphy, 52, started because she would not tell him the name of a friend who was at her house in Richland, 35 miles southeast of Columbus, when Murphy arrived around 9:30 p.m. on April 26.

Wells, who teaches in Columbus, said she had called to report a prowler. Murphy wrote in his police report that he was dispatched to check out a report of an “unwanted guest.”

John Robinson was at Wells’ house when Murphy pulled up. Robinson told the AJC his friend of 26 years had called him to be with her until the police arrived. Robinson lives 10 miles from Wells and her husband was in McRae, almost 90 miles away.

According to Robinson, Wells and the police reports, the officer only asked Robinson how long he had known Wells, the status of their relationship and where he lived. Murphy asked nothing more, not even Robinson’s name.

Moments later Robinson left. Murphy wrote he let the man leave because it is best to seperate people in domestic violence situations.

“I could always arrest him later if I needed to since he lived nearby,” Murphy wrote in a report obtained by the AJC.

But Wells and Robinson said there was no violence and nothing to suggest there had been any.

As Robinson pulled out of the driveway, Murphy asked Wells for her friend’s name.

She refused to give it.

“’You don’t need to know that,’” Murphy wrote in his report was Wells’ response. “I told her that she would need to give me the information that I needed or she would be arrested for obstruction. I explained that state law mandates that we investigate to determine if there has been any family violence.”

She retrieved her purse and began walking around the side of her house until Murphy said he was taking her to jail.

“Janice then backed up from me in a fight or flight stance and I grabbed her arm and placed a handcuff on it,” Murphy wrote. “She pulled away and she took off. I sprayed her with pepper spray. I chased her around the house and tripped and fell, injuring my knee just as I caught up with her. As I was once again walking her to the car, she broke loose again and ran. She tripped and fell and I grabbed her again. As we got to the car, I attempted to get the other handcuff on her and get her in the car.”

Wells told the AJC, she finally stopped.

“I fell to the ground. I was balled up and I was begging him to leave me alone,” Wells said. “Then he called for help.”

Smith answered Murphy’s call for backup.

In his report, Smith wrote he was concerned for Murphy’s welfare because his voice was weak. “[He] sound[ed] as if he could barely talk,” Smith wrote.

The camera recorded images of Smith’s short drive down a two-lane road, but once he got within sight of the Wells’ clapboard house, the dash cam also began recording sound.

As Smith pulled up, the video showed, Murphy was leaning on the roof of his car and a side door was open. He appeared to be talking to Wells, who was “in a ball position facing the ground,” according to Smith’s report.

Smith, 22, said nothing as he strode to the side of the car, his Taser in hand.

Then came the sound of the electric buzz of the Taser and Wells screaming “Oh God! Oh God!”

“Get in the car! Get in the car! Get in the car! You gonna get it again,” Smith screamed.

Wells cried.

In seconds the sound of the Taser can be heard again.

“Don’t do it. Don’t do it. I ain’t gonna do nothing,” Wells pleaded.

Smith is heard threatening a more aggressive setting on his Taser.

And then he used it again.

“It felt like electricity going through your body,” Wells said. “He was tasing me so fast and I was asking them to stop. To me, it was like it was a dream.”

Murphy’s report says Smith used his Taser three times.

Smith said he probably discharged the Taser three or four times for a total of six seconds. One of those times, he shocked himself.

The sound from the video suggests he discharged the device at least four times.

Wells’ attorney, Gary Parker, said it may have been as many as 12 times. Parker said no decision has been made on filing a lawsuit but he is talking with local officials about a resolution.

After hearing about the calls to Wells’ house, a woman he had known for years, the sheriff got to the house just as she was shocked for the last time.

He said he could hear her screams as he pulled up.

“Larry, help me,” Wells said as the sheriff walked up. “Larry, I didn’t do nothing.”

Jones said, “It took my best to hold my composure.”

On the video, Jones can be heard softly reassuring Wells.

Later that night, Jones bonded Wells out of jail and drove her to an area hospital to be examined.

He watched the video from the dash camera later.

“It was worse than what I thought it was. I was shocked,” the sheriff told the AJC.

“The public needs to know.”

Murphy, the first officer, was fired for using pepper spray. The other one, with the taser, quit:

Smith, who quit eight days after the incident, remains unrepentant.

“I did what I had to do to take control of the situation,” Smith told the AJC about his decision to repeatedly discharge his Taser.

Yet his former boss, Lumpkin Police Chief Steven Ogle, was shocked when he saw the video.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Ogle said. “You don’t use it [a Taser] for punitive reasons, to prod someone. It was evident it was an improper use of force. He was an excellent officer other than that incident.”

I’ll bet. But it hasn’t exactly hindered his career:

Smith resigned just as Ogle started the process to fire him, the chief said. Smith now works for the Chattahoochee County Sheriff’s office.

“You don’t use a taser for punitive reasons, to prod someone.”

Someone should put that in a police manual somewhere. I don’t think the guys on the street are getting the message.

*It should also be noted that the police chief who came to the victim’s rescue said that he doubted this would have happened if she had been white. That could be true, I don’t know the racial statistics. But I have to say that in all the reports that flow into my in-box on this topic, I’ve seen no reticence to taser just about anyone, regardless of race. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

And yes, there’s a video of the final moments.

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“Contracts Are For The Little People”

by digby

Chris Hayes, subbing for Maddow, on the strategic default controversy:

Bravo.

How about an MSNBC Sunday show with Hayes? Surely those Lock-up re-runs can’t possibly be making them any money.

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Sounding The Alarm

by digby

Joseph Farrah, the Paul Revere of the Tea Party (and professional wingnut con artist) sounds the alarm. Oh my God, man the barricades, charge the hill, batten down the hatches and fire when ready Mama Grizzlies: the progressives are coming!

Did you hear the one about the Left’s plan to counter the tea-party movement?

It’s no joke.

“In an effort to replicate the tea party’s success, 170 liberal and civil-rights
groups are forming a coalition that they hope will match the movement’s
political energy and influence,” explained a Washington Post report. “They
promise to ‘counter the tea-party narrative’ and help the progressive movement
find its voice again after 18 months of floundering.”

The effort is curiously dubbed “One Nation.” Historically, of course, when that
two-word phrase has been used in America, it is usually followed by another
two-word phrase “under God.” But with groups such as La Raza, the NAACP, the
AFL-CIO and the SEIU joining the party, it is unlikely the deity will be invoked
by any within this coalition.

You might ask: What’s their beef?

They’ve got Barack Obama in the White House. They have Nancy Pelosi as speaker
of the House. They have Harry Reid as Senate majority leader. They seem to have
Elena Kagan on her way to the Supreme Court.

The answer, of course, is they see it all slipping away beginning this November.
The tide has turned against their causes. Something very predictable happened on
the way to their workers’ paradise an awakening in the American spirit that is
saying: We will slouch toward Gomorrah no longer!

That spirit is illustrated by the tea-party movement the biggest and most potent
grass-roots political development in generations. People who never before
marched on Washington, carried a protest sign or rallied at a town-hall meeting
have done just that by the millions. They have no familiar household names among
their leaders. They have no billionaires bankrolling them. They represent no
special interests. They get no friendly coverage from the press. They demand
nothing for themselves from government except their freedom and to be molested
no longer. And this is what has the super-organized, well-funded,
government-subsidized, media-backed Left in a tizzy.

Understandably so.

As I write in my new book, “The Tea Party Manifesto,” this movement represents
what might well be America’s last chance for a return to liberty and
self-government. If it fails, so does the uniquely American dream of
constitutionally limited federal power, the protection of God-breathed
inalienable rights, equal justice, the rule of law, the will of the people and
national sovereignty.

So, you might ask, what does this new opposition movement demand? What will be
the rallying cry of its planned march on Washington Oct. 2?

More government spending on job creation.

Yes, that makes sense. That plan is working so well. It has worked to perfection
with the biggest stimulus spending programs in the history of the world.
Obviously all we need to do is more of the same!

Of course, no rational human being involved in this movement actually believes
that more government spending is going to solve the problem of unemployment. The
smarter and more devious elements of this movement know that more spending will
only make joblessness even worse. However, they also understand that it will
create more unsustainable dependency on government, which will inevitably lead
to chaos and the collapse of the nation and ideals they detest.

With Washington already facing insurmountable, inter-generational debt, what
else could be on the minds of those within this movement who have any rational
understanding of economics? They want to push America off the cliff.

Is there any other explanation?

They don’t want jobs. They want to complete the revolution. And they want to
complete it, if at all possible, before the new Congress sweeps in following the
tea-party electoral victory Nov. 2.

This rogue, reckless movement of fundamentally anti-American ambitions bears
careful watching.

It’s possible that I might have fallen too far down the rabbit hole and may not be able to crawl out. The dissonance is getting so bad that I don’t know if I have the energy to fight it. All day long, on TV and on the intertubes, I’ve been getting a greater and greater feeling of disorientation.

Some of it is undoubtedly due to reading that piece about facts being meaningless, which I read first thing this morning and which has stuck with me all day. But part of it is just a slow growing sense of despair over the fact it looks more and more as if the party of Michelle Bachman and Darrell Issa are going to have subpoena power starting next January and that people like the raving lunatic who wrote that screed are going to be listened to by those nuts. (Nobody’s even pretending that “grown-ups” can contain them. There are no grown-ups.) That outcome is probably what the Democrats deserve. Maybe it’s even what all adult Americans deserve. But no kid ever asked to be born and they definitely don’t deserve to have their futures destroyed and their dreams shattered because some crazy people found their way into power in a crisis. It’s happened before and it can happen again.

Perhaps even more depressing is the fact that while the administration will veto the wackiest nonsense a GOP congress might manage to get through (assuming that Mark Halperin is right and that the freakshow Teabaggers running for the senate win too — omg), nothing that helps ordinary Americans will have a chance of passing. But the Big Money Boyz and the Military Industrial Complex won’t miss a beat — the things that benefit them will probably be signed into law — but only after bruising legislative battles which will further demoralize the Democratic base and empower the right even more. (If the economy has an uptick before 2012 and Obama is lucky in his opponent, perhaps he can retain the presidency, but he will only ever be able to govern as far to the left as a very rabid GOP congress will let allow.)

It’s an ugly scenario. I hope it doesn’t happen. But the Dems have got to make a better argument than they have been. And time is wasting.

(Farrah piece via email)