Powerful Stupid from Michele Bachmann, talking about the Obama administration's decision to fast track the legal dispute about the individual mandate to the Supreme Court:

I think that it can't stay there. We have to go with full-scale repeal of Obamacare. Of course were going to be hoping our best for the Court. We have four votes that are against Obamacare. Do we really want to put the one fifth, swing vote, potentially Anthony Kennedy, to say that because of that, we'll strike down this terrible bill as unconstitutional? I don't want to go that route. The Supreme Court should not be deciding our laws. That's the people we elect, that's who should decide our laws.

Even her assertion that her side of the argument has four votes is highly dubious. All we now for certain is that Clarence Thomas is going to vote against the individual mandate. Beyond that, it's a matter of whether the other conservative Justices will succumb to peer pressure or follow their own precedents. If they have any integrity, even Roberts, Scalia, and Alito will uphold the government's right to regulate interstate commerce. As we saw with Bush v. Gore, anything can happen, but that doesn't make it very likely that the Supreme Court will go all tea-baggy on us.

Also, too, I don't know why Bachmann has a problem with the Affordable Care Act since the country's lawmakers were the ones who enacted it. If the Supreme Court shouldn't be overruling the will of Congress then she should be quite happy about them upholding the law. Or maybe she thinks they should just refuse to hear the case. Actually, I guess she doesn't think the Supreme Court should hear any cases. They might have to "decide our laws."

Ah, there is nothing quite like the repartee between New York Times' columnists Gail Collins and David Brooks. They are so clever. I pick on David Brooks, but I just can't help myself.

Gail Collins: Romney is both intelligent and sane, which I guess is saying quite a lot this year. But the man would change his position on the rotation of the earth around the sun if he thought it would get him a win in South Carolina.

David Brooks: That’s why you should love the guy. Let me put it this way: Would you rather have someone who authentically agrees with Michele Bachmann or someone who is just faking it? It seems to me that from your point of view you should be praying for inauthenticity. The more, the better.

That's a ringing endorsement of prevarication, of rank opportunism, and of having contempt for the intelligence of the average voter. You might write it off as tongue-in-cheek but it isn't really possible that Brooks is not serious. He supports Romney because he thinks he's doing what has to be done to beat off a crazy alternative. Brooks was being honest here, but that's about to change. Watch.

As for the overall field, I think it is decent enough: four current or former governors, a former House Speaker, a business magnate. There are a few oddballs, but I thought the quality of the Reagan debate, in particular, was as good as any I’d seen in either party for at least a decade. Rick Perry can’t keep up because the quality of the other participants is reasonably high.

Yes, the Reagan Library Debate, I remember it well. It's the debate where Michele Bachmann promised us all $2 gasoline, Ron Paul said we don't need air traffic controllers or food inspectors, and Herman Cain introduced his 9-9-9 Plan that would eliminate the capital gains, estate, and payroll taxes. It's the debate where Rick Santorum promised that he could get Senate Democrats to sign off on a bill to reduce corporate taxes to zero. It's the debate where Rick Perry won applause for executing 234 people, said climate-science was unsettled, and that it is a lie to tell young people that they will ever receive their Social Security checks. It's the debate in which Mitt Romney endorsed building a 2,600 mile fence on the Mexican border and Newt Gingrich suggested that we outsource a legal guest worker program to American Express, Visa, and MasterCard. It was a superb debate if you value a bunch of jibber-jabber without any remote connection to anything the next president might actually do once in office. Or, you know, if you don't value sanity in your political leaders.

After Gail Collins remarked that she couldn't see anyone other than Romney and Perry who could conceivably be national leaders, Brooks became somewhat indignant.

David Brooks: I take that as a personal insult against the Herminator! Herman Cain. I feel compelled to rise in his defense. Unlike the current president he at least knows that this is the perfect moment for fundamental tax reform. He’s got his 9-9-9 plan (the virtues of which he has not hid under a barrel). He may be wacky in every other respect and offensive in some, but he at least understands the scope of the problems the country faces, and so I have sympathy for him. I wish President Obama had at least some of his vision.

Yes, the "virtues" of the 9-9-9 Plan. Set aside how badly this plan would screw the poor who would see their income taxes go from nothing to 9% and also suffer an additional 9% sales tax on purchased goods. When even the Moonie-owned Washington Times says that the plan would blow a $380 billion hole in the budget, you need to find more virtue. This is a man who supported bans on mosque-building and promised not to hire any Muslims to work in his cabinet. How does a black man born in 1945 in Memphis (and then raised in Georgia) forget his own past to the degree that he'll openly promise to discriminate against people based on their religion?

I'll close with this, which speaks for itself.

Gail Collins: Pardon me. I’m ready to move on but I can’t quite get past the vision of Mitt Romney and Rick Perry stuck together in the Polar Caves until next spring. What do you think they’d talk about?

David Brooks: Personally I think they’d lounge around in animal skins drawing beautiful paintings of wild animals on the cave walls, like those early cave dwellers did in France thousands of years ago. Perry would draw elegant mastodons, which he shot while jogging. Romney would paint saber-tooth tigers, riding in cages on the top of his car. (There, got that in.)

Thank you for forcing me to imagine Mitt Romney's car smeared with saber-tooth tiger poop.

Every four years we have to witness a fracas between the Republican National Committee and/or the Democratic National Committee and state legislatures who want to move their primaries up in violation of the rules. Remember the ugly dispute between Clinton supporters and Obama supporters over the delegates from Michigan and Florida? It wasn't pleasant. This year, the same thing is happening to the Republicans. And it's quite likely to have a dominant impact on the nominating process, and perhaps even the general election.

The Republicans selected Tampa, Florida as host to their convention. Yet, Florida's legislature has moved their primary to January 31st, 2012. The rules say that any state other than Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada that moves its primary earlier than March 6th will have half its delegates stripped. Needless to say, it's awkward to have the convention host in violation of the rules. And, as you can see, Florida's decision upsets the whole apple cart:

The four carve-out states of Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Carolina may begin their processes any time on or after February 1, 2012.

The remainder of the states may begin no earlier than the first Tuesday of March 2012.

Any state (other than the four carve-out states) that conducts its process prior to April 1, 2012, must allocate its delegates on a proportional basis.

Any state that violates this Rule will lose 50% of its delegates, alternate-delegates and potentially face many other penalties.

The four carve-out states will respond by moving their contests into early January and we'll have a repeat of active campaigns during the holiday season. The RNC tried to prevent this by creating two incentives. The first incentive was the promise to strip 50% of the delegates of any state that violated the rules. The second incentive was to force any state that went earlier than April 1st to allocate their delegates on a proportional rather than winner-take-all basis.

So, for example, Florida would not only lose half its delegates but the winner would only get, most likely, a plurality of the state's votes at the convention. Florida is supposed to have roughly one hundred delegates. You can do the math. In a winner-take-all situation the winner would net 100 delegates. The situation now would make it more likely that the winner would get around 20 delegates and the second-place finisher something like 15, netting the winner a mere five votes.

Update [2011-9-29 12:25:10 by BooMan]: As Massappeal points out, my argument/math here is wrong.

The difference should be enough to dissuade Florida from breaking the rules, but they seem to be operating on the assumption that nominations are won not through accruing delegates but by winning perceptions. They should ask Hillary Clinton how that worked out for her.

Moreover, Florida isn't the only state moving up its date.

This comes on the heels of Michigan and Arizona moving their contests to Feb. 28 in an attempt to get a heads-up on the March 6 Super Tuesday primaries.

And Missouri, Alaska, Georgia and North Dakota have all made noise about moving up their dates, which could wreak additional havoc on the calendar.

The more states that move up into the proportional representation window, the harder it will be for any candidate to get a majority of the delegates. Candidates might run out of money, but they will not be mathematically eliminated. And, as long as a winner has not emerged, minor candidates who are actually winning some delegates will have a powerful incentive to stay in the race so that they can trade their delegates for something of value.

If the race remains mainly a two-way race between Romney and Perry, this will probably resolve itself once the winner-take-all states start tossing huge chunks of delegates one way or the other. But if a third candidate emerges who is keeping pace and even winning a state here and there, then we could easily see a brokered convention.

I kind of wonder who Tom Tancredo is supporting for president. It obviously isn't Rick Perry, who Tancredo calls 'Compassionate Conservatism 2.0.' I doubt it's Mitt Romney for a variety of reasons, including that Romney employs undocumented workers to mow his lawns. Herman Cain is obviously too black for Tancredo. Maybe he's a Bachmann man?

In any case, it's kind of a relief to see The Deep Crazy weaponized and deployed against a Republican for a change. Here's Tancredo on Gov. Perry:

What is not yet as widely known about Perry is that he extends his taxpayer-funded compassion not only to illegal aliens but also to Muslim groups seeking to whitewash the violent history of that religion. Perry endorsed and facilitated the adoption in Texas public schools of a pro-Muslim curriculum unit developed by Muslim clerics in Pakistan.

Perry’s connections to Muslim groups in Texas are well documented. A recent Christian Science Monitor story said, “Perry has attended a number of Ismaili events in Texas, brokered a few agreements between the state and Ismailis (including the legislation introducing Islamic curricula into Texas schools), and even laid the first brick at the groundbreaking ceremony for an Ismaili worship center in Plano in 2005.”

The Muslim Histories and Cultures (MHC) project was formalized in 2004 in a signed agreement between the University of Texas at Austin and Aga Khan University in Pakistan. The announcement of the MHC project credited Gov. Perry by name with being “instrumental” in its launch. The agreement calls for an extensive program of bi-cultural teacher training funded jointly by both parties. More than 200 Texas teachers have been trained in the program, which is ongoing. The project’s curriculum units were initially available for viewing on the university’s website, but have since been scrubbed from the Internet. It appears Texas officials do not want the curriculum examined by Texas taxpayers.

Islam scholar Robert Spencer, head of Jihad Watch, examined the program and concluded, “The curriculum is a complete whitewash and it’s got the endorsement of Perry. It’s not going to give you any idea why people are waging jihad against the West — it’s only going to make you think that the real problem is ‘Islamophobia.’”

Remember that lunatic in Norway who recently went on a shooting rampage because he was so opposed to Muslim immigration?

His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.

I hope Rick Perry is enjoying the taste of his own medicine. He's not the only one who can make crazy statements about his political opponents.

I wish Joe Lieberman would just leave already. He's done enough damage. Now he's teaming up with Tom Coburn, of all people, to recommend steep cuts in Medicare. This is a guy who thought we should expand Medicare eligibility until he heard that Anthony Weiner thought it was a good idea. I feel like Lieberman long ago decided that his job in life is to piss off liberals. He's pretty good at it, too.

There's something missing from Glenn Greenwald's otherwise excellent essay on the Wall Street protests and the response to them on the left. And it gets to something fundamental that has divided the left since President Obama inherited the TARP program from George Bush and Hank Paulson. It's hard to describe this in precise fashion, but it comes down to a general versus partial indictment of modern capitalism and American institutions. Back in the first months of the Obama administration, much of the energy on the left was focused on nationalizing the banks. There was certainly a case for doing so, particularly in individual cases. But few people were looking at details. The banks needed to be nationalized as punishment for their sins, not because nationalizing them would necessarily be the best way to protect the taxpayer. I took a look at the arguments on both sides and took them very seriously. I came to the conclusion that wholesale nationalization would be more expensive (almost impossibly expensive) and would guarantee a huge permanent loss of money. It was also highly risky, in that it could have led to many unintended consequences at a time when the markets were in a panic and the economy was shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs every week. And it would also be slow and could prolong a period of frozen lending. To me, Geithner's Plan seemed eminently more sensible and quite a lot less risky, at least in the short term. There was naturally a risk that putting things back together without some serious reforms would be a lost opportunity that could come back to bite us later.

Many people did not care about short-term risk at all, nor did they even contemplate the costs to the taxpayer. They wanted to use the opportunity of an epic collapse to usher in some creative destruction. I saw the emotional appeal of that, but I was more concerned about stopping the bleeding and doing an honest and prudent risk/reward analysis. Goal number one was to get the banks lending again. And that meant that the banks needed to be recapitalized.

The truth is that as badly as Wall Street behaved in the lead-up to the collapse, and as badly as they behave now and always behave, our livelihoods depend in large measure on Wall Street. When banks stop lending, we lose our jobs. When the stock market collapses, we lose our retirement savings. What we need is not to do away with Wall Street but to regulate it aggressively. And doing so is a political matter that is made almost impossible because of the power Wall Street wields to prevent strong regulation.

Wall Street and corporate money in general pervades our political process and heavily influences both political parties. And despite efforts at campaign finance reform, the problem has grown much worse over the last decade. Anyone looking at the Democrats to solve this problem is going to be disappointed. Even where the Democrats are attempting to do the right thing (such as increasing marginal income tax rates on the wealthy) they are easily thwarted. So, I see the desire and the need for some kind of movement that doesn't rely directly on politics. Neither political party is capable or really even willing to create a fairer system or to truly protect us from the excesses of global capitalism.

In any case, I understand the motive behind the #OccupyWallStreet drive, and I can see why people are seeking non-political avenues to express their discontent. But I'm bothered by the lack of specificity in the movement. Greenwald says I should be able to understand it.

Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power -- in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions -- is destroying financial security for everyone else?

Is that really the point? Is Wall Street oozing corruption and criminality in a way that it was not last year or the year before that? Is it less accountable than it was before the Dodd-Frank bill passed? Or, is it more that people are sick of seeing how much these bastards pay themselves as they ship our jobs overseas and try to whittle away the safety net?

I suppose the answers to those questions will depend on whom you ask. But I get the feeling that people like Greenwald consider Wall Street investment firms and banks as criminal organizations by definition, rather than by circumstance. Or, to be more precise, there are many on the left who don't believe in capitalism to begin with. They didn't believe in it before the September 2008 crash, and they especially don't believe in it now. And without getting into a defense of capitalism, I have to say that I'm not comfortable with a movement that has no more coherent message than 'capitalism sucks.' I don't even like the name. You'll occupy Wall Street until _____ happens?

Now, Greenwald suggests that people like me just don't like to see people expressing their opinions outside of the bipartisan conversation in Washington. There is some truth to that. I see the president trying to mobilize people to pass a Jobs Bill and then I see a lot of the energy on the left going into something that isn't helping move the ball down the field. But, honestly, the protests on Wall Street can be helpful if enough powerful interests get nervous enough to throw us some scraps. I don't mind that the protests are unrelated to the legislative calendar nearly as much as I just think a generic condemnation of an undifferentiated Wall Street is too incoherent to be meaningful.

I understand that this is the beginning of something. Maybe it will flower into something beautiful. I don't want to criticize people who have gotten off their butts and mobilized to try to change things for the better. But, in the end, we have a political problem. We can all try to imagine what will happen if the current iteration of the Republican Party wins the Trifecta next year. If you take your eye off that ball for too long, the worst will come and we'll long for the days when Wall Street was relatively well-behaved.

Obviously, there is no easy choice here. Warding off the worst to protect a rotten status quo isn't too exciting. But things can get much, much worse.

I'm glad people are angry enough to try something different, but the movement needs to move beyond blocking traffic to advocating for some concrete changes. And, frankly, I don't see any consensus on anything beyond that Wall Street sucks. That's not good enough for me. Wall Street isn't going anywhere no matter what else people might accomplish.

What's missing from Greenwald's essay is any sense of what he would like Wall Street to do.

Well, after President Obama last week managed to temporarily save face by turning a lemon into lemonade, trust Israel to find a way today, with this announcement from the Knesset, to defy physics and turns the lemonade back into even more lemons:

...the Knesset will vote on [a] bill to annex the West Bank at the end of October. The bill also nullifies the Oslo Accords, ending all Israeli agreements with the Palestinian Authority.

The JTA reports it mirrors a bill being considered in the U.S. Congress and seems to have support among leaders of the [Israeli] coalition government.

No, wait, make that a festival of lemons:

The Palestinian Authority on Tuesday slammed Israel's approval of construction plans to build 1,100 new housing units in a settlement in East Jerusalem.

Israel's regional planning and construction committee on Tuesday approved the plans, described by one committee member as "a nice gift for Rosh Hashanah."

... The last round of peace talks collapsed over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's refusal to extend a partial freeze on illegal settlement building.

President Mahmoud Abbas said Sunday that he would not return to negotiations unless Israel stopped building Jewish-only settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Netanyahu indicated Tuesday that he was not about to offer one.

So last week, as a way to avoid US and European awkwardness over its support of Israel, Obama finds a way to save face by strongarming both the Palestinians (at least, the Fatah faction) and Israel into accepting new talks. And today both Netanyahu and the Knesset, on separate fronts, do their level best to torpedo those talks.

Personally, really, I'm done with Israel. I mean, I'm sad about it. Good people live there, and don't deserve the governments they get, or the knuckleheads that elect them. But after generations of indefensible behavior, really, if Israel want to commit political and economic and cultural suicide, why should I care? I mean, I would much rather any transition to a sane and peaceful and just Middle East not come at the expense of Israel having the entire world turn against it, but Israel's not leaving a whole lot of wiggle room for sympathy here.

No, I'm more concerned by the prospect that the United States electorate seems, circa 2011, to be completely capable of heading down the exact same suicidal road. Good people live here, too, and we also don't deserve the governments we get, or the knuckleheads that elect them. But our generations of indefensible behavior, crowned (so far) by eight literally torturous years of George W. Bush, is at significant risk of getting exponentially worse in a bit over 13 months. And an outlaw, pariah United States carries significantly more potential to damage global economic and political stability than a country of seven million people, no matter how many nukes it has.

So, yeah, it's scary watching the Israel government, supported by a large and vocal segment of its rightward-drifting public, repeatedly shoot itself in the face. But one of the reasons it's scary is that a not small portion of the U.S. electorate, and one of its two major political parties, would like to do exactly the same thing.

I'm pretty depressed about the political situation in the country. I guess the most dispiriting thing is that Obama can win reelection in a landslide, we can win back control of the House, and we can retain control of the Senate and even pick up a couple of seats, and all of that will not be enough to break the Republicans' ability to stonewall. Blame the filibuster.

But there are some things that might change for the better in Washington. Control of the House and all its committees is obviously something worth fighting very hard for. But things could get better in the Senate, too. Let me highlight a few things.

The chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Kent Conrad, is retiring. We'll probably lose his seat to the Republicans. But Sen. Patty Murray is in line to take over the chair if the Dems hold onto control of the Senate. I think we all can agree that Murray would be a vast improvement over Conrad in that role.

Most of you probably know that Joe Lieberman chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee. What you might not know is that the Homeland Security Committee has a dual role as the committee on government oversight. If the Dems retain control of the Senate, Tom Carper of Delaware will probably take over Lieberman's chair. Carper is, like Lieberman, a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. He's a fairly shitty senator. But, unlike Lieberman, he'll defend the administration from unfair attacks. Also, Lieberman's likely replacement is Rep. Chris Murphy, and he'll be a major upgrade over Holy Joe.

Sen. Dan Akaka of Hawaii is retiring. He is the chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee. Otherwise, he's not much noticed in Washington. Sen. Maria Cantwell will probably take his gavel on the Indian Affairs Committee. Rep, Mazie Hirono, a true progressive, will probably take his seat in the Senate. She'll be an upgrade. She'll also be the first Buddhist to serve in the Upper Chamber.

There is a good chance that Elizabeth Warren will replace Scott Brown as one of the two senators from Massachusetts. That would be a massive improvement.

If Tammy Baldwin is successful in replacing the retiring Herb Kohl, that would be a major injection of progressivism into the Senate.

In New Mexico, its possible that Martin Heinrich will take Jeff Bingaman's place in the Senate and provide a little spark. More importantly, Sen. Ron Wyden is poised to take over Bingman's gavel on the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee.

It can't be bad that Arizona's Jon Kyl is retiring even if we don't yet have a strong candidate to compete for the seat.

Tim Kaine would be a modest improvement over Jim Webb (on most issues) in Virginia.

And Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska will probably lose, meaning we won't have to suffer his betrayals anymore.

There could be interesting primary challenges to Olympia Snowe, Orrin Hatch, and Dick Lugar, but they all seem likely to survive. Maybe the Texas replacement for retiring Kay Bailey Hutchison could be a Democrat. But, I doubt it.

Rep. Shelley Berkley could unseat Sen. Dean Heller in Nevada. She'd be a very modest improvement.

If things go well and Obama is reelected, we should see a better Congress. But it's all relative. It won't be good enough to solve our problems.

I think it's a great shame that the National Rifle Association (NRA) has made the decision to be a nakedly partisan arm of the Republican Party instead of a non-partisan advocate for gun owners, gun enthusiasts, and gun safety. Look at this (via Steve Benen) performance by NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre:

“[The Obama campaign] will say gun owners — they’ll say they left them alone,” LaPierre told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday. “In public, he’ll remind us that he’s put off calls from his party to renew the Clinton [assault weapons] ban, he hasn’t pushed for new gun control laws… The president will offer the 2nd Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail saying he’s actually been good for the 2nd Amendment.”

“But it’s a big fat stinking lie!” the NRA leader exclaimed. “It’s all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and destroy the 2nd Amendment in our country.”

“Obama himself is no fool. So when he got elected, they concocted a scheme to stay away from the gun issue, lull gun owners to sleep and play us for fools in 2012. Well, gun owners are not fools and we are not fooled,” La Pierre declared.

“… President Obama and his cohorts, yeah, they’re going to deny their conspiracy to fool gun owners. Some in the liberal media, they are already probably blogging about it. But we don’t care because the lying, conniving Obama crowd can kiss our Constitution!”

As Benen notes, the NRA has won the national argument over gun laws. And that creates a fundraising problem because they don't have anything left to do but teach people how to use their guns safely. But this rhetoric is totally over-the-top.

I'm personally conflicted about federal gun laws. I supported the Assault Weapons Ban, but I'm not comfortable with a one-size-fits-all national policy on hand-guns. So, I probably agree with the NRA on at least a few issues, but they completely alienate anyone who doesn't hate the president and the Democratic Party.

I knew the NRA preferred the Republican Party, but I thought that was a rational decision based on the fact that most gun control advocates are Democrats. The NRA has endorsed Democrats many times in the past, but I don't see why they bother. I thought they cared about gun issues, but it appears that they only care about the Republicans winning elections. Obama couldn't have done less on gun control if he tried. Aside from his failure to reinstate the Assault Weapons Ban, I have no problem with that, although a lot of people I respect do. And the thanks the president gets is to have the head of the NRA tell him to kiss his Constitution?

I think there are a lot of NRA members who will be offended by LaPierre's crazy talk.

The current #Occupy Wall Street action has its most immediate inspiration and roots in the democratically organized Spanish occupations of last May, similar widespread protests this year in Greece, and Arab Spring. But the clearest modern American antecedent in terms of spirit and many of the logistics was the Seattle anti-WTO protests in 1999.

In 1999, as the political columnist for Seattle Weekly, I covered the organizing for months leading up to the protests. I went to Eugene to profile some obscure anarchists who said they were going to come to Seattle and fuck shit up. It made me as a national journalist. But I had an unfair advantage: my day job was as director of something called the Nonviolent Action Communication of Cascadia, and as such I had a front row seat, because the coalition planning the blockade of downtown Seattle during the WTO meetings was organizing it out of our office. And I'd already had a lot of experience, throughout the '80s and '90s, organizing mass demonstrations and direct actions, in D.C. and around the country, on a variety of issues. So while my memories are pretty subjective, I had a lot of opportunity to see what worked, what didn't work, and to make the connection to what a new generation of protesters is attempting this month in lower Manhattan.

Washington is in gridlock and no matter how I analyze things, I cannot see how that can possibly change even after the next election. The best possible foreseeable outcome of next year's elections will be that the president is reelected, the Democrats retake the House of Representatives, and maybe pick up two or three seats in the Senate. If that happens, the Democrats will still be four or five seats short of the sixty senators needed to do anything. We'll be back to the early part of 2009, before we briefly had 60 senators. We won't be able to do anything substantial about climate change and nothing will be done that isn't approved by Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Dick Lugar, and whomever else is willing to make a deal. The left will continue to wonder why the president can't do anything to the left of Joe Manchin and Mark Pryor.

So, yes, the system is broken and isn't even capable of being fixed through the normal political process. Maybe that helps explain why there's a nascent movement on the left that is anti-Wall Street but has no concrete demands.

The form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What's different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Nafta), institutions with no democratic accountability, which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital; now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US – for exactly the same reason. This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged.

Yet, for the left to organize into something that can break the deadlock in Washington, they have to have some kind of political impact. And it's very hard to have an impact that doesn't primarily empower the right. Disruption tends to lead to calls for law and order. The truth is that the progressive left has almost no power in this country, and almost no progressives who actually hold office have much interest in carrying the ball for radicals to their left.

The last time we had an economy like this, we also had a strong, global communist movement and a growing fascist threat. Those two movements created a lot of room for Roosevelt to maneuver in the middle. Roosevelt also had supermajorities in Congress that allowed him a lot more freedom to experiment. We can't replicate those conditions in today's climate. But if I can make any constructive advice to those who are marching in anti-Wall Street protests around the country, it is to make these people less interested in selecting our next president for us and more concerned about unruly mobs who want to know when they're getting their future back.

Also, this guy needs an attitude adjustment.

For those of you who can't watch videos, it's a BBC interview with a trader who is predicting the collapse of the EuroZone and is excited to make money off it even as he predicts we are all going to lose our life's savings.

He could be right. Maybe you should follow his advice. But it's hard to overcome the impulse to drag him through the streets, isn't it?

Yes, this is what the beginning of a theocracy looks like. A small town in Alabama is forcing individuals charged with misdemeanors to choose between serving time in Jail or time at a Christian only church. Yeah, you read that right.

Starting this week, the city judge [of Bay Minette, Alabama] will implement Operation Restore Our Community (ROC), which gives misdemeanor offenders a choice between fines and jail or a year of Sunday church services. [...]

Pastor Robert Gates told WRKG that the program was a win-win for everyone involved.

"You show me somebody who falls in love with Jesus, and I'll show you a person who won't be a problem to society," he said.

ACLU of Alabama director Olivia Turner called the policy "blatantly unconstitutional."

By the way, no Mosques or Synagogues or other religious groups are included in this program. Only Christan churches. I think these people interpret the Constitution the way they interpret the Bible. In other words, it doesn't matter what it really says, it only matters what they want it to say.

Oh and Pastor Gates, I know of a lot of people who love Jesus and still cause problems for society. I'd start with you and anyone who shares your implied but misguided belief that only Christians are good people. The church isn't a cure-all for people misbehaving. I know lot's of Bible-thumpers who justify beating women if they are married or in a relationship with a woman because God gave Adam authority over Eve, or who claim bullying gay kids is not a bad idea because God hates gays. I even know of a few murderers who justified their acts of terrorism base on their "love of Jesus." Maybe you haven't heard of Eric Rudolph or Scott Roeder.

Nah, you know who they are. But hey, they loved Jesus!

I don't think the New York City police should be torturing peaceful demonstrators with pepper spray, but I don't understand why I am supposed to care about this whole #OccupyWallStreet protest. There is no platform, no legislative vehicle, no coherent call to action, no overriding message, and very little in the way of any point. While the enterprise is less nihilistic than the Rodney King riots or the recent unpleasantness in England, it is even less effectual. I am not sure they are even being successful in inconveniencing anyone. The best I can say for the whole effort is that at least they haven't created a right-wing backlash. If you want to hurt Wall Street without hurting everyone else in the process, develop a legislative goal that sticks it to Wall Street without further tanking the economy. Walking around in circles in Lower Manhattan and chanting "This is what Democracy looks like" is little different from holing up in your apartment with a week's worth of free porn. It's nothing more than a Wank-a-Thon, and I find the whole thing boring and depressing.

I mean, look at this:

Just for the record, I love cops. I do, my mother worked in the justice system for 30 years, and I’ve known a lot of really good cops, really good honorable people just doing their jobs. I’ve never agreed with the sentiment, “Fuck the Po-lice,” and I still don’t. But these guys are fucked up. There was an anger in those white-shirt’s eyes that said, “You don’t matter.” And whether they were just scared or irrational or looking for a target for their rage, there was no excuse for their abuse of authority. I had always thought that people who complained about police brutality must have done something to provoke it, that surely cops wouldn’t hurt people without a really good reason. But they do. We were on the curb, we were contained, we were unarmed. Pepper spray hurts like hell, and the experience only makes me wish I’d done something more to deserve it.

And that's the problem. People aren't doing anything worth commenting on. They don't deserve a response, let alone pepper spray. When they deserve the pepper spray, maybe I will give a shit.

I somehow missed this last week. Funny how those Fox-generated insta-scandals can disappear from sight so quickly and completely.