What a week! We are in dire straits indeed.Our Congress—that we sacrificed so much for to elect in ’06—speaks out boldly on habeas Iraq censuring freedom of speech. Bush says Hussein killed Mandela and Return on Success means it’s the troops’ own damn fault that we can’t bring them home.But it’s not all storm clouds.

Sometimes you can be too far ahead of the curve and you have to wait for time and circumstance to catch up with you.

Unfortunately for America, Connecticut voters aren’t casting their votes today in the Lieberman/Lamont race because if they were, Ned Lamont would win and the US Senate would be rid of the pathological, warmongering narcissist Joe Lieberman (CFL-AIPAC).

The poll, commissioned by Daily Kos, found that Ned would handily beat

The great science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, speaking through his character Salvor Hardin, famously wrote that “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”. I’d like to amend that slightly, and add “fear” to that statement. Fear is what the incompetent — or amoral — use to incite us to tolerate, even enjoy, violence and other amorality.

How are Rahm Emanuel and Disco Stu alike?

Well, they’re both men stuck in a prior decade: Disco Stu in the 70′s and Rahm Emanuel in the screw the base 90′s.

They are different, though. Disco’s Stu’s fixations merely abet fashion crimes. Rahm Emanuel? Well, you be the judge.

Yesterday Truthout ran an examination of how Emanuel, who remains in a position to do candidate recruitment for the DCCC this cycle,

I was always told that it was both wise and good manners not to intervene with parents who seem to be making every mistake in the book with their spoiled children. The Democrats have been observing that rule on the theory that the badly behaved children occupying the White House are not their kids; Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove, Gonzales and etc.

While I know it’s conventional wisdom to confuse Karl Rove with the Oracle at Delphi, let’s dial it back to what CW was only a short time ago:

If you turn on any radio station or read any article in virtually any newspaper, the consensus is that the American voter prefers Democrats to Republicans and that the Democrats have a legitimate shot to take over both houses of Congress.

From the No Honor Among Thieves Department (hat tip to Norwegianity), in case your schadenfreude jones hasn’t been sated by Karl Rove’s bailing from the Bush ship of state:

Linda Chavez rose to prominence in the 1980s as a tart-tongued Reagan administration official and candidate for the Senate, eventually becoming a well-known Latina voice on social issues and President Bush’s choice to lead the Labor Department.

I know people like Lanny Davis like to mewl that Joe Lieberman’s defeat in the primary at the hands of progressives was a “purge” from the Democratic party like it was a bad thing, but that’s exactly what we did.

One year ago today. We kicked Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic Party.

It had a very deep and profound effect on everyone who was left, especially the “don’t mention the war

Michael Tomasky notes in a Sunday Washington Post op ed that in the recently ended Yearly Kos convention, there was not a single panel dedicated to the question of impeaching President Bush and Vice President Cheney, a fact that would likely astonish those in the media who might have thought impeachment would be the first item of discussion if not the only one.

Rootstrapping, n. The practice of courting grassroots money and activism solely to attain elective office, thus securing the advantages of incumbency and making future grassroots support unnecessary. See also: Carney, Chris and McNerney, Jerry.

First Chris Carney made the transition from Blue American to Blue Dog, and now, according to babaloo at Calitics, it appears that Jerry McNerney has done the same.