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Errol Louis of the New York Daily News has a very good point about the scandal surrounding New York Gov. David Paterson. Namely, that the focus of this case should not be on Paterson. Rather, says Louis, it should be about the person at the center of the controversy — no, not aide David Johnson, though Johnson’s actions should be neither forgiven nor forgotten. But rather on Johnson’s victim, the woman who he abused, a woman who was failed every step of the way:

Johnson’s ex-girlfriend told the NYPD and a Family Court referee that she was injured, afraid and subject to intimidation.

“He’s like a government official, and I have problems with even calling the police because the state troopers kept calling and harassing me to drop the charges, and I wouldn’t,” she told the referee in November.

After which, it appears, nobody lifted a finger to help the accuser. City cops, tasked with serving an order of protection on Johnson, proved unable to do so, even though the towering 6-foot-7 aide was by the governor’s side at every public appearance.

The governor’s schedule is public information. Anybody could have served the papers.

The judge does not appear to have passed along the report that men with guns from a state agency were supposedly harassing a victim who appeared in her court.

The state police appear to have acted more like a private intimidation force than a professional law enforcement agency. And members of Paterson’s immediate political staff - and, perhaps, the governor - may have known all of what was going on, but tried to spin or dissolve the complaint rather than face it head-on.

Bad business all around.

In a city where attacks between family members or intimate partners are an epidemic - the NYPD responds to some 650 domestic violence calls every day - it chills the blood to read about how one high-profile encounter was botched.

It does, and not just because this one woman was failed. It chills the blood because it begs the question, how many more victims of domestic violence are being failed?

Obviously, most victims of domestic abuse are not going to be harassed by the Governor of their state. But the other failures — the lack of follow-through, the judge who was silent, the general nonchalance about serving papers — these are failures that are systemic, and general. If city police can’t be bothered to serve papers on a man traveling with the Governor, whose schedule is public, how many other abusers is the NYPD failing to serve?

Moreover, this case is precisely why so many victims of domestic violence choose not to come forward. No, most women who are abused are not going to be visited by state troopers. But many will be pressured by family and friends who are eager to minimize the deeds of the abuser, and eager to get all the unpleasantness behind them. While this is a case of that writ large, Paterson’s actions in this are simply the actions of someone with power trying to get all the unpleasantness swept away, so that his friend can move on with his life — because hey, the guy just made a mistake. Why wreck his life, right?

MRA types are fond of saying that orders of protection are given freely and capriciously. And no doubt, cases can be found where that is true. But this case shows the reality of orders of protection — the fact that victims all too often struggle just to get that piece of paper that maybe, maybe, will help them avoid further abuse. Questionable orders of protection can be quashed. Abuse cannot be so easily undone. And so I’d much rather a system that makes a mistake that can be remedied than one that refuses to take domestic violence seriously. Unfortunately, the latter appears to be the system in place in New York.

If I lived in New York, I’d be giving serious consideration to voting for the Republican candidate in the next gubernatorial race. Not so much because the Republican’s bound to be a great candidate, but because there’s pretty strong evidence that New York’s Democratic governors don’t so much give a damn about women.

First, we had former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a rising star in the Democratic Party nationally who ended up having to resign when it turned out he was soliciting prostitutes the way some people order pizza. That might have been forgivable, had 1) Prostitution been legal, 2) Spitzer not made his mark as a prosecutor by going after prostitution, or 3) Spitzer not been caught moving enough money around to spend on prostitutes that it drew the attention of bank regulators.

Spitzer ultimately wasn’t prosecuted, but he was forced from office ignominiously, and in his place New Yorkers got Gov. David Paterson, who immediately announced that he had had affairs in his lifetime. Okay, well, that’s not good. But points for honesty. And surely, surely, Paterson would keep himself on the straight-and-narrow after seeing what happened to his predecessor.

Or, you know, he might decide instead to obstruct justice in a domestic violence case:

Gov. David A. Paterson personally directed two state employees to contact the woman who had accused his close aide of assaulting her, according to two people with direct knowledge of the governor’s actions.

Mr. Paterson instructed his press secretary, Marissa Shorenstein, to ask the woman to publicly describe the episode as nonviolent, according to a third person, who was briefed on the matter. That description would contradict the woman’s accounts to the police and in court.

Mr. Paterson also enlisted another state employee, Deneane Brown, a friend of both the governor and the accuser, to make contact with the woman before she was due in court to finalize an order of protection against the aide, David W. Johnson, the two people with direct knowledge said. Ms. Brown, an employee of the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, reached out to the woman on more than one occasion over a period of several days and arranged a phone call between the governor and the woman, Mr. Johnson’s companion.

After the calls from Ms. Brown and the conversation with the governor, the woman failed to appear for the court hearing on Feb. 8, and the case was dropped.

It was probably a minor issue, though. MRAs are always telling me that you can get an order of protection for any reason at all. I’m sure she was just mad that the stunning floral bouquet that her charming boyfriend gave her had only seventeen roses in it. I mean, surely, she didn’t have a good reason to get this order, right?

Mr. Johnson’s girlfriend had accused him of choking her, smashing her into a mirrored dresser and preventing her from calling for help during a Halloween altercation in the Bronx apartment they shared.

Oh. Um…well. That’s…a pretty damn good reason, actually.

So to recap: a woman is assaulted, goes to the police, and begins the work of getting an order of protection. The Governor of New York — the Governor of New York — uses his aides to put pressure on her to drop the case, because the assailant is on his staff.

Frankly, as someone who cares about women’s rights, I’d rather have the guy who just liked sex with prostitutes.

But of course, Paterson is blameless in this. I mean, he didn’t know that the attack was as severe as it was.

Mr. Paterson has stated that he was unaware of the details of the case until The Times reported them, and has said he did nothing improper.

See? He had no way of knowing that the case involved someone slamming someone’s face into a dresser. And no way of finding out. Which is why he immediately got mixed up in the case, because…uh…the woman was probably lying.

Okay, actually, that’s not a very good excuse.

Paterson has already announced he won’t stand for election in the fall. If today’s allegations are true, then that doesn’t go far enough. Like his predecessor, Paterson should resign, before the day is out. Paterson injected himself into a criminal case on the side of an assailant. At best, he did so recklessly, assuming that the — again — criminal case was not so serious as it really was. At worst, he did so with malice, seeking to get the exact result he did — a woman who, faced with pressure from the office of the governor, gave up on her criminal case because she saw more pain going forward with it than any relief justice could give her.

Either way, Paterson has demonstrated that he is unfit to serve as Governor of New York. Maybe Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch can do better than the two moral lightweights to precede him this term. He certainly can’t do much worse.

So those of us who find lulz in inept campaigns all shed a tear with the news today that former Rep. Harold Ford, Jr., Joe-Tenn., would not run for Senate in New York, where he was gonna totally wow the kids with his younger, hipper Joe Lieberman-style campaign.

Alas, what could fill the void of Ford’s helicopter rides over Staten Island? What could — wait….

Do — do you hear that?

Th-that’s Mickey Kaus’s music!

Pioneering political blogger Mickey Kaus took out papers filed to run for U.S. Senate in California, he told LA Weekly. The Venice resident said he’ll run this year against Barbara Boxer for her seat.

Oh. My. GOD. This is going to be AWESOME. I wonder how the voters will respond to a candidate who I am told has been caught in flagrante delicto with several members of the species Capra aegagrus hircus. But I’m sure the voting public will show Mickey understanding. At the very least, as much understanding as he’s shown to homosexuals.

Discussing a hypothetical stipend increase for Americorps volunteers — so that they don’t have to receive food stamps as many now do — John Cole pretty much nails exactly how things would go down:

Wanting to negotiate in good faith, having never learned a lesson ever, the Democrats like Baucus and Conrad would slow down the debate to give the Republicans time to participate. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe would work for a couple weeks with Senate leadership, get a couple things they want in the bill, then sigh and utter their public regrets that they just can not support the bill. Chuck Todd, the Politico, and other dullards in the beltway media would run a few pieces wondering why Obama hasn’t reached out more to moderates. While this is happening, the wurlitzer’s media blitz starts.

First off, we all know who loves Americorp- the Clenis. From there, it is all downhill. Breitbart would seize upon the bill, and claim that the anonymous stipend is just President Obama seeking to pay off his campaign volunteers- just like the KHMER ROUGE, POL POT, STALIN, AND DUVALIER! They would find some innocuous aspect of Americorps and turn it into something that is no doubt worse than Hitler.

[...]

Somewhere around this time, Randy Scheuneman and Meg Stapleton would post a bunch of nonsense on Palin’s facebook page, maybe declaring that Americorps is just like Hitler Youth Corps. This would get picked up by the Weekly Standard’s resident Palin fluffer, Matt Continetti, repeated by the increasingly loathesome Michael Goldfarb, and mainstreamed into CNN by Stephen Hayes in one of his typical fact-free appearances. Bill Kristol would pick up the ball and run with it, and before you know it, Fred Hiatt’s fishwrap would have 20 editorials railing against Americorps.

At this time, we would have tea partiers packing guns to town hall events, terrified of a socialist takeover of, well, something, carrying racist signs and chanting “Keep Government out of Americorps!,” and the rest of the MSM can start their coverage. Sensing an opportunity, shitheels like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu sense the bill is in trouble, and would start to pack the goodies into it for their home state. Lieberman and Marshall Wittman would sense that liberals really want this, and then start voicing grave concerns about the bill, and Marty Peretz and company would call anyone who noted Lieberman is just being an asshole an anti-Semitic Jew hater. Evan Bayh and other “fiscal conservatives” would then start mugging for every camera they could find, and would make appearances on all the Sunday shows with mean old man John McCain talking about the need to cut government and why war should always be off budget.

The read-the-whole-thing level of this post is off the charts. And deeply depressing. And accurate as all get out.

Is this Carly Fiorina ad the worst political ad of all time of this year? Yes, but of course, the year is young.

So much fail, so little time. Is it the way Fiorina suggests that good fiscal conservatives are mindless sheep? The way she attacks Campbell for deficits while simultaneously attacking him for supporting tax hikes that might have ameliorated them? No, truly the best part of the ad is the Demon Sheep Itself:

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Incidentally, the title of this post comes courtesy of Cake:

From Conor:

Only a partisan hack could deny that all aspects of this election bolstering my analysis happened to be most significant, whereas factors that cut against my thesis were ultimately irrelevant to the outcome. Let this be a lesson to my political and ideological opponents in future contested elections — insofar as it is advantages my policy preferences, what happened in Massachusetts is a harbinger of things to come in the 2010 midterms, and even in 2012. Meanwhile all precedents seemingly at odds with my national political proclivities were unique, and should be ignored.

I assume everyone is watching Massachusetts as anxiously as I am?

I’m somewhat desperately — is “desperately” too strong? Maybe. But maybe not — hoping that Martha Coakley wins the election today, because although the Democrats certainly can pass health care reform no matter who wins today, they might not if Scott Brown wins.

But if Scott Brown wins — as seems likely — I can see a silver lining. I don’t think a far-right tea-bagger type is likely to win a regular election in Massachusetts, so if Brown wins, he’s almost certainly a one-termer. In contrast, Martha Coakley — who has been exactly the sort of prosecutor I loathe, the sort who doesn’t give a damn about keeping innocent people in prison as long as her conviction record looks good — would probably be in the Senate until the day she dies.

(Related: The reason the Dems are in such deep shit today is mostly the economy and the usual mid-term problems. “To reinforce this point, try and list the times when the economy was in a downturn, but approval of the governing party was in an upswing. Outside of post-election honeymoons and the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, you simply are not going to find any examples. At all.”)

As you all most certainly know, an embarrassing quote from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., surfaced over the weekend. Reid apparently stated during the 2008 election that then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., would be an electable African-American candidate because he was lighter-skinned, and because he had the ability not to speak in a “Negro dialect.”

The quote was cringeworthy, and full of what Josh Marshall once described as “racial grandpaism,” the sort of archaic, muddled statement made by a guy who is generally well-meaning, but also generally possessed by some racist baggage left over from their upbringing.

Was the quote racist? Well, yes. But racism is not a capital offense; I have said racist things and so have you. One can’t grow up in America and not be suffused with some of the racist legacy our culture carries. The best any of us can do is recognize this and strive to overcome it, and apologize and learn when we fail to live up to our responsibility to overcome it.

More to the point, Reid’s statement, while clumsy and racist, was not malicious. He wasn’t saying that Obama shouldn’t be president because he was a charlatan, or that it was reasonable and proper that darker-skinned African-Americans should be less electable. A more artful phrasing of what he was trying to say might have gone something like this: Because of the legacy of racism in this country, a candidate like Barack Obama, who is biracial and who is able to speak to audiences in a manner that is less connected with stereotypically African-American speech patterns, will be more electable than a candidate like, say, Al Sharpton, who is darker-skinned and whose speaking style is more stereotypically African-American.

That doesn’t mean that this is right; it’s a value-neutral statement of fact. And what’s more, it’s true. Just as it’s true to say that being white makes one more “electable,” historically, than not being white, or that men are more likely to be elected president than women. It’s not right. It’s not fair. It’s something we should work to change. But it’s true, and saying so doesn’t make one a racist or sexist. Saying so makes one observant.

Which brings us to former Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss.

As you may recall, Trent Lott used to be Senate Majority Leader until, in 2002, he was forced out in a scandal involving a statement he made that included racist language. The then-Majority Leader’s statement that got him in trouble came in a tribute to retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond, KKK-S.C. Lott said of Thurmond:

I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.

Strom Thurmond ran for president in 1948, at a time when he was a Democrat of the traditional Southern variety — i.e., a flaming racist douchebag who nevertheless had an illegitimate biracial daughter conceived, quite probably, in rape.

Southern Democrats were furious at efforts by President Truman to ameliorate the damage caused by the apartheid system of segregation. The breaking point came at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, at which a young Minneapolis mayor by the name of Hubert Humphrey urged the party to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” The speech prompted a walkout of Southern Democrats, who left to form their own party, the Dixiecrats. The Dixiecrats nominated Thurmond, at the time the Governor of South Carolina, as their standard-bearer.

The party’s platform was simple: States’ Rights. Anti-Miscegenation. Pro-Segregation. Pro-Lynching. They were a party whose raison d’être was the full-throated defense of Jim Crow. Perhaps their platform was summed up best by Thurmond, who during the campaign said, “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra [sic] race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”

Again, when he said those words, he had a 23-year-old African-American daughter.

Flash-forward back to today. Many on the right, apparently wowed by their ability to connect that both Trent Lott and Harry Reid were or are Senate Majority Leaders, and that both were accused of racism, are now calling on Reid to step down as Majority Leader, because the situation is totally the same. Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., said flatly, “If he [Lott] should resign, then Harry Reid should.”

This is, in a word, bonkers.

Again, what Reid said was inartful and cringe-inducing and yes, racist. But it was not malicious. A different phrasing could save it from racism, and the core idea — that America in 2010 will treat candidates of varying racial backgrounds in different ways — is absolutely true.

Compare to what Lott said. Lott said that if America had followed Mississippi’s lead in 1948 and voted for the Dixiecrats, that America today would have avoided a lot of problems.

And yet the Dixiecrats stood for the worst sorts of barbarism committed in this country. They were the spiritual heirs to the slaveholders, the men and women who were absolutely and completely committed to keeping a boot of the throats of all non-white Americans. They expressly supported lynching, for God’s sake.

There is no way to save that quote, no way to phrase it that does not make it offensive and malicious. Lott was saying, flatly, that if only we’d maintained a system of segregation and racial apartheid in the South, that America today would be better off.

To compare the two situations is ludicrous.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it:

Claiming that Harry Reid’s comments are the same, is like claiming that referring to Jews as “Hebrews” is the same as endorsing Nazism. Whereas a reputable portion of black people still use the term Negro without a hint of irony, no black person thinks the guy yelling “Segregation Forever!” would have cured us of “all these problems.”

Leaving aside political cynicism, this entire affair proves that the GOP is not simply still infected with the vestiges of white supremacy and racism, but is neither aware of the infection, nor understands the disease. Listening to Liz Cheney explain why Harry Reid’s comments were racist, was like listening to me give lessons on the finer points of the comma splice. This a party, rightly or wrongly, regarded by significant portions of the country as a haven for racists. They aren’t simply having a hard time re-branding, they don’t actually understand how and why they got the tag.

Exactly right. Harry Reid said something stupid while arguing that a specific African-American man could get himself elected to the presidency. Trent Lott endorsed the worst part of America’s racial legacy, and held it up as our nation’s salvation. That Republicans can take these two situations and not see a difference between them says far more about the Republican Party than about Harry Reid.

The government can function if the minority party has either the incentive to make the majority fail or the power to make the majority fail. It cannot function if it has both.

Ezra has a series of filibuster-related posts up today with are worth reading, beginning with an overview.

This might seem an odd moment to argue that the Senate is fundamentally broken and repairs should top our list of priorities. After all, the Senate passed a $900 billion health-care bill Thursday morning. But consider the context: Arlen Specter’s defection from the Republican Party earlier this year gave Democrats 60 votes in the Senate — a larger majority than either party has had since the ’70s. Democrats also controlled the House and the presidency, and were working in the aftermath of a financial crisis that occurred on a Republican president’s watch. This was a test of whether a party could govern when everything was stacked in its favor.

The answer seems to be, well, not really. The Democrats ended up focusing on health-care reform’s low-hanging fruit: the bill the Senate ultimately passed does much more to increase coverage than it does to address the considerably harder problem of cost control, it strengthens the existing private insurance system and it does not include a public insurance option. And Democrats still could not find a single Republican vote, which meant they had to give Nebraska a coupon entitling it to a free Medicaid expansion and hand Joe Lieberman a voucher that’s good for anything he wants. If the Senate cannot govern effectively even when history conspires to free its hand, then it cannot govern.

There’s an interview with a political scientist, who “published a study showing that about eight percent of major bills in the 1960s faced filibusters or filibuster threats and 70 percent of bills in the current decade did the same.” The point being, the filibuster has not, historically, been a routine supermajority requirement.

There are two interviews with currently sitting Senators about how the filibuster rule might be restored to what it originally was — a guarantee that no bill could be passed without some opportunity for debate.

First, Senator Tom Harkin, who wants it known that he was actively in favor of fixing the filibuster even when his party was in the majority minority, brings back a proposal that he and Joe Lieberman (!) came up with in 1995:

The idea is to give some time for extended debate but eventually allow a majority to work its will. I do believe there’s some reason to have extended debate. If a group of senators filibusters a bill, you want to take their worries seriously. Make sure you’re not missing something. My proposal will do that. It says that on the first vote, you need 60. Then you have to wait two days, and on the third day, you need 57 votes. And then you need to wait two days, and on the third day, it’s 54 votes. And then you’d wait another two days, and on the third day, it would be 51 votes.

And there’s an interview with Jeff Merkeley (Oregon has really great Senators, incidentally), who has this suggestion:

…one question we’re asking is how do you get two-thirds of the body to agree to change the rules when there’s immediate pressure for the minority to protect themselves? Your rule changes could kick in in 6 to 8 years. Or you could have rule changes that are designed to trigger when the two sides are more or less even. So when there’s a 55-45 majority, it wouldn’t kick in, but it would at 52-48. Or think about with nominations. We’re really paralyzing the executive branch.

Back to quoting Ezra:

The danger of reforming the Senate is that, like health-care reform before it, it comes to seem a partisan issue. It isn’t. Members of both parties often take the fact that neither Democrats nor Republicans can govern effectively to mean they benefit from the filibuster half the time. In reality, the country loses the benefits of a working legislature all the time.

But members of both parties have become attached to this idea that they can block objectionable legislation even when they’re relatively powerless. This is evidence, perhaps, that both parties are so used to the victories of obstruction that they have forgotten their purpose is to amass victories through governance. Either way, a world in which the majority can pass its agenda is a better one, a place where the majority party is held accountable for its ideas and not for the gridlock and inaction furnished by the Senate’s rules.

As all denizens of the internets know, Jumping the Shark is a phrase that has come to represent that moment in which a good something becomes permanently broken. It originally referred to the moment on Happy Days when Fonzie, for no evident reason, has to jump over a shark on waterskis because…well, because he had to, okay?

The actions of the formerly redoubtable Jane Hamsher during this health care debate, sadly, have now reached a point beyond Jumping the Shark. Hamsher has Transcended Sharks. She has rocketed over ever every member of Superorder Selachimorpha, and she is gone.

It’s not just her incessant parroting of right-wing talking points on individual mandates in her quixotic quest to “Kill the Bill.” Yes, Hamsher’s rhetoric since the public option was stripped has essentially mirrored the right-wing talking points (the evil government is gonna make you buy insurance! And if you’re doing well, you might even end up spending more on insurance, which will help others get insurance, but so what? What about your rights?), and that was the point at which she jumped the shark.

But now…well, now Jane has just gone beyond beyond. Because she’s allying herself with the worst elements of the Republican party. And I don’t mean that figuratively:

Jane Hamsher, Grover Norquist Call for Rahm Emanuel’s Resignation

By: Jane Hamsher Wednesday December 23, 2009 12:17 pm

Today, Grover Norquist and I are calling for an investigation into Rahm Emanuel’s activities at Freddie Mac, and the White House’s blocking of an Inspector General who would look into it. The letter follows: [...]

This is, in a word, unforgivable. It would be akin to working directly with Dick Cheney. Norquist is, quite frankly, a man who has devoted his entire life to destroying the Democratic Party, and any form of government more robust that that which exists in Somalia. He famously has said of his aims, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” He wants to eliminate the FDA, the NEA, the IRS, and the Department of Education.

Norquist cut his teeth working with the Contras for Ollie North. He helped Newt Gingrich write the Contract With America. He’s the genius behind the TABOR legislation that’s been slowly strangling Colorado. Norquist was an early and enthusiastic backer of then-Gov. George W. Bush’s run for the presidency in 2000, and he has been associated with Karl Rove for decades. His goals are anathema to the goals of Democrats, or indeed anyone more liberal than James Inhofe.

Quite honestly, if Grover Norquist approached me and asked me to help him in his quest to save puppies, it would lead me to rethink my feelings about puppies. So it’s not just alarming, but flatly wrong for Hamsher to join in common cause with Norquist, even if there was strong evidence that Rahm Emmanuel had done something specifically wrong during his brief tenure at Freddie Mac, which there isn’t.¹

At any rate, Hamsher isn’t concerned about Emmanuel’s ethical problems. She’s mad because Emmanuel put pressure on the Senate to find a compromise that could get through the Senate, and that led us to the bill which lacks the public option, which alone has caused mandates to go from fairly understandable requirements to the worst! violation! of liberty! ever!!! And Hamsher wants to punish Emmanuel and the Obama Administration however she can. if that means making common cause with the likes of Norquist or Phyllis Freakin’ Schlafly, so be it.

Well include me out. I can understand being so frustrated with the bill coming out of the Senate that you’d oppose it. I think the idea that a better bill is just waiting for more willpower, or attacks on Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., or a really good speech from Barack Obama betrays a certain naïveté about the realities of the American system of government, and I think the main lines of attack from the Kill Bill crowd have been specious at best, but I can understand the frustration shared by anti-compromise forces; indeed, I share it, even as I understand that reality means we have to give in to Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman because that’s the way the system works.

But Hamsher has moved beyond principled opposition to the bill, and beyond even strong and forceful criticism of the Obama Administration. She’s now working with people who do not wish to improve the Obama Administration, but instead wish to destroy it. She’s working with people who do not want to improve the bill working its way though Congress so that more people are helped and corporations get their just deserts, but instead with people who want Congress to end Medicaid because it helps the wrong sort of people.

I’m sorry, but that’s beyond the pale. Hamsher may have the purest of intent. But her actions are helping and emboldening the right. She has, ultimately, become the mirror of her greatest adversary, Holy Joe Lieberman, another person who started out a moderate liberal, and ended up joining forces in common cause with the Republican Party. In his case, it was just the war he was with them on. In Hamsher’s case, it’s just health care and Rahm Emmanuel. In both of their cases, they’re gone. And they’re never coming back.

1. There is some evidence that Emmanuel did nothing during his brief tenure at Freddie Mac, and that he basically received a paycheck for doing said nothing because he’d been a high-ranking official in the Clinton Administration, but while such a deal may be unethical — indeed, is unethical, in my opinion — it isn’t criminal, and isn’t much different than, say, Halliburton hiring a politically-connected former Defense Secretary as its chief. Indeed, such practices are sadly common, on both sides of the aisle. That may be reason to think Rahm isn’t particularly ethical, or even a reason to think Emmanuel’s a bad person. It isn’t by itself reason to call for his resignation. And it certainly isn’t the real reason Hamsher or Norquist are doing so.