From The Slacktivist

From ABC News and Radley Balko

For those of you who are unfamiliar, during a drug raid last January, police officer Joseph Chavalia shot and killed Wilson and wounded her infant son. Wilson was unarmed and was holding the child in her arms at the time. It's probably no surprise to anyone that Wilson is Black and Sgt. Chavalia is white.

I was going to do a whole analysis of this subject, only to find that Mark Kleiman has already done it for me. I'm going to borrow liberally(heh) from his post. Go click over there to see the extent of my theft.

Even though there are no more contests scheduled until April 22nd, the delegate count in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination continues shift around. Obama picks up nine delegates from the county caucuses in Iowa yesterday, eight from John Edwards and one from Hillary Clinton. He loses one, and Clinton gains one, in the final California count. That sounds like +9 for Obama, coincidentally the same number that Clinton gained from her big win in Ohio.

Many people, myself included, are of the opinion that it's going to be very hard for a pro-gay, pro-choice, anti-gun, New York, Italian, lapsed Catholic to win the GOP nod. And even if he wins, the thinking goes, he'll have no shot of actually winning the office because the hardcore pro-lifers aren't going to vote for a pro-choice candidate, no matter how many Scalia clones he promises to appoint to the Supreme Court. If a significant percentage of them vote for a third-party candidate or even just stay home it would make the 2008 Presidential contest no more competitive than the last Patriots-Dolphins game, with the GOP representing Miami.

I've been been mostly away from The Forvm of late, work and all that jazz, but I couldn't resist passing on this little bit of Rudiania.

Those of us on the left have long argues that Rudy's got nothing on his resume but September the 11th. The New York Daily News decided to prove it.

Via TPM

Rudy addressed the NRA today and did a near 180 on his view of guns and gun control. Why? Well 9/11, natch.

Sez' Rudy:

Two questions come to mind.

1. How stupid do you have to be to say something like that?

There's an old joke that goes something like this:

This joke was the first thing that came to mind when I read that Mitt Romney had spent over two million dollars on the Ames, Iowa straw poll. Jill Lawrence at USA Today does the math and figures that he paid at least $442 for each of his 4,516 votes in the poll. The second place finisher, Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, shelled out a modest $58 for each of his 2,500+ votes, certainly winning the frugality-popularity metric. Third place finisher Sam Brownback spent about $150 per vote.

I didn't think the Democratic YouTube debate was anything particularly groundbreaking. It was, for all intents and purposes, a town hall debate with the questions prerecorded. There were a couple questions you probably wouldn't have seen even in a standard town format, such as whether the candidates had hurt feelings over all the speculation and anticipation about Al Gore getting into the race. I thought that some of the presentations made the questions more interesting, such as this charming couple, a talking snowman and even a song about taxes.

Nobody has less love for the Bush administration than I do. I personally can't wait for Janury 21st, 2009 so that we can begin the long-overdue prosecution of the Bush administration and their cronies. The ones that don't get pardoned, that is. But I'm getting pretty annoyed at former members this administration who decide to come out and talk about how much they really disagreed with what was going on.

Case in point, this past week we heard from two formerly loyal members of the Bush 43 team, former Surgeon General Richard Carmona and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Both of these men expressed, in no uncertain terms, how they disagreed with the direction the White House was taking and, more to the point, their role in it.

I admit, me and my fellow lefties have been less than pleased with the backbone of our Democratic leaders in Congress. Yes, we understand the limits of legislative power, especially with only a Lieberman-thin majority in the Senate. Still, you'd think that a near landslide victory in the last go-round and a President both mired in scandal and hovering around Nixonian approval ratings might inspire some forcefulness from our representatives.