Cazayoux's victory occurred in my district. He was the most conservative of the several Democratic contenders for the nomination, and beat out a black fellow legislator in the second round of our Byzantine run-off system. So his victory actually follows the pattern of several Democratic seat pick-ups in the 2006 election.

The sixth district is demographically complex--it was gerrymandered originally to dilute the large African-American vote therein, and as long as all whites vote Republican in a bloc, it is a reliably GOP district. Cazayoux won for at least four reasons:

(1) The most obvious is that he's a Democrat in a year that even Louisianians are growing weary of Republicans. The number of SUVs and pickups with "W" stickers on them is still large down here, but not as large as it was two or three years ago.

(2) Cazayoux, by running to the right, coopted the usual GOP subtext and wedge issues for himself. (I received a robo-call from former Sen. John Breaux, urging me to vote for Cazayoux because of his "conservative, Louisiana values." I voted for him anyway.)

(3) Cazayoux's opponent is sort of a local laughingstock, a multiply-failed businessman named Woody Jenkins who publishes a segregationist rag in which he repeatedly urges the secession of "South," i.e. white, Baton Rouge from "North," i.e. black, Baton Rouge. Even white conservative voters may feel uneasy with his apartheid fantasies, although it's his shady business dealings and fiscal ineptitude that really sealed the deal.

(4) A big maybe:

Race matters in America, and will always matter. Even if it stops mattering in the rest of the U.S., it will continue to matter in the deep south. But since 2001, since Katrina, since Iraq, it has become possible for economics and ethics to trump race, and for the use of race to keep black and white working people at odds with one another to come to an end, at least provisionally.

it is in danger of acting like a bully, and gives a blowhard like Dobbs the chance to be a martyr to First Amendment rights.

But when Congress lives up to its responsibility to regulate interstate commerce (and this includes the airwaves and, pace the Reagan-era FCC, cable), it is fulfilling its constitutional duty, something it has abdicated with respect to TV and radio since the abrogation of the Fairness Doctrine.

The solution may or may not be the MORA Act, authored by Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and intended to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. New times and new media may require different solutions to balance the public right to free speech against the broadcaster's right to free (i.e. purchased) speech. But unless Congress grows a pair and undoes its general abdication of responsibility, all its members can do is whine--even in a good cause.

Sometimes I agree with Joan Walsh. Sometimes I disagree with her. I happen to be an Obama supporter; she supports Clinton. But geez Louise, where do these people come from who seem to await her every utterance like Dick Cheney's hunting party waiting for quail? Joan could do the editorial equivalent of clear her throat, and there would be sixty posts within an hour dripping with facetious rancor telling her she's not fit to draw breath.

Such people are, in my opinion, making their own sense of impotence and irrelevance all too clear. It must be musty in your Mom's basement, guys, but hey, at least she's paying the Internet bill, right?

We're better than that, people. I hope. Or there's no point in pretending that what happens to this country matters.

Civilized discourse. Look it up.

Actually, Obama has raised a great deal of his money à la Howard Dean -- over the Internet in small amounts from a very wide base of donors. I send him $25 every few paydays, since that's the only way I can possibly influence the presidential election, given the fact that I'm a liberal in a deep red state.

The ultimate importance of this new, non-John Houseman method of financing a campaign has yet to be determined. For now, given the Electoral College and the gerrymandered status of our Congress, it's the closest thing to being able to really influence federal electoral politics we have.

This is another reason I prefer Obama to Clinton: while both have big donors, they set the tone of the latter's campaign and would ultimately set the agenda of her presidency. Obama, not so much.

It's gotten to the point that shills like Gibson and Stephanopoulos get their talking points from Mallard Fillmore.

Let's not forget that the complicity of Congress (and indeed the complacency of the American people) was necessary to enable Bush to rack up this debt. And the guardians of the supposedly self-correcting market did nothing to discourage it either. George W. Bush is the creation of our collective stupidity and delusion in a way that not even Richard Nixon was. To borrow from the film Forbidden Planet, he is a Monster from the Id of the American people.

Read the McCain profile in a recent New Yorker, and decide (in conjunction with this incident) if John McCain is anything but a bully, despite all of his verbal abuse being him "just kidding." He's a bully of a different type than the George W. model, who's more the class wiseass (who feels safe to hurl insults and screw up endlessly because his dad is the football coach, or the principal) than a real bully, but a bully nonetheless. Remember the crowd of dim loser hangers-on that would form every schoolyard bully's entourage? That's the press corps, in a nutshell.

damaged in Katrina, and use the rest to pay down the Visa.