Michael Moore to begin gathering information for a movie on BillieBoy. For each time, Little Billie's crew ambushes someone, Moore's crew ambushes Little Billie. Of course they should also ambush the members of Little Billie's ambush crew... repeatedly, mercilessly.

People like Little Billie and his posse are nothing but overgrown, underdeveloped, over-empowered playground bullies who will only learn by having their own tactics used on themselves.

Which they have been, but now that they're awake, they're a good deal smarter than our rightwing friends might wish they were. All the old tactics: endlessly repeated B.S., unsubstantiated false attacks, trying to label the Democrats as "big spenders" and complaining about earmarks when there's no way the Democrats can even come close to the spending increases of the Republicans, NONE of these tactics work now that the public is awake (except, of course for the always-sleepwalking right wing loyalists and their mouthpieces).

But they're the only thing the Republicans have actually had since the days they used them to get Reagan elected, so look forward to more of the same. It will likely take a generation in the wilderness and the death of a few key loud mouths before a new generation of conservatives will begin to build a fact and reason based counterpoint to the traditional Democratic approach (if that's even possible).

Meanwhile, President Obama, thankfully, still has the political capital to do what's unpopular but necessary: prop up the institutions whose leaders demanded the changes that resulted in this mess enough to prevent a collapse (which will take a breathtakingly amazing amount of public funding - this hole is still much larger than we really comprehend), after which he and congress will rebuild the regulatory laws and enforcement mechanisms that our investment and financial sector so clearly need in very logical ways.

The Wall Street and financial CEOs will scream about the destruction of the "free market," but the public finally recognizes that B.S. for what it always was. The Street will be so in debt to the public by then (they already are) that, when the new regulations come down, the public will be solidly behind them.

Finally, the world will begin to shift, and we'll move back in the direction of operating our economy on sounder footings featuring more equal compensation for those who work (because unions will have been re-empowered as a counterbalance to the tyrannical rule that much of management, as required by Wall Street, has recently demonstrated), and ways which support the production of actual, physical objects and profiting from inventing innovative ideas and developing them into attractive and useful products.

In other words we will no longer be paying our society's highest rewards to those who produced nothing but were only selling investments made of magical "fairy dust" which were not even that, but, once you laid down your money, were revealed to be toxic waste.

I suspect you can identify them by their use of specific endlessly-repeated talking points together with the fact that they are so rabidly opposed to the very idea that the perspectives expressed on Salon exist, let alone that so many of us enjoy reading it, that it's unimaginable that they would choose to read this site voluntarily.

I don't know whether the left has used paid trolls, but it seems as if that's a much more likely tactic of the right (and by the way, Jesus Christ and the original brothers who led the twelve tribes of Israel, especially Judah, are all EXTREMELY offended when slimeballs on the right claim to be allied with them).

DarkHomer's piece, however, is very likely a lame attempt to get people on the right wing sites, who may very well be reading increasing amounts of other right-leaning folks calling some of the offensive idiocy found there into question, to ignore anyone who questions the VERY important and UNDENIABLY brave, patriotic, and intelligent people in charge of those sites.

DarkHomer's just crying out hysterically... "DON'T LISTEN TO THEM! No matter how much better in touch with reality they seem than our shrieking, whining, angry, wailing, keening endless variations on 'POOR US!'"

DON'T LISTEN TO THEM! THEY'RE JUST LEFTWING TROLLS!

DON'T LISTEN TO THEM PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! DON'T LISTEN AND FOR THE SAKE OF ALL THAT'S GOOD AND HOLY (you know, Wall Street, Wealthy CEOs, Big Guns, Warmongering Armageddon-loving gay-hating abortion-hating politicians) DON'T LISTEN!

and whatever you do DON'T THINK about the very reasonable questions they're asking or provable facts they're raising!

DON'T LISTEN! DON'T THINK! They're just EVIL TROLLS!

In that they allow real people to get together, share their opinions, challenge each other and talk about a wide variety of issues beyond just nominating candidates, including passing resolutions which may become part of the state party's platform.

In other words they are participatory democracy in it's most basic form - at least that's the way every one I've attended has functioned here in Minnesota.