Anyone want to bet the topic of "affirmative action" gets a heightened profile in the coming months?

Seed, cultivate, reap.

Seed, cultivate, reap.

Seed, cultivate, reap.

This is how America's pinch-faced Fascist Right (the only enforced Right remaining in this country) sets the national agenda, and as long as voters keep sending gelatinous Democratic millionaires to expand their financial portfolios in Congress, it always will.

The Democratic Faithful can (and, no doubt, will) persist in delusions of liberalism ascendant, but their necrotic party won't be regenerating itself anytime soon - not while "liberals" champion Obama's beeline to the dick-measuring contest in Afghanistan, Pakistan and, yes, Iraq, all while continuing a host of Bush-era policies that represent a total assault on civil liberties and the "freedom" our politicians tell us is so precious. The Democratic Party doesn't have to change because it already has their support. Should voters ever decide to make that support conditional, Salon columnists & bloggers will have better things to do than cry about Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck.

Oh, and, by the way, discussions of affirmative action should not be confined to race. Women of every color are still getting screwed over in the workplace (as is everyone else, for reasons not necessarily involving race or gender, thanks to systematic erosion of legal protections for the fortunately employed), but based on the commonplace horrors I've witnessed during my thirty years in the workforce, working women would be significantly worse off today without affirmative action.

Darren Hutchinson's same as it ever was rationalization of the kleptocracy Obama oversees is typical of the kneejerk defense forever emanating from liberal quarters. Not only is that defense appallingly lame to the point of being unconscionable (for a thinking person), it diminishes any valid points expressed by the defender, and does precisely nothing to mitigate the lies Buchanan weaves into his bomb-throwing demagoguery.

Republican or Democrat, it would be a swell thing if voters would start taking some responsibility for policies initiated by their respective oligarchs.