Do Police Have The "Right" To Brutalize-- And Execute-- Citizens? Republicans Tend To Think So

If the election is a referendum on Trump, get ready for President Biden. If it's about Trump's handling of the pandemic, expect an landslide that will see Republicans at every level of government losing their offices. The Republicans know that, of course, and they are working make the election about anything else. They've settled on a bogus "law and order" narrative. Bogus because Trump is the most criminal president in history, presiding over the most criminal regime in American history. This may not be that big a deal compared to Trump's major, daily criminality but last February he pardoned the female Darrell Issa, Angela Stanton-King, who had served 2 years of her sentence for running a car theft ring. A few weeks after Trump pardoned her, she launched an election campaign against John Lewis in Atlanta's 5th congressional district, one of the bluest districts in the country (D+34), where Trump only drew 11% of the vote. With Lewis' death Stanton-King is now running in an open seat (against state Senator Nikema Williams). A gay-bashing, anti-Choice Q-Anon nut case with a flare for getting attention, Stanton-King has no chance of being elected to Congress but every TV appearance and every newspaper article or social media mention brings money into her coffers. She's very much like her hero, Señor Trumpanzee.

"Law and order" is not part of today's Republican Party-- except inasmuch as it can be used to oppress poor people. The Republican campaign theme this cycle is all about painting a picture of Democrat-run cities being overrun by angry mobs and looters. Trump in New Hampshire Friday: "Today's Democratic Party is filled with hate. Just look at Joe Biden supporters on the street screaming and shouting at bystanders with unhinged manic rage... They are not protesters. They are anarchists, they are agitators, they are rioters, they are looters." And actual Trump supporter Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two protesters and wounded a third in Kenosha.

The protests in Kenosha were all about the police shooting Jacob Blake in the back-- 7 times-- last Sunday. Blake lived but is now paralyzed from the waist down. The police responded to protesters by gassing them. Some of the protesters, angry and provoked-- possibly by Trumpist agents provocateurs-- burned businesses. There is a legitimate sense that police are not accountable for their criminal activity and the fascist impulses they act out against citizens.

"I support the protestors, so I am against the police. That’s the lie I hear every single day in America," wrote John Pavlovitz yesterday. "It’s a myth perpetuated by this President and his party and by people like them: white people who don’t want to address the systemic racism embedded in law enforcement or the persistent brutality against people of color on display-- and who attempt to push people to the very opposite of poles in order to avoid talking about it: 'Choose Black Lives or Blue Lives.' they say. 'Those are the options.' This choice is not only unnecessary, it is rooted in a fundamental falsehood: the existence of Blue Lives. There is no such thing as a 'Blue Life.'"

Law enforcement officers are not a race and they are not a monolith, either. They come from every disparate part of this nation; out of many families of origin, religious traditions, sexual orientations, and political affiliations, when they choose this work. It is among the most dangerous and stressful and volatile work on the planet-- but they do choose it.

And when they do, they take an oath to protect and serve humanity in its fullness. That is the job description. It is the very heart of the calling. It is the singular purpose they exist: defense of all life under the Law, a Law they represent and embody.

There are expectations we have for those choosing to put on that badge and that uniform:

• They are expected to defuse combustible situations, not exacerbate them.
• They are expected to use wisdom and restraint instead of emotionally exerting force.
• They are expected to withstand provocation without responding in kind.
• They are expected to be beyond prejudice and above biases that would deny another human being’s inherent worth.
• They are expected to uphold the civil rights of every person in their path equally, without caveat or condition or excuse.
• They are paid by American citizens (including citizens of color) to do this chosen work on behalf of the public who they are accountable to.

And when they are off-duty, members of this diverse community can remove the badge and uniform and they can escape the hazards and the threats of their jobs, and live fully into their other “non-Blue identities”-- that is, except for the black and brown police officers.

They like (all people of color) can’t take off their skin to avoid the taunts that come with it, they can’t be undercover or off-duty or take a break from the demands of their difficult reality. They can’t step out of their pigmentation in order to sidestep the violence it brings every moment of every day. They are not black or brown at some portions of the day or some days of the week or when they clock in, which is why the supposed #BlueLivesMatter movement isn’t an equivalent advocacy of life in response to the call for people of color to be treated with dignity, it is an insult. It is a white excuse to avoid confronting discrimination against people of color, to distract from the difficult conversations, to deny the systemic sickness, and to stop all conversation.

This is something far beyond citizen on citizen violence, this is violence initiated by those with both the power of the Law and weaponry in their hands. That means they are subject to even greater scrutiny because the stakes are higher and the impact on communities is profound.

It is not an attack on law enforcement to name and to condemn police brutality, or to demand that those who comprise its ranks are of the highest standard as human beings-- it is a reiteration of its value as an entity.

And it is not anti-American, but the essence of patriotism to responsibly police the police; to ensure that they are living into their oath with regard to all citizens, because every human life literally depends on them doing so: at traffic stops and in city streets and in public parks and in their homes.

And as citizens of this country, we don’t have to apologize for our standards and our expectations of public servants. That’s part of the gig. Law-abiding, tax-paying Americans are not accountable to violent police officers-- violent police officers are accountable to law-abiding, tax-paying Americans. It is not incumbent on us to avoid criticizing them, it is incumbent on them to listen and to respond to valid criticism.

It’s not asking too much to insist that officers not only protect people of color as passionately as they protect white Americans, but that they not actively harm them.

It’s not unreasonable to expect them not to kneel on a man’s neck for over eight minutes until he expires, not to shoot a man seven times in the back, not break into a woman’s bedroom and murder her, not to beat peaceful protestors, not to knock unarmed old men to the ground, not to allow a young white man with an AR-15 to run past them while being alerted to his murderous presence.

Being furious when police officers do these things is not an act of hatred against law enforcement as an entity-- but against the acts of hateful cowardice committed by some that pervert it and cheapen them all.

I am not for Blue Lives, I am for human lives, and the human lives that continually find themselves brutalized by those entrusted to protect them are black and brown-- and Americans need to name and confront and own this because until we do, we will continue to conflate outrage at inequity, with attacks on the perpetrators of this inequity.

The good people of this country fighting against brutality will not be defined by the calculated lie that to be for Black Lives is to be against the police.

We simply demand that the police be for Black Lives without exception-- or we demand they no longer be police.

Should Members Of Congress Pay For Their Complicity In Mass Gun Slaughter?

If you read DWT with any regularity you probably know we're pretty tough on law and order around here. This isn't an "abolish the death penalty" blog. This is a "let's use the death penalty much more" kind of blog-- albeit not until we have a perfected justice system that doesn't penalize suspects for being minorites or for poverty. Once that's all set, you better hope I'm not ever a judge. For example, all the Members of Congress who have carried out the diktats of the NRA in regard to ending the assault weapons ban-- how would you like seeing Heidi Heitkamp and every Republican senator on trial for the mass murders in Orlando's Pulse? You probably know the sanitized fictional version of what happened to Dan White, Harvey Milk's and George Moscone's assassin. Take my word for it, justice was rougher than than the official report of suicide. The LGBT community isn't a bunch of wimpy liberals who get pushed around by red necks who gravitate towards gun violence because of their penis-size insecurities. Sorry... off the topic there.

And how about the NRA's number one handmaiden in Congress, Paul Ryan? Should he be on trial for all those deaths? I'm not prejudging in case I wind up on the jury... which I'd sincerely want to be.

Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15, the implement of mass destruction used in the Orlando slaughter that the Republicans have allowed to permeate our country, bringing nothing but death and destruction in it's wake. His family told NBC News that Stoner never intended it for civilian use.

The AR-15 is the most talked about gun in America.

But the AR-15's creator died before the weapon became a popular hit and his family has never spoken out.

Until now.

"Our father, Eugene Stoner, designed the AR-15 and subsequent M-16 as a military weapon to give our soldiers an advantage over the AK-47," the Stoner family told NBC News late Wednesday. "He died long before any mass shootings occurred. But, we do think he would have been horrified and sickened as anyone, if not more by these events."

The inventor's surviving children and adult grandchildren spoke exclusively to NBC News by phone and email, commenting for the first time on their family's uneasy legacy. They requested individual anonymity in order to speak freely about such a sensitive topic. They also stopped short of policy prescriptions or legal opinions.

But their comments add unprecedented context to their father's creation, shedding new light on his intentions and adding firepower to the effort to ban weapons like the AR-15. The comments could also bolster a groundbreaking new lawsuit, which argues that the weapon is a tool of war-- never intended for civilians.

Eugene Stoner would have agreed, his family said.

The ex-Marine and "avid sportsman, hunter and skeet shooter" never used his invention for sport. He also never kept it around the house for personal defense. In fact, he never even owned one.

And though he made millions from the design, his family said it was all from military sales.

"After many conversations with him, we feel his intent was that he designed it as a military rifle," his family said, explaining that Stoner was "focused on making the most efficient and superior rifle possible for the military."

He designed the original AR-15 in the late 1950s, working on it in his own garage and later as the chief designer for ArmaLite, a then small company in southern California. He made it light and powerful and he fashioned a new bullet for it-- a .223 caliber round capable of piercing a metal helmet at 500 yards.



The Army loved it and renamed it the M16.

But after Stoner's death in 1997, at the age of 74, a semi-automatic version of the AR-15 became a civilian bestseller, too, spawning dozens of copy-cat weapons. The National Rifle Association has taken to calling it "America's rifle."

The bullets that tore through the Pulse nightclub in Orlando were Stoner's .223 rounds, fired from a AR-15 spin off made by Sig Sauer.

In all, an AR-15 style rifle has been used in at least 10 recent mass shootings-- including at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and a work party in San Bernardino, California.

"What has happened, good or bad, since his patents have expired is a result of our free market system," Stoner's family said. "Currently, a more interesting question is 'Who now is benefiting from the manufacturing and sales of AR-15s, and for what uses?'"

That's the question for the rest of us.

So just to be clear, yes, the Member of Congress who have voted to end the assault weapons ban should be put on trial. That may be a fantasy at this point-- unless you realize that elections are trials too. Think about that when you consider voting for Republicans in November. They're accessories to mass murder and they don't deserve public trust... to put it mildly. Hold them accountible:

The Teabaggers Will Be Denied… Again

Who will Sheldon & Miriam want to get into bed with?

Roland is in Las Vegas for the long weekend. So are some of the most venal characters in American politics-- Gov. Scott Walker, Gov. John Kasich, Gov. Chris Christie, John Bolton, ex-Gov. Jeb Bush and Dick Cheney. The Republicans-- other than Cheney, who just shows up wherever evil is pulsing strongest on earth-- are there for the Sheldon and Miriam Adelson Primary where each presidential wanna-be is vetted in terms of how slavish they are to the national interests of Israel-- this is a strictly Israel-first/America-second confab-- and the gambling interests of the Adelson branch of the Mafia.

Although the government of Binyamin Netanyahu and the Adelsons have a lot of say in the decision of who will be the next Republican nominee, they don't get to decide all by themselves. The grassroots, of course, are ignored. They can suck air with their fervent intentions for winning the nomination for right-wing extremists like Ted Cruz or Rand Paul. The serious people don't consider them any more serious than the German plutocrats considered Hitler in the early 1930s. The power brokers who laugh at the teabaggers and the religious right grassroots dredges, have pretty much settled on Jeb Bush now that Christie is damaged goods. If this sounds like it was written by a Jeb Bush press flack… well… how coy can one be when one is breaking sucking up to the detestable Adelsons in their garish Mafia haven?

Many of the Republican Party’s most powerful insiders and financiers have begun a behind-the-scenes campaign to draft former Florida governor Jeb Bush into the 2016 presidential race, courting him and his intimates and starting talks on fundraising strategy.

Concerned that the George Washington Bridge traffic scandal has damaged New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s political standing and alarmed by the steady rise of Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), prominent donors, conservative leaders and longtime operatives say they consider Bush the GOP’s brightest hope to win back the White House.

Bush’s advisers insist that he is not actively exploring a candidacy and will not make a decision until at least the end of this year. But over the past few weeks, Bush has traveled the country delivering policy speeches, campaigning for Republicans ahead of the fall midterm elections, honing messages on income inequality and foreign policy, and cultivating ties with wealthy benefactors-- all signals that he is considering a run.

Many if not most of Mitt Romney’s major donors are reaching out to Bush and his confidants with phone calls, e-mails and invitations to meet, according to interviews with 30 senior Republicans. One bundler estimated that the “vast majority” of Romney’s top 100 donors would back Bush in a competitive nomination fight.

“He’s the most desired candidate out there,” said another bundler, Brian Ballard, who sat on the national finance committees for Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008. “Everybody that I know is excited about it.”

But Bush would have serious vulnerabilities as a candidate. Out of public office for seven years, he has struggled in some appearances and has had difficulty navigating the Republican Party’s fault lines on immigration and other issues. A Bush candidacy also would test whether the nation still has a hangover from the George W. Bush administration.

On Thursday night, Bush was feted here at a VIP dinner held by Sheldon Adelson inside the billionaire casino magnate’s airplane hangar. When one donor told Bush, “I hope you run for president in 2016,” the crowd of about 60 guests burst into applause, said a donor in attendance.

Bush also met privately with Adelson. One person with knowledge of the conversation said that the former governor was “very laid back and comfortable” and that they did not discuss the 2016 campaign.

…He would enter a wide-open contest for the GOP nomination with other advantages, as well: deep ties to his party’s establishment and evangelical wings, and a reputation as a reform-minded policy wonk. Fluent in Spanish, Bush has credibility within the Hispanic community that could help broaden his coalition. He also has the gravitas many Republicans say is required to compete with former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democrats’ leading potential contender.

“Jeb has the capacity to bring the party together,” said [Nixon's Jew counter] Fred Malek, a top Republican official who said he has been in regular contact with Bush.

…Bush’s vocal support for immigration reform and Common Core education standards-- lightning-rod issues for tea party activists-- could dog him in the GOP primaries… In any campaign, Bush would have to grapple with the legacy of his brother George W. Bush and his unpopular wars. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that almost half of all Americans surveyed say they “definitely would not” vote for Jeb Bush for president.

“The ‘Bush fatigue’ question is always there,” said former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour (R). “If his name was Jeb Brown instead of Jeb Bush, he’d be the front-runner.” … Strategists for other prospective candidates said they are growing nervous about Bush and fear that he could lock up the donor class. “He would take some of the oxygen out of the air,” said David Carney, an ally of Texas Gov. Rick Perry ®.

Paul Ryan may not have been there this weekend… but apparently someone grabbed his iPod to better entertain the fat cats:

And they said the NYS Dems' record for shortest tenure as Senate majority party (under 11 months, 1965) was one that would never be broken

Billionaire, thrice-failed gubernatorial candidate, and recent self-proclaimed tax emigrant to Florida Tom "The Golem" Golisano, seen here in an unflattering, apparently stone likeness, is just one of the hilarious players in the summer-stock production of Putsch! currently being played in that hotbed of hilarity, the New York State Senate.

"Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight."

-- from the famous opening number of the classic Larry Gelbart-Stephen Sondheim musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (the first show for which Sondheim provided music as well as lyrics)

by Ken

With our NYS Legislature, by contrast, it's comedy 24/7!

So, who could have foreseen, right? I mean, the way a "coalition" of New York State Senate Republicans and a couple of nominal Democrats -- people you would by and large do your darnedest to avoid allowing in your home -- wrested control of the Senate from the iron grip of Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, thus ending his and the Democrats' five-month tenure as Senate majority party. Or maybe they didn't. (The Dems say the Senate was adjourned before the vote that either did or didn't take place, depending on your viewpoint, and in the best of comedy stylings, the joint is now locked tight, with the keys in the Dems' possession of either the Senate secretary or the sergeant-at-arms, like as if it was the Our Gang clubhouse, while presumably all the players are running frantically to, and trying to break down the doors of, the judges of their choice.

Quite a shocker, eh? Well, maybe not so much.

Yesterday's putsch in Albany may have been "unexpected" in the sense that nobody except the conspirators led by briefly former and apparently soon-to-be once-again Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos knew it was going to happen yesterday. After all, as the breathless local news talking heads were pointing out in their pop-eyed accounts, most everyone expected that that the Senate was going to be accomplishing its current paper-shuffling standard yesterday, which is to say zilch, as the Legislature counts down the last two weeks of the current session.

Oh, it's not that there's nothing to be done. There's a nasty list of things that need to be done by recess (but probably won't be), and then an assortment of lists of things hoped by various parties to be done (expected to suffer a similar fate). But basically where approximately where we were six or seven months ago.

So, in short, pretty much the last thing any of us were expecting was news of any sort from our beloved, gridlocked Senate. But in reality this has been staring us in the face ever since the Dems won "control" (ha!) of the Senate in November, by a tenuous 32-30 margin that's a good deal wispier than it sounds, for the first time since the LBJ presidential landslide year of 1964.

Essentially we're back where we were in December. As you may recall, barely had the election smoke cleared -- with one Senate contest, for the Queens seat being defended by incumbent GOP Sen. Frank Padavan, still undecided -- than it became clear that the Senate Democrats, after all those decades as a permanent minority, didn't face a smooth transition into the majority.

Suddenly there was a Gang of Four or Maybe Three -- Democratic state senators, including one who had only just been elected -- threatening to refuse to vote with their fellow Democrats unless, unless . . . well, it's never been clear what they wanted. It was widely assumed that the key bone of contention, or a key, was opposition to same-sex marriage, and there's no question that this is a big issue to the socially extremely conservative Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. of the Bronx, who is an ardently anti-choice Democrat (and emphatically not to be confused with his progressive son, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr.).

But the issue doesn't seem to resonate much with the others. Pedro Espada Jr. doesn't seem to have much history on the issue. He's more known for a history of dubious financial dealings that's outsize even by forgiving Bronx-pol standards. Espada in fact was actually negotiatintg a deal with Malcolm Smith, repudiated when it became public, that among other goodies would, astonishingly, have vaulted him to the position of Senate president pro tempore -- a dream that rechristened GOP Majority Leader in fact delivered on yesterday in a flurry of post-putsch activity. The word generally heard about Espada is that he has ties (financial, one would presume) to landlord interests, which are always in play when it comes time for the Legislature to consider renewal of rent regulation laws. There's no question that a Republican-controlled Senate is a happier playing filed for landlords.

And at least on paper the just-elected Hiram Monserrate of Queens, who quickly backed down from the uprising rumblings, reducing the Gang from Four to Three. is a textbook progressive. But then, Senator Monserrate has other, er, issues, centering around an incident with a girlfriend. He was, as Wikipedia puts it, "arrested on December 19, 2008 and accused of slashing Karla Giraldo in the face with a broken drinking glass during an argument in his Jackson Heights apartment." And in fact it wasn't that long ago that the Republicans were opposing seating their future "coalition" mate Monserrate at all. Complicating matters for the senator, in March a Queens grand jury indicted him on three counts of felony assault and three counts of misdemeanor assault. Word is that his conversion to coalitionism is going to win him some much-needed funding for his defense.

Finally there's my favorite of the bunch: Carl Kruger of Brooklyn, whose sole known governing principle appears to be: What's good for Carl Kruger is good for Carl Kruger. In 2007 Kruger became the first minority-party member in NYS Senate history to be appointed chairman of a committee, and even though Kruger does not appear to have participated in yesterday's coup, it's reported that Skelos has assured our Carl that he will retain his committee chairmanship under the new "coalition" command.

From the evident ethnicity of three of the four, it's not surprising that there was talk of Hispanic resentment at disrespect from the Democratic conference leadership. One wants to be sensitive here, but what possible respect could be shown to people like this? The only discernible thread that joins these Democratic "rebels" is an especially shameless concern for the traditional NYS Leg question "What's in it for me?" But there's a way of doing it that crosses the line into tacky, like when a bribe-giver hands out bare fistfuls of cash rather than taking the trouble to stuff the loot in an envelope that slides easily into the pocket. Now there's class.

Here it's well to remember those decades of permanent-minority status Democratic senators suffered. As I've written before, there was little enough for majority senators to do, since traditionally all their thinking was done for them by their majority leader. But at least they had all those perks of the majority to occupy their attention and help instill a modicum of, um, dignity. In New York's system, there is a raging disproportion between majority and minority loot, which is how the two major parties came to carve up the Legislature after that brief experience of Democratic Senate rule in 1965. The biggest, most intractable disagreement between the parties back then was reapportionment. With each party unwilling the forego the opportunity to pamper itself and screw the opposition, the two houses had still not been able to agree on a judicially acceptable redistricting plan.

With a view to future census-driven redistrictring, the legislative leaders finally hammered out the only compromise they could think of. Knowing that both houses' approval would always be needed for any future reapportionament plan -- that is, assuming that the courts would allow the Legislature to perform the task -- they ceded one house to each party, the often Democratic Assembly to the Dems and the normally Republican Senate to the GOP. I don't know that any formal document was ever drawn, but the brazen understanding was that the parties wouldn't contest each other's sitting members.

It's this agreement that then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer threw over, choosing as part of his battle plan an active challenge to the shrinking Republican Senate majority. Of course the governor wasn't around to take advantage of the result, but then, even before his "difficulties" there was plenty of evidence that his "steamroller" approach wasn't exactly winning friends or influencing people of either party in the Legislature, and I'm not at all sure that he would have succeeded any better than his successor, Govenor Paterson, has managed to do in nurturing the new Senate majority.

Because, especially where there is no history of conference leadership or loyalty, what can you do about people like Espada and Monserrate and Kruger and Diaz? And this is where one wonders where the Senate Democrats, who declared yesterday that they're "going to the mattresses" over the Republican seizure of control of the Senate, really plan to go? Presumably they can keep the Senate shut down for a day, maybe two. But at some point, and I'm guessing some point soon, isn't control of the chamber going to depend on who's got the votes? One hears rumbling of "strategies" being applied to Espada and Monserrate, but really, what can they do? (The more immediate question for Monserrate would appear to be how long an accused felon can string out his tenure. All the way to verdict?)

Meanwhile the Republican-"led" leadership "coalition" is doing a lot of talking about ending the Senate's five-month-long gridlock and even instituting much-need reforms. It sounds crazy, but then, who knows? Maybe the state party, making what appears to be something close to a "last stand," is so bereft of ideas that it's prepared to gamble everything on the most desperate of gambits: good government.

Presumably Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserrate and maybe even Carl Kruger will vote for that.


THE GOLISANO FACTOR

I see that I've left out of my narrative the role of one of the shadier sideshow attractions in recent New York State history, Tom "The Golem" Golisano. Even back in the early days of the Gang of Four or Maybe Three, it now appears that the anti-leadership machinations were being facilitated if not actually orchestrated by one of the more repellent sideshow attractions in recent state political history. Golisano, a payroll-processing billionaire, has made three failed races for governor, though each time drawing the minimum 50,000 votes to put his so-called Independence Party on state ballots for a while. Like other extremely wealthy folk with too much time on their hands, Tom the Golem seems to have decided that he knows how to make government work.

Apparently Tom's fingerprints are all over yesterday's Senate coup. Which makes one think that he may not have been not entirely serious in his not-long-ago renunciation of the Empire State in favor of Florida (where he already had a residence), a loudly self-declared fugitive from tax policies he announced would cost him, as I recall, an additional $5 million. By creepy coincidence, Gov. David Paterson has loudly opposed even modest tax increases on the rich as a way of closing the state's terrifying budget gap, on the ground that this would cause an outward flight of the rich. Putting the two together, one wonders if the rich person the governor had in mind was Tom the Golem.


COMIC FOOTNOTE: A WORKABLE DEMOCRATIC
SENATE MAJORITY WAS ATTAINABLE IN NOVEMBER

As all of this weren't hilarious enough, to top it all off, as my colleague Debra Cooper has been pointing out since before the election, this didn't have to be. Debra and some lonely-voiced colleagues in the NYS Democratic Party could be heard -- faintly -- screaming that there were several Senate races, including the oh-so-close Padavan seat in Queens, where Democratic pickups were within relatively easy reach. Just the tiniest expenditure of party campaign money and manpower could well have brought those seats home. However, virtually all state party campaign resources were being diverted, by order of the Obama campaign, to the presidential contest in Pennsylvania and other states -- manning phone banks and such.

Yes, the presidential race was important, and NYS Dems were eager and willing to pitch in wherever asked. But it wasn't the only game in town, the only job the state party had to do. For Democrats who believe in the things that New York State Democrats do, there has been a high price to pay for the diversion of all those local campaign resources. Thanks, Team Obama!

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