In a truly unprecedented attack on federal law enforcement agents at the National Labor Relations Board, California Representative Darrell Issa and his Republican allies in the House of Representatives are doing the bidding of corporate elites in an effort to suppress the collective bargaining rights of private sector workers.

In June of this year, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) commenced an enforcement action against Boeing based on a claim by IAM District 751, part of the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers, that Boeing broke worker protection laws when it told its unionized workers in Everett, Wash. it would transfer airplane assembly to its newly non-union facility in Charleston, South Carolina due to their past and possible future union activity.

Go back and read, Let's Get the Credit Downgrade Story Right. Peter Herbert did a good job of presenting some interesting observations on where he thought credit should be assessed.

We have a good mix of regular writers and commentaries. Without question, most of us lean to the liberal or progressive side of politics. But, we have a few in the comment area that honestly challenge and offer constructive conservative opinions.

We had one commentary to Peter's and some of the others' comments, who thought it was absolutely the Democrats and Barack Obama that were responsible for the downgrade. The commenter sarcastically pointed out his amazement that we all could have missed what was so obvious to him.

We are all ranting and cursing and hollering about our political leaders right now. Really, what is wrong with them? They can’t seem to get anything done! What a disgrace! How do these idiots keep getting reelected! Why can’t they be like the rest of us!

Well, an interesting reality is that comparing the demographics of the Congress to the demographics of the people will show that the Congress is not really much of a representation of the people at all. The proportions of race, gender, net worth and even religion are completely inconsistent with the people, as a whole. However, I would say that they actually represent us almost perfectly. You may be scratching your head and wondering how I am making that assertion. Well, I’ll explain that.

In the 1960s, during the heat of the civil rights, student rights and anti-war movements, women, both black and white, found themselves relegated to the domestic side of leftist activism. Much to the surprise and disgust of leftist activist women, left-wing males let movement women know that their role was to cook, clean, make the coffee, and make themselves available for sex whenever the men wanted it. Author Gail Collins covers this issue in her book, When Everything Changed, an overview of the women’s movement during the last fifty years.

Not every man treated every woman as a subservient being, but the treatment was widespread enough that many women finally decided to form their own movement groups, giving birth to the Second Wave of the women’s liberation movement.

Wow! So the deed is finally done. I really have a great deal to write in this article because this has been a complex situation for me. So I think the best way to do it is to just take you through it in the order that I experienced it.

So Sunday night I flip from my DVR and see that Osama Bin Laden is dead. I was so excited that I had to go to my office and get online and have the internet and the TV news going. The rush of endorphins and thrill of seeing it in writing that we had done what I questioned would ever be accomplished. I often thought that we would never be certain of his death. I thought that either we had already killed him without knowing it, or that he would die of old age and we would never know it. It was great to see it done. Then I thought, “What now? This certainly isn’t the end of terrorism. I know we aren’t going to bring our troops home. I know that Afghanistan is going to fall apart immediately after we leave… whenever that is.”

I thought about who I was when this first happened. I was just a 19-year-old green Sailor right out of Hospital Corps School and home on leave.

Name of the game seems to be ‘sock it to the working people and protect the rich even more.'

From the time I left home to the time her mind became too clouded with Alzheimer’s disease to do so, my mother wrote to me once or twice a week, newsy letters about family, friends, and neighbors. We kept up a long, steady correspondence during the years before e-mail ended the practice of letter writing.

My mother did not have a college education, but she was intelligent, artistic, and adept at math. At one point she went to business college, taking enough classes to allow her to work as a bookkeeper at the Empire District Electric Company. Then, after all us kids grew up and left home, she began working as a tax preparer.

I do not believe that Sarah Palin really wants to be President, and that is why I think she will run in 2012.

Palin feeds on the lucre of celebrity, and her Facebook page and Twitter account form a kind of peanut gallery from which she can transmit tiny encyclicals without having to be right or even informed on the subject of her pronouncements. Her genius is the ability to remain unaccountable for behavior and utterances that would fatally wound anyone else in public life. Like a student who gets caught looking at the work of another during an exam, only to explain that her learning style just looks like cheating, Palin supplies her own rules.

Sarah Palin will run in 2012 because she is beyond politics yet addicted to our attentions.

For the past few months, there has been a lot of talk about the lack of bipartisanship in the past few years. I have to admit feeling dread at the new Republicans that are coming to Congress this January. There are issues that Democrats will have to fight the Republican Party tooth and nail on, like the Republican promise to try to repeal last year's health care bill and the attempt by some Republicans to reverse the repeal of the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. There are some issues, though, that Democrats could possibly collaborate with Republicans on. These collaborations will result in piecemeal, incremental reforms, but in my view, even incremental change is better than gridlock. I read two articles, Brian Riedl's November 29, 2010 article for the National Review titled What to Cut and Daniel Stone, Eleanor Clift and Andrew Romano's article for the November 1, 2010 edition of Newsweek called Yes, They Can to try to find some possible areas of common ground that the Democrats and Republicans can work on. Admittedly, there isn't much common ground between the liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans that dominate the Congress right now. I don't yet know the tendencies of the few remaining moderate Republicans who remain. Perhaps though if we find some areas of common interest to work at, maybe these next two years in Congress won't wind up just being two years of gridlock.

After the horrible Tucson shooting, John McCain and even Roger Ailes, the Fox News president, joined President Obama's call for a more civil discourse. Ailes told his anchors and reporters to “tone it down.” McCain agreed with the President’s call for “… every American who participates in our political debates… to aspire to a more generous appreciation of one another and a more modest one of ourselves.”

But if the recent history of ACORN is a guide to the future, Obama’s attempt to jolt the nation into civility, something we desperately need, will fail. And unless Obama fights to protect his base from the upcoming attacks by the Right, he will undermine our chance for a resurgent movement based on respect, equality and democracy.

Imagine how Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News commentators from Sarah Palin to Glen Beck would have responded to the Tucson violence if we discovered the gunman had some connection to ACORN, the group demonized by conservatives as a dangerous, even criminal organization.

Would they have pushed their current talking points about the assassin being a lone wolf, a paranoid schizophrenic completely unaffected by the political rhetoric of the left?