The Washington Post profiles Dede Scozzafava, the incumbent Republican Congresswoman from Upstate New York’s 23rd District, whose last-minute withdrawal and subsequent endorsement of Democrat Bill Owens led to the district’s election of  the first Democratic representative since the 19th century.

The article reveals a modest, mainstream, small-town, church-going woman who was unexpectedly caught up and chewed up by the hardcore tactics of the hardcore right wing.

Two key excerpts:

Even as she now hopes to return to her normal life of local politics, laundry and choir practice for next month’s big performance of Bach’s Christmas Cantatas, the political forces that swept her up have not entirely let her go. Last week, while watching a news show about the next sharply contested Senate Republican primary in Florida, her parents reported that one of the commentators asked whether the moderate was in peril of getting “Scozzafaved.”

And:

In the summer, Scozzafava and her husband, Ron McDougall, a local labor leader, retreated to their summer house at the end of a dirt road on Sylvia Lake. The place has no TV reception — a good thing, she said, given all the attack ads against her funded by the Club for Growth, the anti-tax group backing Hoffman. Still, she wasn’t entirely isolated. She heard through friends that Palin insinuated she had been “anointed” by a “political machine” because county chairs handpicked her as the nominee. Beck denounced her as “ACORN-supported” and an “Obama-Lite Republican.” Former House majority leader Dick Armey’s group FreedomWorks mobilized against her. She said she heard conservative robo-calls in the district describing her as a “child killer,” a “lesbian lover” and a “homo.”

From Raw Story:

Defense contractor KBR may have exposed as many as 100,000 people, including US troops, to cancer-causing toxins by burning waste in open-air pits in Iraq, says a series of class-action lawsuits filed against the company.

At least 22 separate lawsuits claiming KBR poisoned American soldiers in Iraq have been combined into a single massive lawsuit that says KBR, which until not long ago was a subsidiary of Halliburton, sought to save money by disposing of toxic waste and incinerating numerous potentially harmful substances in open-air “burn pits.”

According to one of the lawsuits (PDF), filed in a federal court in Nashville, KBR burned “tires, lithium batteries … biohazard materials (including human corpses), medical supplies (including those used during smallpox inoculations), paints, solvents, asbestos insulation, items containing pesticides, polyvinyl chloride pipes, animal carcasses, dangerous chemicals, and hundreds of thousands of plastic water bottles.”

With winter at hand, we may need to add packing foam to our coat and food drives, so that folks moving into their new living quarters might have a little insulation.

May there be less irony in the headline than originally intended.

COLORADO SPRINGS (AP) – Ted Haggard, who was dismissed from the megachurch he founded after a man alleged a cash-for-sex relationship with him, plans to lead people in worship again.

The pastor told The Gazette he is holding a “prayer meeting” Nov. 12 in his living room in Colorado Springs but said it would also be correct to call it a church.

Haggard says he has no goals of building something like New Life Church, which began with about 25 people in his basement in 1985 and grew to thousands of members.

Haggard resigned from the church in 2006 after a Denver man said Haggard paid him for sex.

The gathering Nov. 12 will include music, an offering to New Life Church and a talk from Haggard about the power of prayer.

h/t: Kos

The Teabagger Fringe thought they could barge right in and flex their muscles, which of course are all located below their heads.   The Fringe thought they could easily throw their weight around in a district that had been such easy pickings for Republicans for decades.   Had the national GOP just stuck with their mainstream candidate, things would have worked out just fine.  But no, they caved once again to the bluster of the Fringe and now they are turned out of a seat they’d grown quite comfortable in claiming as exclusively theirs.

The thought that NJ and VA governorship gains by the GOP actually strengthen the party’s hopes for the ‘10 midterms may be misleading.   Neither Democrat was an especially appealing candidate, nor were the Republicans who beat them the sort of folks who are beholden to the frighty-righties.

However:

These elections recall the central point of the 2008 Democratic Party triumph, namely that it was beholden to the progressive expectations of significant and dramatic transformational change.  Specifically:

• Financial sector reform
• Economic Recovery–with specific relief for the embattled Middle Class
• Healthcare Reform (see above)
• Transparency in government
• Ending BOTH foreign occupations
• Closing Gitmo and black site prisons
• Bringing the architects of torture and other criminal constitutional violations to justice

Just because the Republican Party is devouring itself and becoming more lunatic-fringe controlled by the day, does not mean Democrats can afford to dawdle and diddle in so-called Centrist and Bluedog political behaviors, which do little else but perpetuate the corrupt, dysfunctional systems that brought about our present national calamity.

Democrats were elected to take great progressive strides in a relatively short period of time.  The governor’s races in VA and NJ hopefully send a message that mediocrity, timidity and corporate lackey behavior won’t get out the votes.  The NY congressional race hopefully sends a message that will bolster the more reasonable, moderate, and sane faction of the Republican Party.  It also sends a message that the smart money needs to move away from the Palin-Limbaugh-Joe the Plumber bunch; if it doesn’t, and if the extremists continue to exert dominance and gain control of the party, 2010 and 2012 will not be opportunities to regain lost GOP power.   But Democrats had best not take this for granted, or by 2014, we’ll have a barter economy and be at war with Honduras (to borrow and tweak a line from Bill Maher) under the Palin- Pawlenty administration.

Colbert’s best line is the punchline to his comparison of the Roman Catholics and Episcopalians to the National and American baseball leagues.  It takes a while, but it’s worth the wait.

And Randall Balmer knocks this one out of the park.

About 2 feet fell in the Denver Metro area, about 4 feet dropped on the foothills to the west of the city.   I-70 is closed from Aurora to Kansas, and I-76 is closed from Brighton to Nebraska, as this eastern-moving storm adopts blizzard-like qualities while it blankets the Eastern Plains.

Temps are projected to be in the cold 40’s beginning tomorrow, then warming to the low 50’s over the weekend.  Snow normally melts quickly here, but is likely to hang around a while, given how much snow fell in this storm.

Here’s one guy who really enjoyed the past two days: