Now, about that light at the tunnel's end

Things you could sure see comin'.

This.

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

And, infuriatingly, this.

A group of several dozen moderate to conservative House Democrats, known as "Blue Dogs," has pushed Hoyer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to approve the Senate bill. Some aides on Capitol Hill were discussing the potential for the House passing the Senate version but breaking it into two votes: one on the portion of the bill that deals with revising FISA provisions and a second on the immunity measure.

This procedural move would allow many Democrats to vote against immunity but still make its approval all but certain since almost every Republican and some centrist Democrats would vote in favor.

It's all so predictable, whether it's the latest white author who writes of his or her childhood in horrible conditions that turn out to be not so much, or Congress ultimately bowing before this lawless administration and giving it exactly what's needed to make sure it's crimes are not discovered in a trial.

I suppose there's some psychoanalytic reason for the former. The ego of a young writer; the need to be recognized; publishers who go along on the ride and never question. But the latter? Greenwald ties to get at an understanding.

There's very little point anymore in writing about how the Congressional Democratic leadership is complicit in all of the worst Bush abuses, or about how craven they are. All of that is far too documented and established at this point to be worth spending any time discussing. They were never going to take a stand against warrantless eavesdropping or the destruction of the rule of law via telecom amnesty for one simple reason: many of them don't actually oppose those things, and many who claim to oppose them don't actually care about any of it. That's all a given.

But what is somewhat baffling in all of this is just how politically stupid and self-destructive their behavior is. If the plan all along was to give Bush everything he wanted, as it obviously was, why not just do it at the beginning? Instead, they picked a very dramatic fight that received substantial media attention. They exposed their freshmen and other swing-district members to attack ads. They caused their base and their allies to spend substantial energy and resources defending them from these attacks.

Exactly right. For a brief, shining moment, House Democrats seemed to push back against the endless fear tactics of preznit, and even though the media for the most part accepted Republican framing of the issue ("Brown people are trying to get in your house, right now!"), the public didn't seem particularly afraid.

But now they've rolled, and you can expect their rightwing challengers won't forget this come the Fall -- not how they ultimately reached a "compromise" with the administration, but that they stalled on it at all, putting each and every one of at extreme risk of an imminent terror attack at the nearest shopping mall.

And the truth is, this has never been about telecom immunity. The telecoms always had that as they were working in cooperation with the Atty General. Instead, this is Bush administration immunity, as the telecom's own trade organization understands.

CCIA dismisses with contempt the manufactured hysteria that industry will not aid the United States Government when the law is clear. As a representative of industry, I find that suggestion insulting. To imply that our industry would refuse assistance under established law is an affront to the civic integrity of businesses that have consistently cooperated unquestioningly with legal requests for information. This also conflates the separate questions of blanket retroactive immunity for violations of law, and prospective immunity, the latter of which we strongly support.