What my friend Jared said is pretty much exactly what I've been thinking lately, except that I will have to take his word for it that a sense of decency was behind Durbin's apparent loss of backbone (I'd have called it a sense of vote-grubbing, though that is almost equally unsatisfactory as an explanation). I'd been working up a post, but J has saved me the trouble. Go read his entry, and then tell us both if you have any ideas about how to get progressive politics off the ropes.