When you live in the Red Zone you are still  under the Bush/Cheney rules. Take this incident of police-state brutality which happened just a few miles from my door:

About 9 p.m. Friday, a neighbor complained about noise coming from the party attended by about 50 people at a home in the 1200 block of Rubenstein Avenue, Sheriff's Department spokeswoman Jan Caldwell said. . . .

[Candidate Francine] Busby said the sedate gathering had no music and generated little noise. She guessed the complaint came from an unseen man who spent the evening shouting obscene remarks about democrats and herself from behind a tree in a neighboring lot.

When the deputy arrived around 9 p.m., several dozen guests were still in the house and the front door was open, Busby said. The deputy came in and was directed to Barman. . . .

Barman allegedly refused to give her date of birth, argued with the deputy and walked away, Caldwell said. Caldwell said Barman rushed the deputy after he reached out to grab her. Others in attendance were also becoming argumentative, Caldwell said. Caldwell said the deputy was worried the guests were becoming unruly and someone might get hurt. He warned Barman twice he would use his pepper spray if she didn't calm down and stop charging him, she said. The hostess allegedly kept arguing, and the deputy sprayed her, Caldwell said. Caldwell said the deputy then followed Barman into the kitchen, where she continued to argue and allegedly struck him, Caldwell said.

Busby disputed that Barman was responsible for the confrontation's escalation and said she was shocked how quickly the deputy pepper-sprayed the middle-aged, older crowd. "People were standing talking, nobody was paying any attention, and the next thing you know (Barman) was being grabbed; she was on the ground," Busby said. Recovering from a recent shoulder surgery, the hostess was clearly suffering in the deputy's grip, she said. "There were a bunch of women standing around and their reaction was to beg him, 'Please don't hurt her. What are you doing?' His response was to pull out pepper spray," Busby said.

See, in the Red Zone, running for office while Democratic is a crime. Standing up to a bully with a badge is a crime. Refusing to be pepper-sprayed is a crime.

Naturally, conservative bloggers jumped on the story, labeling the participants lesbian drunken revelers (there was no alcohol but there were lesbians) and somehow managed to get their hands on the police report, where the deputy admits knowing it was a political event going in the door. The left's blogosphere, too, has noticed the story, in a "too weird to be true" way.

Sorry, people, it's very true - in the Red Zone.

Ironically, Francine Busby is the sort of timid, tame candidate Republicans should want to run if they want to keep their "gerrymandered" incumbent in office. She is (or was before this happened) too polite to speak out against their shenanigans. Even when she ran to fill Randy "Duke" Cunningham's seat after he resigned in disgrace, she didn't bring up his conviction or even suggest that replacing him with a lobbyist might not be too savvy. So she lost -- and though the Republicans suffered elsewhere for the Cunningham debacle, they got to keep his seat.

Now the local Sheriff (another Republican politician) will conduct an investigation - of the "we investigated ourselves and concluded that no crime was committed" sort - and hope that media attention dies down before 2010.

Because when the media spotlight dims, the Red Zone cockroaches take over.