Update (TL): Firedoglake is live-blogging.

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Chris Dodd has announced he will filibuster the FISA Amendment which includes telecom immunity. You can watch the debate here.

Update [2008-1-24 11:56:34 by Big Tent Democrat]: Clinton a No Show. Shame on her.

Update (TL): Obama isn't there either. I didn't expect either of them to be there.

Via Stoller:

[JACK WELCH]: I gotta ask you this. Part of the reason that there's so much excitement about your campaign is to leave some of the divisive politics behind, and you made a comment about Ronald Reagan and his Presidency and I can tell you that probably half of this country looks back on those years and there's a lot of, you know, admiration left for President Reagan. Even the Wall Street Journal, I don't know if you saw the editorial, seemed to commend you for that. Then in the debate the other night it looked like you couldn't run fast enough from those comments when you were debating Senator Clinton. How do you really feel about the Reagan years?

More...

I'm working most of the day, so here's a place for those of you who want to discuss news and issues other than the presidential election.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has announced the Bush Administration will give $200 million to state and local governments to fight crime. Among his reasons:

Mukasey also rapped U.S. Sentencing Commission plans to allow some 19,500 federal prison inmates, most of them black, to seek reductions in their crack cocaine sentences. The attorney general described many of the inmates as violent gang members who could threaten public safety if released sooner than initially expected.

"A sudden influx of criminals from federal prison into your communities could lead to a surge in new victims as a tragic but predictable result," Mukasey told the mayors.

Only a small percentage of those 19,500 inmates will get any benefit from the change. For those that do, in most cases, the average sentence reduction is expected to be about 16 months. Many of those serving these draconian sentences are not violent criminals but drug offenders unlucky enough to have been caught possessing or selling the wrong drug.

Bush and Mukasey should have put the $200 million into drug treatment and offender re-entry programs. It would be far better spent and of greater ultimate benefit both to the inmates being released and the communities that receive them.

I guess this shows Mukasey, like Bush, intends to continue to be tough rather than smart about crime. [More....]

In Monday's South Carolina debate, John McCain and who could beat him was a big topic. Both John Edwards and Barack Obama argued they could beat John McCain and Hillary Clinton could not. Sorry Barack, the polls do not support you:

Clinton 46
McCain 42

Obama 41
McCain 42

The interesting finding here is Obama simply does not have the type of solid support with DEMOCRATS that Clinton does. And he runs no better with Independents against McCain than does Clinton. The moral of the story? The Kumbaya Unity schtick is a BAD general election strategy. There is no reason for it. Obama needs to jettison it NOW. It hurts him in the primaries. And would hurt him in a general election against McCain.

More . . .

Now this is a silly story. Buuut, just for a moment imagine if Hillary Clinton had said this:

I was not aware that I had voted no," [Obama] said that day in June 2002, asking that the record be changed to reflect that he "intended to vote yes." . . . Obama cast more than 4,000 votes. Of those, according to transcripts of the proceedings in Springfield, he hit the wrong button at least six times. . . . "I pressed the wrong button on that," he said.

Does anyone doubt it would be the top news for the next couple of days? The Media's hatred of the Clintons is outrageous and the way the so called progressive blogs have rolled over on this is awful. Consider this headline in the NYTimes:

Bill Clinton Accuses Obama Camp of Stirring Race Issue

Actually he accused the MEDIA of stirring the race issue. Why? Because they ran to him with Obama supporter Dick Hartpootlian's outrageous and false smear accusing Bill Clinton of playing the race and gender card and comparing him to Lee Atwater. You know where that part of the story appears in the NYTimes story? Graf 19!! I kid you not. What a ridiculous piece of journalism.

More...

This is bad:

In an interview with CNN's Jessica Yellin, Dick Harpootlian, a former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party and a supporter of Barack Obama, said some of Bill Clinton's recent remarks on the campaign trail were appeals based on race and gender. He said the comments were meant to "suppresses the vote, demoralize voters, and distort the record," and said they were "reminiscent of Lee Atwater."

Outrageous and false. And, from Obama's perspective, not helpful to his campaign. Consider this, the LAST thing Obama wants is for his big win next Saturday to be viewed as a race issue. Harpootlian feeds that narrative with his outrageous smear.

Obama himself strenuously denied that the Clinton campaign was playing race or gender games last week. Harpootlian does no one any favors with this outrageous smear. The Obama campaign should disavow them.

Speaking for me only.

As I have seen the context of Barack Obama's infamous remarks regarding the GOP being the party of ideas, I believe I was unfair to both Barack Obama and TPM. While I do believe Barack Obama does too much unity schtick and is entirely too easy on Republicans and their ideas, the context of his remarks makes his statement much more defensible than I originally thought.

Below the fold is the relevant portions of the text:

TPM is in full defend Obama mode but they misfired here - reminding us that Daniel Patrick Moynihan said the GOP was the party of ideas. If that is a comparison that is supposed to convince us of Obama's Democratic bona fides, then all I can say is you got to be kidding me. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was certainly not MY IDEA of the kind of Dem I would want. But I speak for me only there. Your mileage may vary.

A federal judge in Cleveland has ordered 15 inmates released from long prison terms and more may be coming, due to an DEA informant's lies.

Collectively, the men have served at least 30 years behind bars. They were sentenced to a combined 86 years. Federal public defender Dennis Terez called the release of so many people at one time unprecedented.

Fallout from the case is expected to spread beyond the federal courthouses in Cleveland and Akron, where the men were convicted of dealing crack cocaine in Mansfield.

Uncorroborated snitch testimony is inherently unreliable and our system has depended on it for far too long.

The case is a blow to the federal justice system, which relies heavily on informant-based testimony, lawyers said. The men, some with no prior run-ins with the law, were given long prison sentences based almost exclusively on the word of informant Jerrell Bray and Lee Lucas, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who supervised Bray.

An investigation is ongoing into the conduct of the DEA Agent Lee Lucas who supervised the informant.

Also revealing is that most of the inmates to be released pleaded guilty. Here's why. [more...]

TPM again distorts this critique of Obama. Here is the text of the ad:

VOICE-OVER: “Listen to Barack Obama last week talking about Republicans.

BARACK OBAMA: “The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years.”

VO: “Really? Aren’t those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we’re in today? Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street. Running up a $9 trillion debt. Refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis. Are those the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about?”

BO: “The Republicans were the party of ideas.”

VO: Hillary Clinton thinks this election is about replacing disastrous Republican ideas with new ones, like jump-starting the economy. Putting an immediate freeze on foreclosures and mortgages. Cutting taxes for the middle class. And creating millions of new jobs. With the economy in crisis, we need a president with the ideas, the solutions that get our economy working for all of us. Hillary Clinton. Solutions for America.

TPM says Clinton implies Obama supported these GOP policies. TPM is wrong. The ad properly points out that Obama did not express any criticism of the GOP ideas. That is the problem. Obama's failure to speak out against these ideas. And this is not new. Obama has been a unity schtick candidate the entire campaign. The reason this ad works is precisely because Obama's has not been a partisan Dem campaign. Will he speak out now? Yes, because the Clintons are scoring points on him. That, my friends, is politics. TPM continues to distort this issue.

Congrats to Michigan lawyer Bill Swor, lead counsel for Jose Padilla co-defendant Kifah Jayyousi. (Background on Jayysousi here and here.)

In yesterday's sentencing decision, the Judge found the terrorism enhancements applied to his sentencing guidelines, raising them to a range of 30 years to life. Bill had presented the defense sentencing case and the Judge ultimately departed downward and imposed a sentence of 12 years and 8 months.

Another mild rebuke to the Bush fear and terror machine.