Maybe I'm just fixated on Las Vegas today as I wait for the caucus results, but this CLE (continuing legal education) program for public defenders and private defense counsel sounds great -- and, it's only $90 for the weekend. Check it out here. There's even a poker tournament:

2008 WORLD DEFENDER POKER CHAMPIONSHIP (LIMITED TO 50 ENTRANTS)
Sunday afternoon, 2 pm to 5 pm??: After the MCLE program, we will be holding the 2008 World Defender Poker Championship. Sara Cooper, a public defender from Arizona won the 2005 title, and Public Defender David Daniel from Media Pennsylvania won the 2006 event. Entry fee will be $50 per person, (pay in advance with your Retreat Registration).

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Speaking for me only

eriposte takes Markos Moulitsas' unsound post at daily kos on the Party of Ideas and debunks it (see also Crashing The Gates co-author Jerome Armstrong gently disagree with Markos.), using Markos' own words. It uses some definitive statements from "Crashing the Gate," Markos and Jerome Armstrong's book on Democratic politics:[More...]

Denver civil rights lawyer David Lane intends to subpoena Dick Cheney in the civil rights lawsuit he brought against Cheney's secret service detail. Details of the incident and lawsuit are here.

Steven Howards and his son were walking by a Dick Cheney event this summer in Beaver Creek, on their way to a piano lesson. Howards told Cheney he didn’t approve of his war policy. When Howards walked back from the lesson, passing the site again, he was arrested. Charges later were dropped.

The New York Times had a feature article on the case yesterday. What's become the big story in the case is that the Secret Service agents are accusing each other of making stuff up. [More...]

Since President Bush doesn't believe that lying to federal investigators or grand jurors really deserves punishment (at least in the case of his friend and fellow rascal Scooter Libby), do you suppose he'll commute the sentences of Pro Bowl defensive lineman Dana Stubblefield or Olympic medalist sprinter Marion Jones?

Oh, and to all the disgruntled Republicans who complained that nobody gets charged or convicted or punished for what Scooter Libby did -- tell that to Stubblefield and Jones.

If there is a nightmare that haunts criminal defense attorneys, it is being forced to remain silent when speaking out would prevent an innocent man from going to prison ... or worse. That was Leslie Smith's dilemma after he watched prosecutors coax his client, William Jones, to change his story so that it would match other evidence. Prosecutors used Jones to convince a jury that Daryl Atkins shot a man to death, resulting in a death sentence (later vacated) for Atkins.

“As he began to describe the positions of the individuals and the firing of the shots,” Mr. Smith said last month, referring to his client, a prosecutor “reached over and stopped the tape recorder.” ... The problem was that Mr. Jones’s account did not match the physical evidence. “This isn’t going to do us any good,” Ms. Krinick said, according to Mr. Smith.

For 15 minutes, Mr. Smith said, prosecutors coaxed and coached Mr. Jones to produce testimony against Mr. Atkins that did match the evidence.

After being told by ethics authorities for years that he could not reveal the prosecutor's misconduct, Smith finally received approval from the state bar's ethics authority to tell what he knew.

His testimony caused a state court judge in Yorktown, Va., to commute the death sentence of Daryl R. Atkins to life on Thursday, citing prosecutorial misconduct.

Smith's pursuit of the right result saved Atkins from facing the possibility of a second death sentence. Let's hope both Smith and Atkins can finally sleep easy.

The New York Times says Republicans are embracing an immigration policy known as "attrition." It's a policy of tightening the screws, in hopes the undocumented will just go away.

That amounts to relentlessly tightening the screws in workplaces and homes until illegal immigrants magically, voluntarily disappear.

Making it work would require far more government intrusion into daily lives, with exponential increases in workplace raids and deportations. It would mean constant ID checks for everyone — citizens, too — with immigration police at the federal, state and local levels. It would mean enlisting bureaucrats and snoops to keep an eye on landlords, renters, laborers, loiterers and everyone who uses government services or gets sick.

Worst of all, it’s weak on law and order. It is a free pass to the violent criminals we urgently need to hunt down and deport. Attrition means waiting until we stumble across bad people hiding in the vast illegal immigrant haystack. Comprehensive reform, by bringing the undocumented out of the shadows, shrinks the haystack.

Going through the list of Republican candidates, one is more reactionary than the next. As to the border fence, the Times calls it a "reject of history." [More...]

We've covered most of the stuff in this new Telegraph article about how Barack and Michelle Obama have attacked Hillary Clinton this week.

There's one comment by Barack Obama I missed though. Criticizing Hillary's statements in the last debate about the bankruptcy bill, he says:

He then poured ridicule on Mrs Clinton for saying in the debate that she had voted for a bankruptcy bill but "I was happy that it never became law".

Mr Obama could not conceal his mirth as he said: "What does that mean? No seriously, what does that mean? If you didn’t want to see it passed, then you can vote against it! People don’t say what they mean."

This from the guy who voted "present" on at least 86 bills?

An examination of Illinois records shows at least 36 times when Mr. Obama was either the only state senator to vote present or was part of a group of six or fewer to vote that way. In more than 50 votes, he seemed to be acting in concert with other Democrats as part of a strategy.

What a joke. No wonder he laughed as he said it.

Speaking for me only.

In what I can only term an absurd post, Markos writes that Democrats have had no ideas, it has been the GOP with the new ideas.

Setting aside whether "new" ideas for the sake of having something new means anything, it simply is false. "The new GOP idea`was the old GOP idea - cut taxes and strangle the government. Oh, and the most important GOP idea? Stop anything that comes from Dems, be it old ideas like Social Security and Medicare (see the 1995 government shutdown) to new ideas like universal health care and addressing climate change. Or how about the Earned Income Tax Credit? The largest tax reduction for the the poor working class ever given. Or raising the top tax rate on the richest Americans in order to balance the budget? How about those new ideas that the Republicans fought fiercely? Does Kos NOT know about those?

Because I have news for you -- those are the ideas that form the centerpiece of the Democratic agenda this election. They are not new ideas from Obama, Edwards or Clinton. These are Democratic ideas. Formulated in the last 15 years. By Democrats.

Kos has always said he does not pay much attention to policy. In this post, he proved it. And he does a great disservice to the Democratic Party when he buys the nonsense David Brooks is selling.

The Las Vegas Sun today endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. Some of their reasons:

Clinton has a long and substantial record of leadership fighting on behalf of working Americans and children, and it is this experience and her passion for creating a better country that would serve this nation so well.

Our country needs someone who can be president from Day One after taking the oath of office. Her steadiness and resolve certainly would aid us in reestablishing better relations with other nations after Bush’s go-it-alone foreign policy, not to mention a thoughtful and responsible policy regarding our combat troops in Iraq.

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Ezra:

[T]he much-promised "Anti-Hillary" vote never really existed. Democratic voters just don't dislike Hillary very much. Some may prefer her, some may prefer other candidates, but it was largely a press corps invention that the primary would be dominated by one faction of pro-Hillary Democrats battling it out with another faction of anti-Hillary Democrats.

Yep. Heck, the Media's hate of Hillary helps her with Democrats.

Hillary says:

"I have to say, you know, my leading opponent the other day said that he thought the Republicans had better ideas than Democrats the last ten to fifteen years. That's not the way I remember the last ten to fifteen years. "I don't think it's a better idea to privatize Social Security. I don't think it's a better idea to try to eliminate the minimum wage. I don't think it's a better idea to undercut health benefits and to give drug companies the right to make billions of dollars by providing prescription drugs to Medicare recipients. I don't think it's a better idea to shut down the government, to drive us into debt."

Obama Camp (interestingly NOT Obama)retorts:

“It’s hard to take Hillary Clinton’s latest attack seriously when she’s the one who supported George Bush’s war in Iraq, the most damaging Republican idea of our generation. While others were triangulating and poll-testing their positions, Senator Obama has been fighting for progressive ideals for over two decades.

So I guess there were some progressive ideas the last 2 decades. Fair point on Hillary' support for the war, but unfair to argue Obama has NOT supported Bush's Iraq Debacle. His voting record is exactly the same as Clinton's in the Senate. And Obama has had some kind words for Bush himself, including stating in 2004 that he basically agreed with Bush on how to conduct the Iraq war.

More interesting was both camp's refusal to say a bad word about Ronald Reagan. What is up with that?

Update [2008-1-18 18:47:20 by Big Tent Democrat]: From the turnabout is fair play dep't, via Geekesque, Hillary's favorite President's include Reagan and Bush 41.

A Collossus strode forth:

And held a press conference.

This is some funny stuff.