With the return of ten Saudi detainees this week, the population of Guantanamo Bay now stands at 275.

Those repatriated to Saudi Arabia have received financial help from the government to rebuild their lives, and many have been allowed to go free.

...The United States agreed to return the men with the understanding that Saudi Arabia will mitigate that risk, partly through a state program to reintegrate former detainees into civilian life, said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Defense Department spokesman.

Hopefully the rest will go home soon and Gitmo will be closed. May it always be remembered as an internment camp. As Christopher Brauchli wrote in 2003:

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Broder reports on his Establishment Nader-like movement:

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a potential independent candidate for president, has scheduled a meeting next week with a dozen leading Democrats and Republicans, who will join him in challenging the major-party contenders to spell out their plans for forming a "government of national unity" to end the gridlock in Washington. Those who will be at the Jan. 7 session at the University of Oklahoma say that if the likely nominees of the two parties do not pledge to "go beyond tokenism" in building an administration that seeks national consensus, they will be prepared to back Bloomberg or someone else in a third-party campaign for president.

So if thery do not get a High Broderite candidate to back (McCain and/or Obama, based on a number of reports), they will spend Bloomberg's billions on a quixotic campaign with no chance of success.

What is stunning about this list is that it includes Gary Hart and Bob Graham. Excuse me? What the heck is Gary Hart doing? What is Bob Graham doing? You expect this kind of nonsense from the Borens and Nunns in this group. They were always basically moderate Republicans anyway. And this revolt is a revolt of moderate Republicans anyway.

But Bob Graham ran for President as a Democrat just 3 years ago. And Gary Hart pontificates from a High Progressive perch. Now he joins hands with the likes of Broder and Bloomberg? What a phony he is.

But I must go back to Obama on this, because these High Broderists will NOT mount a challenge to his candidacy, if reports are true. Now what does this tell us about how he will change the system? Obama's Kumbaya schtick now needs to deal with this. I think a response from him is in order. Will he support a Bloomberg candidacy if he does not capture the nomination?

This sounds like a prelude to a scene out of "I am Legend" where Will Smith is the last man alive after a virus breaks out. Only it's real, and it's happening in California prisons.

In the past three years, more than 900 inmates at the prison have contracted [Valley] fever, a fungal infection that has been both widespread and lethal. At least a dozen inmates here in Central California have died from the disease, which is on the rise in other Western states, including Arizona, where the health department declared an epidemic after more than 5,500 cases were reported in 2006, including 33 deaths.

It's not just inmates who are contracting Valley Fever which appears to be spread through soil in areas of the Southwest.

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Greg Sargent:

ABC News reports that an ad the Obama campaign released yesterday on lobbying reform excised a quote in which "Obama promised to ban lobbyists from working in his White House -- a pledge the Illinois Democrat seemed to have backed off from earlier this month." The Obama camp responded that the cut had been made for time. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that a new Obama health care ad "misrepresents some newspaper assessments of the Illinois Democrat's proposal."

Now if the Media makes a big deal of this Obama is a bad tipper story, then I will know the worm has totally turned. I blame it on Axelrod.

In its earlier 12/20-23 poll, ARG had Clinton ahead by an outlandish 14 points. Either that poll was a clear outlier or Clinton has lost support while Obama and Edwards gained support. The latest results of ARG's 12/26-28 poll:

Biden 5%
Clinton 31%
Dodd 3%
Edwards 24%
Kucinich 1%
Obama 24%
Richardson 5%
Undecided 7%

According to ARG, Clinton is winning women by 38 to 21 percent while losing men by 28 to 25%.

Reading the trend in the poll, the Big Mo is clearly with Edwards.

The Des Moines Register is the biggest paper in Iowa. Here are some of the campaign stories they have filed so far today.

Obama Keeps Pressure On Clinton, Edwards:

Burlington, Ia.- Democrat Barack Obama today kept the heat on his two chief rivals the Iowa Caucuses, taking shots at both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards while describing himself as the best able to change the nation's course. . . . Obama spent more than 10 minutes of a 45-minute speech referring to what he argued were differences between his, Clinton's and Edwards' credibility to challenge the status quo in economic and foreign policy.

Edwards Hunts Second Choice Votes:

Iowa Democrats who support back-of-the-pack candidates should expect to be approached Thursday night by John Edwards fans carrying 80-page booklets spelling out his stances on issues. At every campaign stop, the Edwards campaign has been passing out scores of copies of the red-white-and-blue booklet. Before the candidate takes the microphone, the person introducing him asks supporters to study the pamphlet and carry it with them to their caucuses, where they can use it to persuade supporters of less-popular Democrats to switch to his side.

And from David Yepsen's blog, Hillary Weather:

The forecast for caucus day on Thursday in Iowa is clear with a high of 34 degrees. The day before is also expected to be sunny. That’s Hillary Clinton Weather. The roads and sidewalks will be clean and the ice melted enough to allow older women to get out and caucus for the New York senator. Clinton’s been placing a big emphasis on getting older women to caucus for her. Her events are well attended by them and there seems to be some excitement among some of them about how they can help elect the first woman to the presidency. Women will make up over 55 percent of the caucus attendees on Thursday.

Chris Bowers has an interesting post on the second choices in Iowa and the deals the candidates might strike. First a quick primer on why this matters.

In Iowa, Democrats operate under one of the most undemocratic systems one could imagine. There is no secret ballot AND if your choice does not reach 15% in a PARTICULAR precinct, your vote does not count. Frankly, this is all outrageous and should not be countenanced. But because the Iowa caucus has been sanctified as some pure form of political participation, we ignore this outrageous system that utterly distorts the actual preferences of Iowa caucus goers. Thus, when the Media reports the Iowa results, they will be reporitng a lie -- the result they will be reporting will NOT accurately reflect the actual preferences of the Iowa caucus goers, just the delegate division.

So what does this mean for caucus goers whose choices are not viable in a precinct and their second choices? That they could become important. On the flip let's discuss it.

The AP combs census and other government reports on Iowa. Here's what they come up with:

• 3 million people, 95% of whom are white
• 86% graduated from high school, 21% from college.
• 88% of the land in Iowa (55 million square miles) is farms. There are 5 1/2 hogs for every person. In 2006, Iowa led the nation in the production of pork, corn, soybeans and eggs. Iowa's total agricultural exports for 2005 topped $4.02 billion, second in the nation.
• Median income is $42,000; 7% of families are below poverty level.
• Median age is 38; 15% are over 65.

As to Iowa voters:

• There are 45 Democratic delegates and 40 Republicans. The state has 7 electoral votes.
• In 2004, George W. Bush got 50 percent of the vote to John Kerry's 49.3 percent
• Registered voters: Republican, 574,571; Democratic, 600,572; Undeclared, 737,054

CNN posted these results from the 2004 primaries.

Like Markos, I thought Steve Gilliard was one of the finest writers the blogs ever produced. Here is Matt Bai offering a NYTimes Magazine tribute to him:

Steve Gilliard was born into this Harlem and took it all in, but he wouldn’t find his voice on the corners. He was quiet, bookish, overweight. He won entrance to an elite high school, where he passed his time reading obscure military histories, then studied history and journalism at New York University. He found his true calling, though, on the Internet. In 1998, when he was 34, Gilliard joined a new site called NetSlaves.com, whose blogger-reporters chronicled the misadventures of the new high-tech work force, and there he discovered his own kind of incendiary oration. It was by the dim light of a computer screen, rather than on the sunlit corners of Harlem, that Gilliard took to expertly excoriating the moneyed establishment.

We still miss him terribly.

The consequences of David Axelrod's offensive remarks linking Hillary Clinton to Benazir Bhutto's assassination continue to reverberate. Today, the Washington Post editorialized:

Mr. Obama . . . began by offering bland condolences to Pakistanis and noting that "I've been saying for some time that we've got a very big problem there."

Then Mr. Obama committed his foul -- a far-fetched attempt to connect the killing of Ms. Bhutto with Ms. Clinton's vote on the war in Iraq. After the candidate made the debatable assertion that the Iraq invasion strengthened al-Qaeda in Pakistan, his spokesman, David Axelrod, said Ms. Clinton "was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, which we would submit was one of the reasons why we were diverted from Afghanistan, Pakistan and al-Qaeda, who may have been players in the event today."

When questioned later about his spokesman's remarks, Mr. Obama stiffly defended them -- while still failing to offer any substantive response to the ongoing crisis. Is this Mr. Obama's way of rejecting "the same Washington game" he lambasted earlier in the day? If so, his game doesn't look very new, or attractive.

By making a defense of David Axelrod the centerpiece of the Obama campaign's reaction to the Bhutto assassination, the Obama campaign has allowed this story to fester for 3 days. He is sure to face more questions today after this WaPo editorial. Axelrod is killing the Obama campaign. Instead of serving his candidate, Axelrod has chosen to serve his own ego. What a terrible mistake.

Update [2007-12-29 10:54:11 by Big Tent Democrat]: See also Lambert at correntewire.

From the same NYTimes article I discuss here, Obama is quoted:

“Because neither Reverend Jackson nor Reverend Sharpton is running for president of the United States. They are serving an important role as activists and catalysts but they’re not trying to build a coalition to actually govern.”

This quote highlights what has been the central issue of the Obama candidacy for me. I have been writing about it for years now. In my July 2006 post, written BEFORE Obama was a candidate for President, What Obama Needs To Learn, I wrote:

In its profile of Senator Barack Obama, the NYTimes writes:

Much of Mr. Obama’s success as a politician has come from walking a fine line — as an independent Democrat and a progressive in a state dominated by the party organization and the political machine, and as a biracial American whose political ambitions require that he appeal to whites while still satisfying the hopes and expectations of blacks.

Like others of his generation, he is a member of a new class of black politicians. Too young to have experienced segregation, he has thrived in white institutions. His style is more conciliatory than confrontational, more technocrat than preacher. Compared with many older politicians, he tends to speak about race indirectly or implicitly, when he speaks about it at all.

After Hurricane Katrina, he did not attribute the lumbering federal response to the race of most of the storm’s victims. “The incompetence was color-blind,” he said, adding that the real stumbling block was indifference to the problems of the poor. After six black teenagers were charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white schoolmate in the “Jena Six” case in Louisiana, he said the criminal justice system needed fixing to ensure equal justice “regardless of race, wealth or circumstances.”

(Emphasis supplied.) Is that an accurate description of Obama the politician? And if it is, do you like Obama's style of politics?