Jerome Armstrong brings us Obama's answer on his present vote (the only legislator NOT to vote in favor of it) on an Illinois law to protect the privacy of victims of sex crimes:

What do you think of it?

Blog traffic is so slow on holidays. I'm going to try to give the gift of traffic through the holidays. For this morning:

• Via Avedon Carol at Sideshow: Brooklyn Girl, guest blogging at PowerPop, lists the ten sexiest male rockers, with sample video clips. I would have added Jon Bon Jovi.

• Donklephant writes about the WaPo's article on the FBI's newest biometric database keeping track of our most personal details.

• Sentencing Law and Policy doesn't like Huckabee's new attempt to avoid the soft-on-crime label.

• Grits for Breakfast writes about an expert who says drug sniffing dogs are wrong 48% of the time.

• Ed at Captain's Quarters, a conservative blog, gives a preview of how they will attack Obama if he's the nominee: inexperience.

• Digby on Jonbenet journalism

• Capital Defense Weekly notes that the Death Penalty Information Center has released its 2007 Capital Punishment Report, available here (pdf.)

• Marvin Kitman on Huffpo writes about Rudy's Yellow Badge of Courage

What are you reading or writing about this weekend? Let us know in comments, and please put urls in html format using the link button because otherwise they skew the site.

The AP reports on Barack Obama's changed opinions on issues over time. Chief among them:

• The death penalty

  In 1996, when he was running for a seat in the Illinois Senate, Obama's campaign filled out a questionnaire flatly stating that he did not support capital punishment. By 2004, his position was that he supported the death penalty "in theory" but felt the system was so flawed that a national moratorium on executions was required.

  Today, he doesn't talk about a moratorium and says the death penalty is appropriate for "some crimes — mass murder, the rape and murder of a child — so heinous that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage."

• The Patriot Act

  When he ran for the Senate, Obama called the act a "shoddy and dangerous law" that should be replaced. After he took office, the Senate considered an update that Obama criticized as only a modest improvement and one that was inferior to other alternatives. Still, Obama ended up voting for that renewal and update of the Patriot Act.

The article says Democrats are unlikely to attack him on his changing positions for fear of seeming negative, but Republicans may not show such restraint. Another person interviewed in the article thinks Republicans will use a different argument:

"If Obama is the Democratic candidate, I don't think the Republicans will be attacking him on a particular issue," said Dianne Bystrom, director of the Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. "They'd be attacking him on his experience."

Update: Obama is now criticizing John Edwards' record. I thought negativity didn't play in Iowa....

A few days ago, Jake Tapper of ABC ran this false story:

ABC News has learned that the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., has registered the names of two Web sites with the express goal of attacking her chief rival, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. It's the first time this election cycle a presidential campaign has launched a Web site with the express purpose of of launching serious criticisms on a rival.

(Emphasis supplied.) It is false because as the story itself states, no site had been launched and John Edwards launched an attack site against Hillary Clinton previously. No correction has been made by ABC. It is egregiously bad jounrnalism. There is no question that, as Howard Kurtz reported, the Beltway Media detests Hillary Clinton.

But I also think there is strong evidence that Barack Obama is the Beltway Media darling. For example, consider this Obama "attack" site. Think Jake Tapper will run a story on that? Me neither. How about Obama's planted question?

In an online posting Monday, ABC reported that an Obama volunteer wearing a press pass asked the candidate a friendly question about tax policy at an Iowa event. But several of the assembled reporters huddled and concluded that it was not a story, one of them said. Clinton faced a storm of media criticism over a similar planted question.

More.

John Sasso has a pretty impressive resume -- he was John Kerry's general election manager at the Democratic National Committee in 2004, manager of Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign in 1988 and the manager of Geraldine Ferraro's campaign.

True, they all lost, but that doesn't make his thoughts irrelevant. Writing in the Boston Globe Saturday, he says Hillary Clinton will prevail and win not just the Democratic nomination, but the Presidency.

Sasso says she's already cleared the bar, particularly that of attacks by Republicans:

If Obama is the Democratic nominee, a man less intimately understood and less defined, Republicans will rush to manufacture their own brutal definition. Can Obama withstand that kind of barrage? Does he have the personal makeup to be as relentless as his opponents? Do past political positions leave him vulnerable? Because the risks are sky-high, these questions need to be reasonably raised and answered beforehand.

Clinton is well past negative redefinition. Unlike John Kerry's 2004 campaign in which veterans opposed to Kerry's candidacy challenged his war record, it will be difficult to ram a Swift Boat into her candidacy. If there is a convict in her political past, as with Willie Horton during the Dukakis 1988 campaign, he will already have been exhumed. Besides, the Clintons are veteran enough to mount a withering counterfire of their own.

Sasso calls her a "thoroughbred" of candidates and the most electable. [More...]

Media Matters does the heavy lifting and announces the worst offenders of misinformation by the media. Top categories: Those who unfairly blasted Hillary, Obama, the undocumented and Muslims.

Top Offenders: You know who they are, no surprises here. But the examples demonstrating the extent of their naked hatred may surprise you.

In a separate MM article, Jamison Foser lambasts Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson over their feigned indignation about Bob Kerrey's use of Barack Obama's middle name. Turns out, both of them used his middle name well before Kerrey.

The first mention of the name as a political matter that we can find in the Nexis database comes from MSNBC's Chris Matthews. On the November 7 [2006] edition of Hardball -- three full weeks before Rogers' comment -- Matthews said: "You know, it's interesting that Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein. That will be interesting down the road, won't it?" Media Matters noted Matthews' comments the next day.

....A few weeks after Matthews' reference to Obama's middle name -- and a day before Rogers first used it -- Tucker Carlson used his MSNBC television program to call guest Bill Press "a true member of the Barack Hussein Obama fan club."

Foser continues on to who first brought up the topic of Obama's cocaine use:

More...

I just received notification that TalkLeft has received press credentials to cover the Iowa Caucuses. Credentials are required for admission to the Polk County Convention Complex, which will be open 24/7 from December 30 to January 4.

On January 3, caucus night, the convention center will be the location of the “big board.” This is where real-time numbers from both parties will be reported.

An assigned workspace at the convention center, including an electrical outlet and internet connection, is $200.00. Since media with assigned workspace will have priority to be in the "big board" room on caucus night, I just faxed in my $200.

So, my New Year's Eve will be spent in Des Moines. I'll be in Iowa, along with Jane of Firedogake and other bloggers, from Dec. 31 to Jan. 4. I hope you'll log on to read us.

This is the month that many bloggers balance the ledger sheet and reassess their time commitment to blogging. There's no question blogging is a financial drain -- time that could be spent making real money at our day jobs. Whether blogging is an act of love or a means of keeping one's sanity in these uncertain times, we could all use a little boost.

So, as you're putting a little something in the pocket of your newspaper carrier, housekeeper, doorman, shoe shiner, hairstylist, secretary, personal trainer, whomever.....please consider a thank you gesture to the bloggers whose sites you read regularly throughout the year. A little holiday giving goes a long way.

If you're short on cash, you can contribute by voting for TalkLeft in the ABA Journal Awards. We're in the "politics for sport" category. It's free, does not require logging in or identification and takes 5 seconds or less. Voting ends January 2, 2008.

USA Today has released a new poll of New Hampshire voters. It's a toss-up between Hillary and Obama, but there is a 5% margin of error rate. Even so, there are a few differentiating clues.

• Who are you leaning towards? Note, this was asked of Democrats and those leaning towards a Democrat but without a preference.

Hillary 32%, Obama 32%, Edwards 18%

• How certain are you to vote for that person?(Note, this was asked of Democrat voters not those leaning without a preference)

Hillary 20%, Obama 18%, Edwards 10%

The terrific Mark Schmitt writes a great piece on what is clearly the central issue of the Democratic campaign - the competing theories of change the three top tier candidates are offering. I am on record as disagreeing with Obama's theory of change. Schmitt here mounts an articulate defense of the Obama theory:

let's take a slightly different angle on the charge that Obama is "naïve" about power and partisanship. Suppose you were as non-naïve about it as I am -- but your job wasn't writing about politics, it was running for president? What should you do? In that case, your responsibility is not merely to describe the situation exactly, but to find a way to subvert it. In other words, perhaps we are being too literal in believing that "hope" and bipartisanship are things that Obama naively believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure. Claiming the mantle of bipartisanship and national unity, and defining the problem to be solved (e.g. universal health care) puts one in a position of strength, and Republicans would defect from that position at their own risk. The public, and younger voters in particular, seem to want an end to partisanship and conflictual politics, and an administration that came in with that premise (an option not available to Senator Clinton), would have a tremendous advantage, at least for a moment.

As I have written ad nauseum, I believe it fails as a tactic. But Schmitt's argument is well worth reading. On the flip a bit more from Schmitt.

The very important Iowa caucuses are 13 days away which will mark the mad dash to nominate the candidates. Chris Cilizza has a nice rundown.

If you believe in polls, RCP and pollster.com do a good job of summarizing the polling. In Iowa, the polls show Obama in a virtual tie with Clinton with Edwards further back. However, polling Iowa is especially tricky because of the caucusing format and the 15% thresholds per precinct (an incredibly undemocratic provision by the way.) Because of all this, it is safe to say that no one really knows who is going to win Iowa among the top 3. I think Obama wins narrowly with Clinton 2nd and a fading Edwards 3rd. It becomes a new ballgame after that with a real race between Clinton and Obama. New Hampshire will be wild.

Among the GOP, Huckabee has moved into a solid lead in Iowa and since there are no 15% thresholds for the GOP in Iowa, this seems to be a likely result. But Huckabee has money problems and a lot of resistance from the Establishment GOP. Like Cilizza, I still see Romney as the favorite for the GOP nomination. More.

CBS' Harry Smith interviews Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in Iowa, trying to get them to reveal something of their personalities with questions like what's on your iPod, what's the first thing you do when you wake up, last thing before going to sleep, what's the last movie you saw, etc.

Here's the video. See for yourselves, they sure are different.

CBS notes in a companion article that Obama has a hard time showing emotion and empathy, even in a pre-arranged setting, suggesting he struggles "to feel the pain." It doesn't come naturally to him. Example: His campaign invited six voters in New Hampshire with hard luck stories to meet the candidate. Here's what happened. [More....]