How do you stay enthusiastic after three big losses in a row? I can't. What do I conclude? The Red Sox play better baseball.

It's hard to call the Rockies 21 game winning streak a fluke. Maybe they just choked with the national attention and hoopla over their getting to the series at all. Woody Paige in the Denver Post writes:

What are you going to do? The rest of the country is amused. We must laugh, too....And the really good news: We still live in Colorado.

The game is only in the 5th inning and the Rockies could win tonight. But that might just prolong the agony. On the other hand, there's something to be said for positive thinking.

Go Rockies!

So Barack Obama is going to go after Hillary Clinton now. Umm, what took him so long? Anyway, this part bothered me:

[Obama] accused [Clinton] of “straddling between the Giuliani, Romney side of the foreign policy equation and the Barack Obama side of the equation.” He said that she was trying to “sound or vote” like a Republican on national security issues and that that was “bad for the country and ultimately bad for Democrats.”

Very true. But what about trying to sound like a Republican on social issues? What about all that appealing to "values voters" that Obama does? We all know about Obama's willingness to attack Democrats in front of "values voters" and this statement is ominous:

Mr. Obama suggested that she was too divisive to win a general election and that if she won, she would be unable to bring together competing factions in Washington to accomplish anything. “There is a legacy that is both an enormous advantage to her in a Democratic primary, but also a disadvantage to her in a general election,” he said. “I don’t think anybody would claim that Senator Clinton is going to inspire a horde of new voters,” he said. “I don’t think it’s realistic that she is going to get a whole bunch of Republicans to think differently about her.”

But they are going to like the way Obama panders to the "values voters?" Excuse me Senator Obama, it will be good to see you draw sharp distinctions with Senator Clinton on certain issues. But how about you drawing some distinctions with Republicans on other issues? Your Joe Lieberman imitation on "values" is a serious problem.

Thanks to talking "sources," details of a Seattle grand jury investigation into alleged rape allegations against magician David Copperfield are available for the world to see.

The story: A 21 year old woman attends a Copperfield show with her family. Almost as soon as they enter, they are ushered to the front. Copperfield has her come onstage to be a part of the show.

He invites her to his private island in the Bahamas, assuring her there will be other guests. There were no other guests, she says.

When the woman, 21, made the trip in late July -- after exchanging e-mails with Copperfield, 51 -- she found herself the only guest on the island with him, she told investigators. She has told Seattle police, and later the FBI, that Copperfield raped and struck her during her two days on the island, said sources familiar with her allegations.

She said that, afterward, Copperfield threatened her, telling her she'd better keep quiet, and then escorted her onto a plane, sources said.

More...

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has given in to the feds and agreed to water down his plan to grant drivers' licenses to undocumented immigrants.

Now, there will be a three-tier system with the undocumented getting licenses that make them prime targets for state and local law enforcment officials who want to turn them over to ICE for removal.

The licenses for the undocumented are the equivalent of a scarlet letter.

“What a huge political flip,” said Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “He’s now embracing and letting his good name be used to promote something that has been widely known in the immigrant community as one of the most anti-immigrant pieces of legislation to come out of Congress,” Ms. Hong said.

She said having separate licenses would amount to a scarlet letter for illegal immigrants. ....”The separate licenses could also serve as an invitation for law enforcement to arrest anyone carrying one on immigration charges, said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. She added that the new proposal could send illegal immigrants further into the shadows, compelling them to drive with forged or no licenses and without insurance.

Wasn't it just last month that Spitzer said: "The D.M.V. is not the I.N.S."?

The Washington Post devotes 3 pages on the burgeoning cocaine trade in Venezuela.

It sounds like a low-budget version of Scarface. The drug kingpins are in cahoots with the Venezuelan military officers. The blame is given to Bush:

The Bush administration's dismal relations with Venezuela's government have made matters worse, anti-drug agencies say, paralyzing counternarcotics cooperation.

Venezuela did cut back on U.S. intervention efforts, but here's why:

More...

Despite chiding from John McCain and the pulling of federal funding this week, the Woodstock Museum will go forward.

In recognition of the war protests today, this clip is Country Joe and the Fish, Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag.

More..

This is the front page of today's Rocky Mountain News (larger version here.)

Will the home team advantage kick in? I hope so. Game updates at the Colorado Rockies website and MLB.com

Go Rockies!

Among those on the front lines fighting the California fires this week were prison inmates.

About a quarter of the 14,000 firefighters defending homes and businesses in Southern California from wildfires have been prisoners, officials said. Of the 4,400 inmates trained to battle fires in the state, 3,091 were on the front lines Friday from Lake Arrowhead south to San Diego.

The inmates are paid $1.00 an hour. They also get a day of extra good time for every day spent fighting fires. The savings to California: $80 million a year.

The Washington Post reports on the CIA's Ghost Air prisoners. Some have been sent to Guantanamo, some were returned to their home countries (some of whom were never heard from again) and some are....missing.

Where are they? Who's keeping track? Human Rights Watch and Reprieve are trying to. According to the Post, HRW says at least 39 of those seized remain unaccounted for.

There's further reading today on this at Alternet: The Bush Era's Dark Legacy of Torture.

The Washington Post has a long feature article on a unit of soldiers preparing to leave Iraq. In a nutshell, as one of them says,

I don't think this place is worth another soldier's life."

Matt Yglesias smugly writes:

This is a presidential primary after all. Chris Dodd's already won my vote for Senate Majority Leader should the position come open. It seems to me that Obama needs to convince people that he would have a different, better Iran policy were he too become president and not that he has a better view of how he hypothetically would have handled Senate votes were he to have actually been in DC on the day of the vote.

I find that comment smugly . . . well, stupid. Obama, a sitting Senator, "needs to convince people that he would have a different, better Iran policy" and his performance as SENATOR is deemed irrelevant to that persuasion by Yglesias. I mean, honestly. Is Yglesias really such a believer in position papers that actual POSITIONS taken in ACTUAL VOTES are deemed irrelevant by him? I'm sorry, that is just irritatingly ignorant it seems to me.

On top of it all, Yglesias seems ignorant of the fact the Clinton campaign was pointing out - that Obama (and yes, my man Dodd too) favored designating the Iran Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization in the Fall of 2006, making their criticism of Clinton's vote on Kyl-Lieberman a bit nonsensical. But of course, if your view is that what someone does as Senator is irrelevant to their Presidential campaign, then it makes its own twisted sense. But then, you have to ignore Clinton's (and Dodd's) vote in favor of war with Iraq in 2002. But then, Yglesias favored the Iraq War at the time. So his position maybe does make sense for him.

He'll be Timmah's guest this week for the full hour. Be sure to check it out.