I have to completely agree with the Netroots "establishment" on this:

This is, I think, a disaster:

"It's a horrible prospect to ask yourself, 'What if? What if?' But if certain things happen between now and the election, particularly with respect to terrorism, that will automatically give the Republicans an advantage again, no matter how badly they have mishandled it, no matter how much more dangerous they have made the world," Clinton told supporters in Concord. "So I think I'm the best of the Democrats to deal with that," she added.

Two points in response. The first is that I think the Democrat best positioned to deal with GOP political mobilization in a post-attack environment is going to be the one who isn't reflexively inclined to see failed Republican policies resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Americans as a political advantage for the Republicans.

For the first time in quite some time, Hillary sounds like the DLC and Mark Penn. This is a huge gaffe. Obama, Edwards and all the rest will pounce on this.

Peter Beinart questions the Netroots' commitment to issues. He asks why so much loathing for Gravel?

What does Markos Moulitsas have against Mike Gravel? The über-blogger recently called for exiling the longshot presidential candidate from future Democratic debates. "Mike Gravel is a waste of our time," he wrote in an August 7 post. "[He's] a running joke." That's an odd assessment coming from the founder of Daily Kos. Every time Gravel gets behind a lectern, he flays the Democratic Party for knuckling under to militarists and corporations. In other words, he sounds just like Markos Moulitsas. . . .

Actually he doesn't. And in my drive to be the most loathed person on the blogs, in a new piece at the Guardian website, I again flay the Netroots for caring more about horseraces than issues:

What we do not see from MoveOn or any of the leading left blogs are any attempts to pressure Democrats into taking action immediately to end the Iraq war. Every plan, every project, seemingly every post, is focused on how to exploit Iraq as a political weapon against Republicans in the 2008 elections. Very little thought is brought to bear on how to pressure Democrats to use the power of congress to end the Iraq war now.

My question is diffferent than Beinart's. It is not why the Netroots loathes Gravel. Rather why does the Netroots not fight for the issues that they are supposed to care about?

There's no doubt Rudy Giuliani could benefit from a new firm to boost his image. But, did he have to hire this one?

Last year, a commercial made by Thompson's firm for Tennessee's U.S. Senate race was criticized for what the NAACP and others said were racial overtones.

Run by the Republican National Committee against Democrat Harold Ford, who is black, the ad showed a white woman saying she had met Ford at a Playboy-sponsored party. As the ad ended, the woman, her shoulders bared, whispered into the camera, "Harold, call me."

The NAACP said the commercial played to prejudices about black men and white women, and Republican Bob Corker, who won the Senate seat, called the ad tacky. The RNC denied any racial subtext but asked TV stations to stop running the commercial.

I can't wait to see the firm's New Rudy.

This is progress. I hope it catches on.

The [Bergen County] Sheriff's Department is not giving inmates fully loaded iMacs along with their jumpsuits as they come through the locking doors. They won't be working on their profiles on MySpace or bidding for rock hammers on eBay.

Rather, the department is offering stripped-down, durable mini-PCs, essentially limited to legal research, that inmates can have delivered to their cells for allotted periods. The department purchased the 80 laptops using $100,000 of its income from inmates' commissary purchases.

In other words, these computers have no internet access. The policy should be extended to federal inmates in pre-trial detention, many of whose cases are complex, involving discovery so voluminious it's only available on dvd or cd-rom.

It's important to remember that pre-trial detainees, who are often housed in county jails due to lack of available space in federal detention centers, or because there is no federal detention center in their neck of the woods, have not been convicted of any crime. They are simply being warehoused awaiting trial.

More...

Jose Padilla has sued 59 goverment officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, over his mistreatment during his confinement in the S.C. military brig. His primary claim: psychological torture.

He's not doing it for the money: He's only asking for $1.00 damages from each official:

"Mr. Padilla suffered gross physical and psychological abuse at the hands of federal officials as part of a scheme of abusive interrogation intended to break down Mr. Padilla's humanity and his will to live," the 30-page complaint says.

"The grave violations suffered by Padilla were not isolated occurrences by rogue lower-level officials," the suit says. Besides Mr. Rumsfeld, it names Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lowell Jacoby, among others, who "personally ordered and/or approved Mr. Padilla's detention and interrogation program."

Related: Lindsay of Majikthise has a new article in In These Times, Perverse Justice, questioning whether detainees who are subjected to long periods of extreme isolation can receive a fair trial.

They must drink funny water in L.A. I don't get them. Paris Hilton gets 45 days for violating probation by driving with a suspended license (even though there was no alcohol involved in the probation violation and yes I know that she was put on probation for an alcohol-related reckless driving charge) while Lindsay Lohan gets 1 day in jail for all this:

She pleaded guilty to two counts of being under the influence of cocaine; no contest to two counts of driving with a blood-alcohol level above .08 percent and one count of reckless driving. Two counts of driving under the influence were dropped.

Lohan had two arrests for drunk driving, one in May, in which she crashed her car and fled the scene, and the other in July, shortly after getting out of rehab.

The D.A. says:

"She's getting what everyone else would get," Deputy District Attorney Danette Meyers said after an hourlong hearing in Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge H. Chester Horn Jr.'s courtroom.

I guess she means everyone except Paris.

To be clear, I don't think Lohan should have gotten more time, I'm complaining again that Paris Hilton got too much time.

Update: Thanks to Squeaky in the comments for adding that Nicole Richie served only 82 minutes of her four day sentence.

A few faces of past clients flashed in front of me as I read the letter the ABA has sent to the U.S. Sentencing Commission (available here) urging that their planned reduction of crack cocaine penalties be made retroactive.

While the planned reductions are tiny compared to what they should be, I'm sure any relief would be appreciated by the thousands of inmates who are languishing in our prisons serving draconian sentences for non-violent crack crimes.

In 2002, the Sentencing Commission recommended a greater reduction but it never happened. It recommended:

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From John Edwards' speech today in New Hampshire:

The choice for our party could not be more clear. We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other.

The American people deserve to know that their presidency is not for sale, the Lincoln Bedroom is not for rent, and lobbyist money can no longer
influence policy in the House or the Senate.

Hmm, where have I heard that before? On Lexis, I found Robert Dole remark's in Fresno, CA, from October 26 1996, when he was running for Vice President:

America is not for sale. Right there. America is not for sale. And the White House is not for sale. And the Lincoln bedroom is not for sale.

...Wake up, America.

Taylor Marsh, also quoting Dole, responds:

.... the Clinton money quote Edwards used today ... is straight out of the right-wing playbook. There are plenty of ways to come at Clinton on the issues, especially Iraq. But if this is the Edwards re-launch, I hope it makes a turn into better territory. Because between Obama's "Bush-Cheney lite" and Edwards talking about "The Lincoln Bedroom is not for rent," I've got to say that these guys sound positively desperate.

What is a sentence like this doing in a national news article on Rudy Giuliani's Iowa campaigning? Reporter Jill Lawrence writes:

Suffice it to say Republicans have never had a presidential candidate like this — half Woody Allen, half Rambo and 100% cerebral.

Via Media Matters which is tracking the media's reporting on Giuliani (and others).

Ms. Lawrence is also in need of a reality check.

As long as President Bush is comparing Iraq to Vietnam, I thought I'd take a look at how we got out of Vietnam. Maybe there are some lessons there for getting us out of Iraq:

• June 22, 1971, the United States Senate passed a non-binding resolution urging the withdrawal of all American troops from Vietnam by the end of the year.

• December 31, 1971, there were 156,800 American soldiers in Vietnam. In January, 1972, Nixon announced "... the United States would continue to withdraw from Vietnam in coming months, removing another 70,000 troops over the next three months, but stated that 25,000 to 35,000 American troops would remain until the North Vietnamese released all the American prisoners of war."

• April and May, 1972: "On 4 April, 1972, Nixon authorized massive bombing of the North Vietnamese troops invading South Vietnam. On 15 April, Hanoi and Haiphong Harbour were bombed by the United States....On 8 May 72, President Nixon ordered the mining of all North Vietnamese ports."

• August 23, 1972, the last US ground combat troops left Vietnam

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Marty Lederman points out the problem with this statement of National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell to the El Paso Times:

There's a claim of reverse targeting. Now what that means is we would target somebody in a foreign country who is calling into the United States and our intent is to not go after the bad guy, but to listen to somebody in the United States. That's not legal, it's, it would be a breach of the Fourth Amendment. You can go to jail for that sort of thing. And If a foreign bad guy is calling into the United States, if there's a need to have a warrant, for the person in the United States, you just get a warrant. And so if a terrorist calls in and it's another terrorist, I think the American public would want us to do surveillance of that U.S. person in this case. So we would just get a warrant and do that. It's a manageable thing. On the U.S. persons side it's 100 or less. And then the foreign side, it's in the thousands. Now there's a sense that we're doing massive data mining. In fact, what we're doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. So that's, we've got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we're doing things we're not doing. (my emphasis)

Marty correctly, in my view, points out: More...

The "much anticipated" Petraeus Bush Report on the Surge will be presented in a few weeks. Senator Chris Dodd said:

Despite the exemplary performance of our troops, we are coming off the bloodiest summer of this misguided war and it should be clear that there can be no military solution in Iraq.

It is useless to argue the merits of a specific tactic when the strategy itself is failed.

In fact, debating over military tactics when there is no military solution only undermines efforts by those of us who believe that we must change course in Iraq now and begin to immediately redeploy US combat forces so that Iraqi leaders will have the impetus to find a political accord.

(Emphasis supplied.) Senator Dodd is leading on Iraq now. He does not believe, as most of the other candidates seem to, that we must wait until 2009 to change strategy on Iraq. More.