It's court in the mountains for me today. I've got an early flight there and a late flight back so that means an open thread day for you.

Here's the tiny plane I'll be flying on. No bathroom, no flight attendant. Even with the constant turbulance caused by the heat of summer it beats driving seven hours each way.

What it doesn't beat is getting up at 5am to arrive at the airport an hour and a half before the flight and on the other end, having to worry about whether the flight will be cancelled due to wind conditions or whether weight restrictions will make them bump some passengers. The worst part, of course, is that I like my client and I'll be very sad when for the first time after months of doing court hearings, I leave to go home while he stays in the custody of the Town Marshals.

I hope you all have a better day planned.

I never expected to be supporting any of our fine Democratic candidates for President at this point, much less Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT). I was not shopping for candidates. Indeed, I insisted (insist?) that the Netroots has spent 2007 too focused on the 2008 horserace instead of being focused on the pressing issues of today, especially the Iraq issue.

But that actually explains how Chris Dodd won my support. Chris Dodd is leading on the issues of today as well as discussing his vision for the issues of tomorrow. Take Iraq for instance. While Dodd thoroughly explains his views on what he will do about Iraq as President, he has spent just as much time explaining and stressing the critical importance of Democrats doing all they can now to end the Iraq Debacle. This is not an issue that can wait 18 months. Thus Dodd argues that we must:

End the War in Iraq Decisively. Chris Dodd understands that ending the war in Iraq makes America safer. He strongly supports the Feingold-Reid proposal - the only responsible measure in Congress that sets a timetable to end the war in Iraq by March 31, 2008 - and he has urged all the candidates in the presidential race to join him. It is time to stand up to the President's misguided Iraq policy.

(Emphasis supplied.) More than anything else, this position won my support. Instead of introducing a "Dodd plan" for getting us out of Iraq, to buttress a stump speech, Chris Dodd put the issue first, he put the nation first, and he argued for what Democrats (and any Republicans with wisdom and courage) should be doing NOW, not in January 2009, to end the Iraq Debacle. With this one act, Chris Dodd demonstrated the type of leadership, political courage, selflessness and wisdom that we need from our future President.

More.

Jackson Browne, Lives in the Balance:

There are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

A Pentagon report to be released tomorrow discloses there were 99 suicides in the military last year. One-fourth of those who took their own lives had served in Iraq or Afghanistan. That's more suicides than the military has had in the past 26 years.

I blame President Bush. Every day he keeps our soldiers in this war, more of them are going to die. The ones that survive will come back with post-traumatic stress disorders that will take years if not decades to overcome. Some of them are bound to take their own lives as well.

This war was not worth the price. We have a President who is unable or unwilling to acknowledge his mistakes. Experts agree the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily. So why are the troops still there? Let's stop the funding and bring them home now.

Responding to Max Sawicky's point about Obama's conceit that he will transform politics, Paul Waldman writes a piece that is all confusion and fantasy. Sawicky wrote:

Today in the Post we find Obama claiming an advantage over Clinton by virtue of his capacity to unify the country. The last thing we need, at a point where the Democrats can establish a decisive margin of political power, is somebody out to unify the country. I fear that Senator Obama is turning into the DLC candidate, in all but name.

I think Sawicky is wrong in thinking of Obama as the DLC candidate. There is no DLC candidate. Not even Biden. The DLC is basically irrelevant to Democratic politcs, but still willing to be a weapon for Republican politics by their incessant bashing of Democrats as too far Left.

No, Obama's problem, as I have argued ad nauseum, is the notion that he will be the first politican in history who can lead his political party to success while not engaging in partisanship. It is pure foolishness. But what is especially galling is Obama's willingess to be divisive among Democrats while promising to not be divisive with Republicans. It is simply political madness. A madness that apparently infected Paul Waldman:

Via Kevin Drum, conservative James Joyner has woken up to Rudy:

Otherwise, I must concur in Matt Yglesias‘ judgment: “this man is bats[**]t insane.” . . . [T]he more I learn about Giuliani, the less I like him. . . . The more I hear and read, . . ., the more I think Giuliani is either a charlatan or a simpleton. Either he’s lying to us and we therefore have no idea what his foreign policy will be or, worse, this is what he really thinks. Either way, it’s not good.

Rudy is the most dangerous person running for President by far. An insane, lying charlatan, in the words of Joyner. Good to see people are waking up to this fact.

Derrick Z. Jackson's Boston Globe column today tracks Barack Obama's record on drug sentencing, including his stance on the disparate and racially discriminatory federal crack-powder cocaine sentencing ratios and the death penalty.

Shorter version: He used to be against the harsh crack cocaine penalties but now won't commit to doing anything to fix them. It may not be worth the "political capital" it would take.

On the death penalty, while he's voted against it in some cases, he's also voted to strengthen it in others.

Details below:

Me:

Politics is not a battle for the middle. It is a battle for defining the terms of the political debate. It is a battle to be able to say what is the middle.

Laura Ingraham, via Crooks and Liars:

[N]ot to defend the Daily Kos, when you’re constantly targeting the middle or the moderates as Harold [Ford] called them…it’s pretty tough because the middle is always shifting…it’s shifting to where the left or right is more persuasive. It’s not like the moderates are an identifiable group—-identifiable positions on a number of key issues. They kinda move to either where conservatives or liberals guide them either successfully or not so…I think targeting the middle is a very risky political strategy . . .

The Republican have always known this. The DLC still has not learned this. Harold Ford and the DLC are bad at politics. But so is the Beltway Establishment, the home of Broderism.

It's so typical. When candidates are pandering for votes and struggling to keep their candidacies alive, they resort to fear mongering and proclaiming themselves to be the candidate that will be the toughest on crime. In today's world, that means being the toughest on undocumented residents and sex offenders.

Rudy Giuliani has unveiled his new plan for war on the undocumented.

Giuliani said he would require a uniform identification card for foreign workers and students and create a central database to track the legal status of visitors to the country....Giuliani wants a tamperproof ID card that includes fingerprinting for everyone entering the country and a central database to track when they leave.

For an immigrant to get a chance to stay here, he wants a confession and then the undocumented resident will "go to the back of the line." That sounds racistly reminiscent to me of "go to the back of the bus."

What's next, a Giuliani-Tancredo ticket?

Mitt Romney is going with the tried and true: declare war on sex offenders. Never mind that penalties for sex offenders are already astronomically high, Romney will raise them even higher:

[T]he Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor has proposed increased punishment for those who prey on children online -- stringent mandatory prison sentences, followed by lifetime tracking by Global Positioning System for first-time offenders who "use the Internet to sexually assault children." He calls it "One Strike, You're Ours."

Ah, the evil internets. What's next, a Mitt Romney - John Walsh ticket?

Civil libertarians provide this response to Romney's plan:

More...

The New York Times reports on the depressing statistics of Alzheimer's disease:

4.5 million people in the United States have Alzheimer’s, 1 in 10 over 65 and nearly half of those over 85. Taking care of them costs $100 billion a year, and the number of patients is expected to reach 11 million to 16 million by 2050. Experts say the disease will swamp the health system.

Researchers and drug companies aren't even close to a cure. So what's a person to do when faced with a parent or loved one with dementia or Alzheimer's?

Take a cue from those of the '60's generation: Go with the flow.

More...

Bump and Update: Deliberations begin Wednesday in the trial of Jose Padilla and his co-defendants.

Here are the jury instructions (pdf), made available on PACER Tuesday.

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Defense Closing Arguments in Jose Padilla Trial

Lawyers for accused terrorism supporters Jose Padilla and co-defendant Kifah Wael Jayyousi gave their closing arguments today.

Shorter version from Jose Padilla's lawyer: He was a student, not a terrorist. As to the mujahedeen form with Padilla's fingerprints:

The critical piece of prosecution evidence is a "mujahedeen data form" Padilla allegedly filled out in July 2000 to attend an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan. The form bears seven of his fingerprints, but Caruso said they are found only on the first page and the back of the final page — consistent with Padilla simply handling the form, rather than writing on it.

Of the 3,000 taped telephone calls, Padilla's voice was only on 7 of those introduced at trial.

As to the use of code words, Padilla didn't use any on the taped calls. The Government wants the jury to believe that when the other two defendants used words like "tourism" and "football" they meant "jihad" and that the words "eggplant" and "zucchini" were references to military weapons and supplies.

Bill Swor, Jaylousi's lawyer, told the jury the government was fear-mongering.

More....

Dennis Hastert, formerly Speaker of the House, now an ordinary U.S. Representative, must not be pleased with his humble new position. The Illinois Congressman is expected to announce on Friday that he won't run for reelection.

Who else will take a dive from the sinking ship?

[Rep. Ray] LaHood, who recently announced his own plan to retire, said he believed there would be additional retirement announcements from within the House GOP. “I retired because it was the right time to leave. Others will also be leaving, for their own reasons,” he said.