The San Francisco Chronicle writes up Yearly Kos and its growing influence. It makes the point that right wing sites are just not in the same league as Daily Kos and other widely read liberal blogs.

Here's all you need to know about how influential the YearlyKos convention has become: Five top presidential candidates are going....Analysts say the community of liberal online activists -- the "netroots" -- has become not only a coveted constituency for the left but a legitimate threat to conservatives, who trail Democrats in online campaigning and fundraising.

There will be 200 journalists covering Yearly Kos. The right will be criticizing, but, I suspect, speaking to their echo chamber.

The article also compares blogs in 2007 to those in 2004:

The netroots have come a long way from the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was big news that bloggers were given media credentials.

Most of the public didn't even know what a blog was then. We've come a long way, but it's where we're going and what we are going to do that counts.

More...

Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack write:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

As two analysts who have been cheering this war on for 4 years, who the heck do you think you are kidding? Consider this from CSM, via Sully:

This article, via Nick Beaudrot, demonstrates that James Fallows (he has a blog too) had been very good for a while now.

He discusses problems in the Media. It is from 1996. On the flip I have an extended excerpt of a small part of it that is brilliant. But read the whole thing.

So there is a lot of teeth gnashing in the Right Blogs about the now unlikely to happen Republican You Tube Debate. I am sympathetic to a part of the complaint. I thought CNN made a joke of the Democratic You Tube Debate. I hated it. Jeralyn and just about everyone else loved it and Democrats got great press for it. Clearly it was successful for Democrats. And there is the rub for Republicans as Patrick Ruffini describes:

At the end of the day, the issue is not YouTube. The YouTube debate snub is the symptom, not the disease. If Republicans fret about a simple debate format, which is really just the modern version of the 1992 townhall debate, how in the heck are we going to be make the really bold, gutsy decisions to transform our campaigns so we can raise over $100 million online and recruit millions — yes millions — of volunteers over the Internet?

Ruffini points to this from Trippi, discussing the You Tube Debate and the pitfalls for Republicans and the Internet (starting at 2:30 or so):

More.

The whole world doesn't revolve around prosecutors. Other good things to read today:

• Say hello to Prison Legal News, gathering injustice stories from all across the country.

• Republican maybe-candidate Fred Thompson writes there are too many federal crimes and criticizes the expanding prison population, but as Ilya at Volokh notes, he ignores the elephant in the room, the war on drugs.

  However, there is a major elephant in this federalism room that Thompson doesn't mention. He is right to note the massive growth in the federal prison population over the last 20 years, but fails to point out that most of that growth is due to the War on Drugs.

• Don't miss the brief by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (pdf)filed in the Kimbrough case on crack cocaine penalties. It focuses on the racial impact of crack sentencing and how the disparity affects not only defendants but families and the community and undermines respect for law. [Hat tip to Peter Goldberger.]

• Also, via White Collar Defense Blog, check out the Federal Defender's amicus brief (pdf)in the Gall case on the reasonableness presumption of the federal sentencing guidelines.

Christy at Firedogake writes about the numerous U.S. Attorney vacancies around the country and yesterday's New York Times article about them. She posits the vacancies put us at risk. The Times reported:

Among the 93 United States attorneys, who serve as the chief federal prosecutors for their regions, there are 24 vacancies. The White House has announced nominations for only six of those offices, which means that several of the jobs may remain unfilled for the rest of the Bush administration.

The Times quotes senior department officials as saying "the work of the department has been severely disrupted by [Gonzales'] troubles.

I think it's worth noting that a big (if not the biggest)reason for not being able to fill the vacancies is that very few people are going to leave current jobs to take the U.S. Attorney's job when the appointment will expire in less than 16 months if a Democrat is elected. Even if a Republican is elected, new U.S. Attorneys may be appointed.

The job is, after all, a political plum. It's awarded based on recommendations from the district's senators, it almost exclusively goes to a member of the President's party and very often it's based on the person's contributions, including fundraising efforts, to the successful presidential candidate.

As for the U.S. Attorney firing scandal and Gonzales' problems disrupting the work of the Department, I haven't seen it in the Districts I practice in. I don't doubt morale is suffering and I don't know of any Assistant U.S. Attorneys who are happy with the situation, but work goes on in the federal courts, people get sent to jail daily, new cases are being brought, existing cases are being argued and Justice Department guidelines are being followed. In other words, the war on drugs, war on civil liberties and trend towards draconian sentences continues unabated.

I've spoken to AUSA's who are embarrassed and critical of Gonzales, but it's not affecting their work. Every district without an appointed U.S. Attorney has an Acting U.S. Attorney. The vacancies are in name only.

As long as Jeralyn, Orin Kerr and Marty Lederman are speculating about what the legal dispute was that triggered the 2004 Comey crisis, I am going to throw my 2 cents in too. I think a thorough review of the original Times article, and the most recent article lead us to a reasonable speculation - that it was NOT the data mining itself that was objectionable but the use of the data mining results. Lederman writes:

[T]he most likely possibility -- the legal problem wasn't the data mining itself, but instead that the uses of the data that were mined violated FISA. The Times story hints at this -- that perhaps it was not so much the data mining itself, but instead what what NSA did with the mined data, that caused the legal uproar: "Some of the officials said the 2004 dispute involved other issues in addition to the data mining, but would not provide details. They would not say whether the differences were over how the databases were searched or how the resulting information was used." . . .

Indeed, and I think we can trace where these concerns first started:

In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it. . . . A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said. The judge questioned whether information obtained under the N.S.A. program was being improperly used as the basis for F.I.S.A. wiretap warrant requests from the Justice Department, according to senior government officials.

The Judge's concerns, I speculate, led to a wholesale review by Comey and others and they came to conclude the program did not pass legal muster. More.

Frank Rich writes an important column on the reality behind the myth of General Petraeus. Some key execerpts:

As always with this White House’s propaganda offensives, the message in Mr. Bush’s relentless repetitions never varies. General Petraeus is the “main man.” He is the man who gives “candid advice.” Come September, he will be the man who will give the president and the country their orders about the war.

. . . Actually, we don’t have to wait. We already know what David will say. He gave it away to The Times of London last month, when he said that September “is a deadline for a report, not a deadline for a change in policy.” In other words: Damn the report (and that irrelevant Congress that will read it) — full speed ahead. There will be no change in policy.

More...

Ever since I ordered my new Macbook Friday night, I haven't been able to get this song out of my head.

"I've got a brand new pair of roller skates, you've got a brand new key"

So, Mac users out there, what's a good external portable hard drive for backup, what programs do you use to backup and are there any new software programs you especially like for it? I'm thinking of getting Parallel and Data Backup 3. Apple Care seems like a necessity too.

No GOP defenders for Gonzo:

Jeralyn, Glenn Greenwald and Anonymous Liberal take apart the NYTimes leaked defense. And I have a new point on the flip.

Ignatius:

The most sensible comment I heard on Iraq in the past week came from one of the Democratic presidential candidates -- indeed, from the one with the strongest antiwar credentials, Sen. Barack Obama: "I think we can be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in." Obama is right, and so, for that matter, is President Bush when he says much the same thing. The United States is on its way out of Iraq eventually, but it matters powerfully how we disengage -- most of all to Democrats, who at this point seem likely to inherit the responsibility for America's security 18 months from now.

(Emphasis supplied.) Now that he has discarded the "Politics of Hope," I sure wish Obama would criticize David Ignatius for basically speaking falsely of his views on Iraq.

I'm as perplexed as everyone else in trying to decipher the White House's latest explanation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' seemingly inconsistent statements in his sworn testimony on what was at issue regarding the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program when he and Andy Card went to visit former Attorney General John Ashcroft in the hospital in March, 2004.

A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

....Mr. Gonzales insisted before the Senate this week that the 2004 dispute did not involve the Terrorist Surveillance Program “confirmed” by President Bush, who has acknowledged eavesdropping without warrants but has never acknowledged the data mining. If the dispute chiefly involved data mining, rather than eavesdropping, Mr. Gonzales’ defenders may maintain that his narrowly crafted answers, while legalistic, were technically correct.

Big Tent Democrat argues that the TSP program and the data-mining program were one and the same -- data mining was part of the TSP program. While there are many data-mining programs run by a host of different agencies, that seems right in this context.

I'd like to examine it from a different angle: Was John Ashcroft ever opposed to data-mining? If not, how could that be the basis of the need to go to the hospital and twist his arm in reauthorizing the NSA's TSP program?

More...