John Roberts of CNN, doing a standup for tonight's CNN/YouTube Democratic Presidential Candidates' Debate makes a "bold" (READ idiotic) prediction - we will all be talking about Mike Gravel tomorrow.

Unless he pulls a Cheney (and I don't mean an 'f you' Cheney; I mean a 'shoot someone in the face' Cheney), I am confident Mike Gravel will not be the name on everyone's lips tomorrow.

Is Roberts trying to act as if he gets the blogs? Gravel had his night. Months ago. I also predict that I will not be watching the first sanctioned debate (the fourth actual debate). I'm sick of them already. My gawd, there are like 10 to go before Iowa. They will be all the same questions, all the same nonsense. Who started this thing so early anyway?

You're watching an utterly irrelevant, shallow television celebrity [Chris Matthews] dominate everybody who claimed they want to lead the most powerful nation in the world -Newt Gingrich

Heeeeeeere's Newt!

Dismissing the GOP presidential field as a "pathetic" bunch of "pygmies," Newt Gingrich hinted Monday he might step in to beat Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. . . ."If it becomes patently obvious, as the morning paper points out, that the Democrats have raised a hundred million more than the Republicans, and at some point people decide we are going to get Hillary unless there's a radical change, then there's space for a candidate," he added. "So you'll know by mid-October one of those two futures is real." Asked by the Examiner if he was prepared to commit to a run, Gingrich said, "I'm perfectly happy to do what I do," he said. "Whether that leads to the presidency is the country's problem, not mine."

(Emphasis supplied.) It sure as heck would be our problem if Newt became President. Thank Gawd there is no chance of that. h/t atrios.

Charles Johnson knows that the administration of daily kos is not the authors of the diaries there, just as he is not responsible for the many racist, sexist and offensive comments at his site Little Green Footballs, but apparently he lacks the integrity to be honest about it. John Cole is a man of integrity and explains why what Johnson has posted is so foul:

Just in case you were keeping score- some anonymous wingnut wrote a nasty anti-military screed on DKOS, had it promptly deleted by the folks at DKOS [It turns out the diarist himself, an crime author named Corey Mitchell, first time diarist with no history at all at daily kos, himself immediately deleted the diary], and that is somehow proof that the left hates troops. . . . A quick refresher- anyone can post a diary there [daily kos]. I could log on to my account and write nothing but BUSH SUCKS BUSH SUCKS BUSH SUCKS BUSH SUCKS. In fact, I just did. . . .

Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl has returned from a trip to Guantanamo where he was allowed to sit in on interrogations.

Diehl reports the Pentagon has shifted from harsh interrogation techniques to ones that stress "the milk of human kindness."

He writes that 360 detainees remain at Guantanamo and 100 interrogation sessions occur each week.

Detainees being worked by the staff of 21 interrogators are invited to leave their small cells for private rooms typically equipped with televisions and comfortable chairs. About five times out of seven, one official told me, the prisoners are asked no questions; instead, pistachios, Subway and McDonald's sandwiches, and other food treats are served, and the session consists of light conversation or the watching of a movie.

Special treats are offered to those who cooperate: One prisoner, I was told, has become an avid reader of the Harry Potter books and was offered access to the latest installment in exchange for responsiveness.

The Good news is Gitmo seems to be winding down.

Fifteen Saudi prisoners were sent home last week; 80 other detainees have been cleared for transfer. One senior official said that he believed only 50 to 75 prisoners here cannot be either sent home or put on trial.

This means of the 360 prisoners still there, most for more than five years, 300 of them have been found not to be a threat or to warrant criminal charges. What a black stain for the U.S. All the pistachios and Harry Potter books in the world can't erase that.

We all know that the political news is not the place to find it. And our illusions about sports has long been shattered. But the NBA/corrupt ref scandal is off the charts. One of my favorite writers, Bill Simmons, explores the scandal and what it means for the NBA. My only blog hook on this story is the FBI is investigating. But I think it is quite a story.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll taken July 21 finds Hillary Clinton with a double-digit lead over other contenders. The poll results are here.

I think it's significant that those responding also gave her a double-digit lead when asked which candidate would mostly likely win in the general election:

Now, thinking ahead to November 2008: Which Democratic presidential candidate do you think has the best chance to defeat the Republican nominee in the general election? (Read list if necessary.)

Hillary Clinton 43
Barack Obama 27
John Edwards 9
Al Gore 7
Bill Richardson 1
Chris Dodd 1
Joe Biden *
Dennis Kucinich *
Mike Gravel *
Other *
None of these 4
No opinion 7

As for Al Gore, he scored 14 when asked who those polled favored now, but only 9 when asked who was most likely to defeat Republicans.

Hillary is also getting major support on her Iraq stance right now.

She has a 51 percent to 29 percent lead over Obama among those in favor of a complete, immediate withdrawal.

From Glenn Greenwald. Irony writ large:

This week's issue of The Weekly Standard features a cover story by Hugh Hewitt blogger Dean Barnett. Entitled "The 9/11 Generation," it argues that America's current youthful generation is courageous and noble because it has answered the call of military service, in contrast to the cowardly Vietnam era baby boomers who chose protest instead. . . . The crux of Barnett's homage to what he calls the "9/11 Generation" is expressed as follows:

In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn't answer the phone.

To begin with, while Barnett contrasts two significant groups of the Vietnam era -- those who bravely volunteered for combat and/or who were drafted (Jim Webb and John McCain and Chuck Hagel and John Kerry) and those who protested the war -- he revealingly whitewashes from history the other major group, the most ignoble one, the one which happens to include virtually all of the individuals who lead Barnett's political movement: namely, those who claimed to support the war but did everything possible to evade military service, sending their fellow citizens off to die instead in a war they urged.

(Emphasis supplied.) I dunno. Barnett may have wanted to not slam them but the retort is so obvious that one wonders how he could not anticipate it.

KagroX finds a military law review article that states in no uncertain terms that the Congress is exclusive holder of the funding power. The article comprehensively reviews the history of Anglo-American law on the subject, including discusions of the British Parliament and the Monarchy, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, Supreme Court decisions and custom. Not surprisingly, Kagro tries to shoot holes in the comprehensive argument, relying on the examples cited by the law review author of extraconstitutional emergency expenditures by Washington during the Whisky Rebellion and Lincoln during the Civil War. But the conclusion of the author is without ambiguity:

When, in some cases of urgent necessity, they ventured to act without law or against law, they boldly took a responsibility; they ran the risk of the law, sometimes the risk of their fortune in damages; then they hastened to acknowledge on the records of the legislature that they had done a thing, meritorious indeed, but illegal; and asked the legislature to cover them with an indemnity.

Washington and Lincoln were not availed of the opportunity to seek the funding PRIOR to acting. That was their principal argument for why they did what they did and the Congress subsequently ratified their actions. Here, not funding the Iraq Debacle will follow years of public debate and would be an express rejection of the President's requests. The situations are not comparable. More.

Via recontext, this SFChronicle article has Speaker Pelosi's thoughts on contempt of Congress, impeachment and ending the Iraq Debacle:

Congress this week will take the next step to force the Bush administration to hand over information about the dismissal of U.S. attorneys and the politicization of the Justice Department, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Saturday. . . . Pelosi spokesman, Brendan Daly, said . . . it would be former White House counsel Harriet Miers, who defied a House Judiciary Committee subpoena to appear. . . . Pelosi also reiterated Saturday that she would not engage in what would perhaps be the biggest confrontation possible with the White House -- seeking the impeachment of Bush over the Iraq war. . . . "Look, it's hard enough for us to end the war. I don't know how we would be successful in impeaching the president," Pelosi said.

Expect the howls to be deafening from impeachik quarters. I'll be howling too if Pelosi does not acknowledge the Congressional power of the purse to end the war and the power of the Congress to use inherent contempt to enforce its subpoenas.

(Written Sunday night.) What a lousy day. Last night, out of nowhere, my Powerbook G4 just went and died. No matter how many times I tried to boot it up, I never got past the gray screen with the Apple logo. I spent most of the night on Apple's website, doing all the things they said, pressing control-option this and command-option that, resetting things called PRAM and PNU, all to no avail.

Today I called the local Apple Store that has a "Genius Bar" and got a 3:45 pm appointment. It was 100 degrees outside, but off to the mall I went. The geniuses hooked it up to their equipment and confirmed the hard drive failed and the data can't be read.

For $150, they would remove the hard drive so I could take it to a data recovery specialist who would charge hundreds more to try and recover stuff. For $400, I could get a new hard drive put in, but my data would be lost.

To make things worse, it turns out that even if I buy a MacBook or MacBook Pro as a replacement, I won't be able to transfer my music and video(other than that purchased from the iTunes store) to the new computer. Apple licensing prohibits it. iTunes only allows the downloading of music from iTunes on your computer to iPod, not from iPod to iTunes.

This totally sucks.

More...

Adam Cohen of the NYTimes Ed Board reminds us what the Founders intended:

The founders would have been astonished by President Bush's assertion that Congress should simply write him blank checks for war. They gave Congress the power of the purse so it would have leverage to force the president to execute their laws properly. Madison described Congress's control over spending as "the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure." . . .

But Cohen warns:

The Constitution cannot enforce itself. It is, as the constitutional scholar Edwin Corwin famously observed, an "invitation to struggle" among the branches, but the founders wisely bequeathed to Congress some powerful tools for engaging in the struggle. . . . Members of Congress should not be intimidated into thinking that they are overstepping their constitutional bounds. If the founders were looking on now, it is not Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who would strike them as out of line, but George W. Bush, who would seem less like a president than a king.

Hear, hear!

This history deeply influenced the framing of our Constitution:

Charles [I of England] had inherited disagreements with Parliament from his father, but his own actions (particularly engaging in ill-fated wars with France and Spain at the same time) eventually brought about a crisis in 1628-29.

. . . Tensions between the King and Parliament centred around finances, made worse by the costs of war abroad, and by religious suspicions at home. . . . In the first four years of his rule, Charles was faced with the alternative of either obtaining parliamentary funding and having his policies questioned by argumentative Parliaments who linked the issue of supply to remedying their grievances, or conducting a war without subsidies from Parliament.

. . . Charles had to recall Parliament. However, the Short Parliament of April 1640 queried Charles's request for funds for war against the Scots and was dissolved within weeks. . . .