Crooks and Liars is hosting a live-chat with Michael Moore today between 4:00 and 5:00 ET.

The movie has opened in about 500 new cities across the country this weekend and is the # 5 grossing documentary of all time so far……

Michael Moore's SiCKO site is here.

Frank Rich in today's New York Times (reprinted and publicly available here):

Forty years late, the party establishment is finally having its own middle-aged version of the summer of love, and it’s a trip. The co-chairman of John McCain’s campaign in Florida has been charged with trying to solicit gay sex from a plainclothes police officer. Over at YouTube, viewers are flocking to a popular new mock-music video in which “Obama Girl” taunts her rival: “Giuliani Girl, you stop your fussin’/ At least Obama didn’t marry his cousin.”

As Margery Eagan, a columnist at The Boston Herald, has observed, even the front-runners’ wives are getting into the act, trying to one-up one another with displays of what she described as their “ample and aging” cleavage. The décolletage primary was kicked off early this year by the irrepressible Judith Giuliani, who posed for Harper’s Bazaar giving her husband a passionate kiss. “I’ve always liked strong, macho men,” she said. This was before we learned she had married two such men, not one, before catching the eye of America’s Mayor at Club Macanudo, an Upper East Side cigar while he was still married to someone else.

Putting it in context:

Via Think Progress, which has the video and transcript, the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol said on Fox News Sunday this morning:

“Every Democratic presidential nominee is going to the DailyKos convention,” said Kristol. “That’s the left-wing blogger who was not respectable three or four years ago. The Howard Dean kind of sponsor. Now the whole party is going to pay court to him and to left wing blogs.”

First, the convention is put on by Yearly Kos, an organization separate from the Daily Kos blog and separate from Markos.

More importantly, Markos is and always has been respectable. I'll repeat what I wrote a few years ago:

Markos is a friend of our's. We've spent hours with him - and his wife. He even designed TalkLeft for us, gratis. We've watched him grow from trying to get a few hundred hits a day to getting a thousand hits by noon (another landmark) to where he is now: the largest and most widely read liberal political blogger in the blogosphere.

He's earned every visitor to Daily Kos with his hard work, intelligence and uncanny grasp of all things related to politics and the internet. He grew up in war-torn El Salvador and served as an enlisted U.S. soldier in Gulf War I. He has a law degree. He is an incredibly talented pianist. He and his wife just had this beautiful baby. He's our friend.

Respectable means "worthy of respect or esteem." I think it's Kristol who is lacking in this department, not Markos.

Most of the Democratic presidential candidates and as well as many top Congressional leaders are attending Yearly Kos and participating in forums where they will answer questions from the attendees, 1,500 people from all walks of life concerned about the state of our nation.

More..

There is a NYTimes article on Rudy and how he has exploited race for political purposes in his political rise. The mendacity, flip flops, race baiting and exacerbation are all revealed in detail. But I really like Greg Sargent's piece on Rudy. Here is a highlight:

Rudy ascended to the Mayoralty on a wave of anger and raw emotion in New York. His strategy was fairly straightforward: He spoke to the (not unjustified) fears and resentments that rising crime and demographic change were causing in blue-collar outer-borough Catholics, aging Jewish voters, and even some white liberals. . . .

For instance, as today's Times notes, during his 1989 campaign against Dinkins, his "campaign ran an ad in a Jewish newspaper with a photo of Mr. Dinkins and Mr. Jackson . . . The paper adds that Rudy also began calling Dinkins "a Jesse Jackson Democrat." [Earlier that year, he criticized Ed Koch for calling Dinkins a Jackson Democrat.]Speaking to the fear and bewilderment of outer-borough white voters anxious about the changing city around them, Rudy played a subtle -- and sometimes not so subtle -- racial game to take power. Eventually, it worked.

. . . You can't understand the "bulls#$t" moment without seeing it in this larger context. It was anything but some random outburst. It isn't just some little "gotcha." It's Rudy in the raw. It's the Whole Rudy -- his rage, his overwhelming drive, his successful exploitation of the city's racial tensions to take power, his nasty and vicious streak.

People do not realize what a dangerous and unhinged man Rudy Giuliani is. There could be no worse fate for the country than Rudy becoming President in 2009.

If Sen. Russ Feingold thinks this will placate impeachniks, I think he is in for a rude awakening:

As you know, over a year ago I introduced a resolution to censure the President for his illegal wiretapping program, and for the way he misled Congress and the public before and after the program’s disclosure about whether his administration was following the law. I appreciated the strong support I got from all of you for that effort. You really helped galvanize support for that push for accountability, and encouraged people all over the country to recognize how damaging the President's actions were to our basic freedoms. So, as I announced a little while ago on Meet the Press, I plan to introduce two censure resolutions in the Senate in the coming weeks. These will be broad resolutions, one of which will address the war in Iraq, including the administration's efforts to mislead the nation into, and during, the war, mismanagement of the war, and its attempts to justify this Iraq mistake by distorting the situation on the ground in Iraq. The other condemns the administration's abuse of the rule of law. Because, of all this administration's outrageous misconduct, those are truly the worst of the worst.

For the record, I supported censure of the President when Feingold first proposed it in January 2006.

The New York Times Magazine today focuses on juvenile sex offenders, asking where is the line that divides a kid between being a sex offender and merely having boundary issues -- and questioning the wisdom of lifetime community notification laws for juveniles convicted of sex offenses.

It's a ten page feature article, but here are some highlights:

Community notification makes people feel protected — who wouldn’t want to know if a sex offender lives next door? But studies have yet to prove that the law does, in fact, improve public safety. Meanwhile, when applied to youths, the laws undercut a central tenet of the juvenile justice system. Since juvenile courts were created more than 100 years ago, youths’ records have, with exceptions in some states, been sealed and kept out of the public’s hands. The theory is that children are less responsible for their actions, and thus less blameworthy, than adults and more amenable to rehabilitation. But by publishing their photographs and addresses on the Internet, community notification suggests that juveniles with sex offenses are in a separate, distinct category from other adolescents in the juvenile justice system — more fixed in their traits and more dangerous to the public. It suggests, in other words, that they are more like adult sex offenders than they are like kids.

More...

There are so many things wrong with this prosecution and conviction, I'm not sure where to begin.

A jury in Lake County [IL.] weighed in ... Saturday, finding a Deerfield couple guilty of allowing their son's friends to drink in their basement one night last October. Two teenage guests were killed in a car crash shortly after leaving the Deerfield home of Jeffrey and Sara Hutsell.

The jury of seven women and five men deliberated seven hours before reaching its decision at about 7:40 p.m. They also convicted the Hutsells of one count of endangerment of a child and one count of obstruction of justice for lying to police officers on the night of the accident. The jury acquitted the couple of another obstruction charge for destroying evidence. The Hutsells showed no emotion as the verdicts were read.

Why should the parents be accountable for the intentional actions of other peoples' kids? One kid, age 18, drove drunk after leaving the party, killing himself and his passenger. Teenagers don't live in a vacuum. They know you aren't supposed to drink and drive. If you have to blame someone, why not blame the driver's parents who gave him the car to drive and didn't teach him better or monitor his activity to ensure he wouldn't abuse the privilege?

As the lawyer for the convicted mom told the jury,

"Did they provide alcohol? No.," .... "Did they come down and drink with them? No. Did they bring them chips and salsa? No."

More...

The New York Times re-examines Rudy Giuliani's strained relations with the African-American community during his tenure as Mayor.

By 1997, Mr. Giuliani’s job approval rating in the black community stood at 42 percent, according to a New York Times poll.

But within these victories lay the seed of a problem. Even as crime dropped by 60 percent, officers with the street crime unit stopped and frisked 16 black males for every one who was arrested, according to a report by the state attorney general. Then came three terrible episodes that raised a pointed question for black New Yorkers: Was crime reduction worth any cost?

And here's Rudy in Iowa, when asked about increasing federal support for HIV medication, answering by referring to 9/11 and terrorists:

"My general experience has been that the federal government works best when it helps and assists and encourages and sets guidelines… on a state-by-state, locality-by-locality basis. It's no different from the way I look at homeland security. Maybe having been mayor of the city, I know that your first defense against terrorist attack is that local police station, or that local firehouse."

"I'm gonna knock you out
Mama said knock you out"

This kept popping into my head today while writing about the Government asking the Court to impose the maximum sentence on Joe Nacchio.

Cockfighting is legal in Puerto Rico. And now the broadcast of cockfights over the Internet is a First Amendment issue here:

The change in the focus of the debate -- from live fights to video depictions of them -- has expanded the argument over cockfighting's cruelty into one that involves the First Amendment and, its defenders say, cockfighting's cultural significance in other countries.

. . . At the heart of the dispute is a law signed by President Bill Clinton that makes it illegal to create, sell or possess a depiction of animal cruelty with the intention of selling the depiction -- across state lines or internationally -- for commercial gain. . .. In signing the law, Clinton said it was important that the law not be construed so broadly as to "chill protected speech." Toward that end, the law offers an exception for depictions of animal cruelty that have "serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical or artistic value." But the law does not spell out which depictions qualify.

The company's Miami lawyer, David Markus, dismisses the child pornography comparison, instead comparing cockfighting to bullfighting, hunting and fishing. . . .

I do see bullfighting on the Spanish cable stations beamed here and it is not clear to me how bullfighting is more acceptable than cockfighting. Indeed, it is arguably worse as the bull does not naturally fight men whereas cocks do fight each other, and to the death sometimes.

If you haven't seen the photo of Romney holding up a sign that said "Obama Osama," you can see it here. Now you can read, via Eric Kleefeld, the worst excuse of the day:

Election Central contacted Romney spokesman Kevin Madden for comment, asking if it was appropriate for the candidate to hold the sign up with the woman. "The governor stopped briefly for a picture with a supporter who just happened to be holding their own sign with an alliterative play on words," Madden said, via e-mail. "I don’t think it was equating or comparing anyone."

Say whaaaaat? So there is today's worst excuse of the day.

In an editorial for tomorrow's paper, the NYTimes Editorial Board writes:

The next question is how Congress will enforce its right to obtain information, and it is on that point that the administration is said to have made its latest disturbing claim. If Congress holds White House officials in contempt, the next step should be that the United States attorney for the District of Columbia brings the matter to a grand jury. But according to a Washington Post report, the administration is saying that its claim of executive privilege means that the United States attorney would be ordered not to go forward with the case.

. . . The White House’s extreme position could lead to a constitutional crisis. If the executive branch refused to follow the law, Congress could use its own inherent contempt powers, in which it would level the charges itself and hold a trial. The much more reasonable route for everyone would be to proceed through the courts.

. . . Congress should use all of the tools at its disposal to pursue its investigations. It is not only a matter of getting to the bottom of some possibly serious government misconduct. It is about preserving the checks and balances that are a vital part of American democracy.

I agree with this editorial. And implicit in the times' last graf is that IF the Bush Administration blocks a judicial remedy, then the Congress must proceed to inherent contempt proceedings. That is also the conclusion I have reached as well.