Via Yglesias, this from LATimes:

Rejecting Moore's prescription on healthcare could alienate liberal activists, who will play a big role in choosing the party's next standard-bearer. However, his proposal — wiping out private health insurance and replacing it with a massive federal program — could be political poison with the larger electorate.

Michael Moore, Kingmaker? Where does the Media get this stuff? This is not Free Republic, but the news section of the LATimes! This is just pathetic. But if you think about it, it offers a great Sistah Souljah moment for all of the Dem candidates - they can say they stood up to Michael Moore!

In what should have been a good, hard hitting and relevant story about something John Edwards should explain, his employment of political operatives in his non-profit poverty organization, Leslie Wayne of the New York Times breaches the most important rule of journalism - report facts as facts, not the reporter's opinions as facts. Wayne's lede is simply intolerable:

John Edwards ended 2004 with a problem: how to keep alive his public profile without the benefit of a presidential campaign that could finance his travels and pay for his political staff. Mr. Edwards, who reported this year that he had assets of nearly $30 million, came up with a novel solution, creating a nonprofit organization with the stated mission of fighting poverty. . .

(Emphasis supplied.) That is Wayne's opinion, not a reported fact. Wayne does not have Edwards saying it nor any evidence to point to other than her own opinion of Edwards' motivations. This is simply unacceptable journalism. Instead of reporting the facts, which do require explanation, Wayne instead basically states AS A FACT that John Edwards committed a crime. Tax fraud.

It is appalling. And now the irresponsible work of Wayne should become a story, along with Edwards' practices. Shame on the New York Times, Leslie Wayne and the editor who let this through.

At every possible opportunity I love to point out I am a centrist. Today, in seeming response to silliness like this from ABC, E. J. Dionne points out:

. . . Whenever you use the word "left" in American politics, you feel almost compelled to add quotation marks. Today's left is not talking about nationalizing industry, abolishing capitalism or destroying the rich. What passes for "left" in American politics is quite moderate by historical standards.

Still, cliches die hard, so you hear such 20-year-old questions as: "Are Democrats moving too far to the left?" or "Will Democrats abandon the center?" This approach is about abstractions, not concrete political problems, and it misses the dynamic in American public life, which is the move away from the right and a discrediting of the conservative era. The political "center" of today is not where the "center" was even five years ago.

. . . [T]he "good ideas" that voters are demanding mostly have to do with problems that have been framed by the left, not the right: the need to disengage from Iraq, to create health security, to ease economic inequalities. It's time to update our sense of where the political center lies and to adjust our view of "the left" accordingly.

Hear, hear!

I thought after 2006, the species would have become extinct, but the "Sell Out on Choice" Dems still chasing those elusive "values voters" live! Paul Waldman has the best fisking of this ridiculous Times Op-Ed by Melinda Hennenberger, who argues, I think, that Dems should drop their pro-choice position, for political reasons apparently.

But I loved this part for its irony:

What would it take to win them back? Respect, for starters — and not only on the night of the candidate forum on faith. As it turns out, you cannot call people extremists and expect them to vote for you. . . .

Us "fringe," "idiot liberals" get that point very well. Drop a line to Rep. David Obey and all the others attacking the Dem base for being angry about not ending the Iraq war on that one Melinda.

If you believe the testimony he gave Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty was "largely out of the loop in the Justice Department's firings of U.S. attorneys." What, then, to make of Monica Goodling's testimony that "there were a number of things that I did brief him on and that that information wasn't fully -- wasn't fully revealed" when McNulty appeared before Congress.

GOODLING: I'm just saying that I didn't believe he was fully candid.

And the point that I was trying to make is that I did give him some information, I didn't withhold information, I gave him a lot of information, and he had some of that information and didn't use of all of it.

NADLER:Although, in fact, he stated things directly contrary to what your written statement says he knew to be true.

GOODLING:Those would be conclusions for others to draw.

As Monica invites, feel free to draw your own conclusions about McNulty. Gonzales also claims to have been absent from the loop. Perhaps there was no loop. Perhaps the Justice Department is loopless. Or perhaps the strategy is to point fingers in every direction (except inward) with the hope that confusion reigns until it's time to move on.

I'm back from Telluride (the thousands at the blue grass festival are at the bottom, this was taken from very high above it.) It's really hard to picture a more scenic spot.

The flight back was very long...I could have driven the seven hours from Telluride to Denver in the time it took to fly back (a one hour flight) due to the winds being too gusty to take off so we sat on the runway forever to wait for the winds to shift. The plane actually ran low on gas after an hour on the runway so we had to deplane while they refueled and wait for the winds to die down It's an 18 seater but it can't fly full because of weight issues even without winds. When the winds exceed 10 knots, flights aren't allowed to take off. Instead of landing in Denver at 4:30 pm, we landed at 7:30 pm.

When you do take off from Telluride, as soon as the plane lifts, the ground drops thousands of feet beneath you. It's a very eerie feeling that makes quite a few people ill. Since I knew to expect it, I enjoyed it.

I'm really glad to be home, but blogging will have to wait until sometime tomorrow after I decompress, and have organized the 300 plus photos I took, so here's an open thread.

Mother Jones runs a rather overwrought and, in my view, wrongheaded article discussing the A-List Bloggers as "The New Gatekeepers." I think the problem is a different one, as I outlined in my post The Dangerous Cooptation of the Blogosphere. The thrust of my post was this:

What is Digby suggesting? That the blogs/Netroots not give its true opinions? That we pull our punches? This is a very very dangerous game Digby is suggesting. For what do the blogs really have going for them? Integrity. If we don't have that, we have nothing. We become the Right blogs. This is terrible thinking, especially coming from our best blogger.

The Mother Jones article sees the problem as one of personal aggrandizement and love of influence and money. In my experience, and I used to be an A-List blogger, it is not that at all.

Remember when Alberto Gonzales assured the Senate that "there has not been any serious disagreement" about the NSA's domestic surveillance program within the administration? Consider this:

The administration was sharply divided over the legality of President Bush's most controversial eavesdropping policies, a congressman quoted former Attorney General John Ashcroft as telling a House panel Thursday.

"It is very apparent to us that there was robust and enormous debate within the administration about the legal basis for the president's surveillance program," Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, told reporters after a closed-door meeting with Ashcroft.

Oops. Another Gonzales lie exposed?

bumblebums reports on a e-mail from Senator Russ Feingold on Carl Levin's history of "not funding the troops:"

Senator Levin went on in his op-ed to grossly mischaracterize the legislation Majority Leader Harry Reid and I have introduced as somehow cutting or "stopping funding for the troops." That is extremely disappointing as it is well known that the Feingold-Reid bill ends funding for this war after our men and women in uniform have been safely redeployed out of Iraq.

. . . After all, Senator Levin and many others now in the Senate supported using Congress's 'power of the purse' before. In October of 1993, they voted for a similar effort with regard to Somalia. At that time, 75 Senators voted for an amendment to set a deadline after which funding for the military mission in Somalia would end and our troops would be safely redeployed. That bill was passed into law.

I'm not sure why some Democrats and many Republicans have flipped on this issue in the 14 years since. . . .

(Emphasis supplied.) What would Lincoln say Senator Levin?

MYDD interviews Speaker Pelosi, who has this to say about Iraq:

Jonathan Singer: You talked about the real need to have 60 votes in the Senate and perhaps even 67 and 290 in the House to override the President and get things done. Even understanding that, given the fact that the standing of Congress has declined since Iraq has really been on the table in Congress, do you feel like something else should have been done? You could have taken different steps? Or what does it tell you about moving forward?

Nancy Pelosi: I believe that we're right on course. We had the votes to say that there are timelines and the President had to honor them. The President vetoed the bill. There isn't much more you can do after that.

But, no, I'm very proud of what we've done in the Congress. I know outside people are dissatisfied. And I am too. . . . But we're right on schedule. . . .

Right on schedule? All you can do? Um, the Founding Fathers would beg to differ. As would President Bush himself.

Soldiers, their families, their friends, and their country continue to pay a heavy price for the Bush administration's intransigent refusal to change course in Iraq:

Fourteen American soldiers were killed in five separate incidents over the last 48 hours, most of them in Baghdad, including a roadside explosion in the capital that killed five soldiers and four Iraqis, the American military said today.

The conduct of Senator Carl Levin on the Iraq War has clearly been the most disappointing and, in my opinion, most dishonorable among the "anti-war" Democrats. Today, he compounds his disrepute by misleadingly invoking Abraham Lincoln. Levin writes:

In his only term in Congress, Abraham Lincoln was an ardent opponent of the Mexican War. . . . But when the question of funding for the troops fighting that war came, Lincoln voted their supplies without hesitation.

This is incredibly disingenuous of Levin. He is misleadingly quoting a letter Lincoln wrote in 1858 while under political attack in a Senate race and trying to compare that with what he is saying and doing now. There are no pretty words to describe what Levin has done here - he has disingenuously and cravenly used Abraham Lincoln to defend his actions. Levin should defend his actions with his own honest arguments, not by the misleading tactics of the Right. He should be heartily ashamed.