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.

The much anticipated decision in Rita v. U.S. was released this morning. Early reports (here and here) from Sentencing Law and Policy tell us that the decision upholds a presumption of reasonableness at the appellate level for sentences that fall within the federal sentencing guidelines.

The more interesting question is whether sentences that are less harsh than the guidelines suggest may be viewed with greater skepticism on appeal simply because they fall well outside the guidelines. (Sentences that greatly exceed the guidelines seem rarely to trouble appellate courts.) That question would have been addressed in the Claiborne case if Claiborne hadn't been killed. We'll have to wait until next term for an answer.

The Senate version of legislation to renew the Higher Education Act, notable for its increased funding of Pell Grants, also includes a welcome but less noticed provision:

The Senate legislation would also eliminate from the federal financial aid application a controversial question asking whether applicants have been convicted of drug possession while receiving federal student aid. That question has been used to identify and strip financial aid from thousands of students. While the Senate bill would leave the drug possession penalty in the law, dropping the question from the federal financial aid form would make enforcement of the provision very difficult.

Tom Angell, government relations director at Students for Sensible Drug Policy, responds sensibly:

“While it would be more appropriate to simply erase the penalty from the lawbooks altogether, we support the committee’s effort to make sure that students with drug convictions can get aid just like anyone else.”

SSDP makes it easy to contact your senator to support the change by visiting this page.

Linda Greenhouse asks what became of the "respect for precedent" that both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito paid homage to during their confirmation hearings.

Both Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. assured their Senate questioners at their confirmation hearings that they, too, respected precedent. So why were they on the majority side of a 5-to-4 decision last week declaring that a 45-year-old doctrine excusing people whose “unique circumstances” prevented them from meeting court filing deadlines was now “illegitimate”? It was the second time the Roberts court had overturned a precedent, and the first in a decision with a divided vote. ...

Sometimes the court overrules cases without actually saying so. Some argue that this is what happened in April, when a 5-to-4 majority upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act without making much effort to reconcile that ruling with a decision in 2000 that found a nearly identical Nebraska law unconstitutional.

All judges respect the precedents they like. Many judges are cautious about overruling precedents that have been widely accepted and implemented by lower courts. But precedents that a judge finds suspect, that aren't consistent with a shared (if not widespread) judicial philosophy to which the judge adheres, enjoy less respect, confirmation hearing promises notwithstanding.

What does this portend? Greenhouse takes a guess ...

"Lots of people say, 'I want a Democrat,' but when they see the particulars, they say, 'I don't want that Democrat,'" said Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University. "The thing that's amazing about the Democrats is that they could still snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. The major Democrats are all now well to the left of the median voter."

Matt Yglesias writes about this piece by ABC News that basically argues what Prof. Jeffrey Berry says. Matt comments on the lack of imagination of the piece. I am struck by its inaccuracy. The argument presented was the same one we saw in the runup to the 2006 election from the Media -- the Democrats are moving to far to the Left. As then, the polls belied every statement made in that regard. And of course the election results proved it too.

I have never heard of Jeffrey Berry and I imagine most of you have not heard of him either. He was chosen to be quoted in the article because the reporters wanted to put their views in the mouths of some semi-authoritative voice. And Berry obliged. But Berry is absolutely wrong based on all the polling on EVERY ISSUE. Let's discuss the particulars on the flip.

Greg Sargent explains. Rudy said today:

"I thought it would work, but then after a month or two I realized the idea that I was possibly going to run for president would be inconsistent with that," he said . . .

Baloney:

Rudy's role with the ISG was announced in March of 2006. That means that Rudy didn't see a problem with being on the ISG at that time. But many months earlier than this, Rudy himself was openly telling reporters that he was a potential candidate for President.

From the Associated Press in October of 2005:

. . . "I will be considering it next year," Giuliani said during a visit to Denmark.

Rudy, as he is on most things, is just making stuff up. Will the Media call him on it? Is a haircut involved? No? Then no.