Rahm Emmanuel says:

We cannot be a one-trick pony," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), who helped engineer his party's takeover of Congress as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "People voted for change, but Iraq, the economy and Washington, D.C., [corruption] all tied for first place. We need to do them all."

This is Emanuel's way of saying 'look, we did our political game on Iraq, now we are going to cave in to Bush and face his intransigence on "kitchen table" issues. Oh by the way, I never cared about doing something about Iraq anyway. Look what I said in the beginning of 2006.'

They don't get it and they never really will. Paul Krugman told them:

Normally, politicians face a difficult tradeoff between taking positions that satisfy their party’s base and appealing to the broader public.... But a funny thing has happened on the Democratic side: the party’s base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party’s leaders. And the result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions. Iraq is the most dramatic example....

They do not want to believe it. They want to listen to enablers like Leon Panetta:

The New York Times reports that many Guantanamo detainees are refusing to meet with or even accept mail from their own lawyers. They no longer trust them.

The detainees’ resistance appears to have been fueled by frustration over their long detention and suspicion about whether their lawyers are working for the government, as well as anti-American sentiment, some of the documents and interviews show. “Your role is to polish Bush’s shoes and make the picture look good,” a Yemeni detainee, Adnan Farhan Abdullatif, 31, wrote his lawyer in February.

Is the Government behind this? Many of the lawyers think so.

More...

I wrote here that I doubted new names would be aired on tonight's 20/20 in the D.C. Madam case and they weren't. 20/20 has aired and gone, and no new names were revealed.

I also laid out what I thought would be the probable strategy of those clients she threatened to call in her defense:

The clients are hardly going to be willing witnesses. What if they just tell her lawyer, when they get their subpoenas, there was sex involved? Surely, she won't publish their comments since it would be adding to the Government's case against her and hurtful to her defense. Nor would she dare actually put them on the stand.

At least one of the clients' defense lawyers apparently agrees.

More...

A Worthy Cause, and a great team-up idea: NORML and Prisons Foundation, with an auction at eBay.

NORML Foundation is proud to partner with Prisons Foundation, the nation's leading non-profit organization working with incarcerated persons seeking artistic expression and rehabilitation through visual arts, to present Prisoner Artwork for Auction.

Located two blocks from the White House and open seven days a week, the Prisons Foundation Art Gallery has hundreds of quality and moving pieces of artwork created by the hands of citizens currently incarcerated in US prisons--many of them for 'drug' related offenses including cannabis.

For those who can't visit the Prison Foundation's Art Gallery located at 1600 K St., NW, Suite 501, Washington, DC, the NORML/Prison Foundation's
weekly online art auctions provide citizens the opportunity to view and bid on prisoner-created works of art, with a large portion of the proceeds going to the prisoner-artist for living expenses while incarcerated.

Check it out.

Yesterday I stopped at the organic grocery and bought a plump free-range organic chicken to make chicken soup. I made it tonight, and while cooking it, happened across this:

About 20 million chickens being raised for human consumption in several states ate feed made with melamine-tainted pet food and are being held from market to keep them from entering the food supply, Agriculture Department officials said last night.

The agency called for the "voluntary hold" late yesterday, pending completion of a government risk analysis to determine whether the animals would be safe for people to eat.

I'm tempted to throw the whole thing down the garbage disposal. Then again, I hate giving in to fear. Does anyone know if organic chickens are given feed made with pet food? And what exactly is an "organic chicken" other than it's free to run around and not be penned in?

I am on record as saying the Media is basically irrelevant on how the American People perceive the Iraq Debacle. That Beltway Dems do not fully appreciate this is true but I think they listen to them a lot less than they used to. But is this true for the 2008 election? Let's hope so, because otherwise, we are hostage to this type of mindset, as digby documents:

If anyone thought that it would be possible to re-run the flip-flop campaign against the Massachusetts politician in the race this time, think again:

STODDARD: You know, I really think this is not a big deal. I think that he is entitled to his quirky tastes. I think that he is a habitual flip-flopper, and has religious conversions on everything that comes out of his mouth, and he changes his mind so much now that people don’t even notice.

. . . The reporter who made those comments, A.B.Stoddard, is often on MSNBC these days. . . . Call me crazy but this sounds like a person we can depend on to keep us apprised of all the latest beltway CW. Mitt's flip-flopping is not going to be an issue.

More...

The Judge was hard on Paris Hilton today, sentencing her to 45 days in the L.A. County Jail for violating probation by driving while her license was suspended.

Hilton had been serving 36 months of probation after pleading no contest to a charge of alcohol-related reckless driving related to her Sept. 7 arrest in Hollywood. She also had been fined $1,500.

Paris' defense was a little weak -- she said her aides hadn't told her about the driving restriction.

Still, 45 days is stiff.

Her mother's reaction:

Hilton appeared stunned by the ruling and began to cry. Hilton's mother also began to show her displeasure visibly, shaking her head -- and had be warned by a court official to stop....

....Her mother, Kathy, told the prosecutor after the judge's decision: "You're pathetic."

Did Paris get a stiffer sentence because she's a celebrity?

Having spent all day in a county jail visiting clients denied bond in federal cases, I can tell you it's no walk in the park. And I bet the LA County Jail is a nightmare by comparison.

More...

A computer guy explains the danger of proposed legislation that would require computer technicians to report to the authorities any child pornography or other evidence of child abuse they encounter while servicing a customer's computer:

Potentially incriminating material can end up on a computer in any number of ways that have nothing to do with a deliberate request for questionable content. Even worse, the range of expertise among computer technicians varies enough that you could conclusively say that not all such technicians have the skills to distinguish between deliberately accessed content and that which may have found its way onto a system through other means (spam, malware, another user, etc.). It's a recipe for disaster when you consider how being accused of child porn/abuse usually turns into a guilty-until-proven-innocent scenario of the sort that can destroy lives and families.

Teachers, social workers, and health care professionals are typically mandatory reporters of child abuse. But computer technicians?

The Atlanta police officers who killed Kathryn Johnston failed to learn from the department's earlier mistakes.

Two months and a day before Kathryn Johnston, there was Frances Thompson. The 80-year-old Thompson was in her bedroom the afternoon of Sept. 20, when she heard a terrible crash and shouting. Startled and confused, she grabbed a pistol and was immediately confronted by three Atlanta narcotics officers.

"They had masks covering their face. I thought I was being robbed," she recalled. "They pointed those big guns at me." ... No drugs were found. And her pistol was a toy cap gun. ...

The two incidents share striking similarities: Two elderly women living alone with guns; police battering in a door; faulty reports from street-level dealers helping narcotics officers; and police parsing the truth, if not outright lying.

It may be that the officers had no incentive to learn. In their corrupt department, truth and public safety were less important than arrest quotas.

[F]ederal investigators say Atlanta narcotics officers hoped to satisfy goals for making arrests and serving warrants set by police commanders. "They believed that these ends justified their illegal 'Fluffing' or falsifying of search warrants," according to those plea documents.

This is the strongest and best statement yet from John Edwards on ending the Iraq Debacle:

We don't need any more non-binding resolutions or big statements; we need to end the war. I've been in Washington, so I understand the urge to make a statement - but in this situation, statements can be an excuse for inaction. Congress has a clear choice - they can talk about ending the war, or they can just end it. The only way for Congress to end the war is to cut off the money for it, and they should concentrate on doing just that. Anything else is just noise.

Edwards has joined my preferred candidate Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), and there can be no doubt that Dodd's co-sponsorship of Reid-Feingold has had an effect on the entire slate of candidates, in supporting Reid-Feingold. Rep. Kucinich also has been strong on this issue.

We now need Senators Clinton, Obama and Biden to step up along with Governor Richardson. Let's concentrate on ending the Debacle by NOT funding it on a date certain. This is the ONLY way to end the Iraq Debacle.

Poor, poor Monica Goodling.

A former U.S. Justice Department official and central figure in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys tearfully told a colleague two months ago her government career probably was over as the matter was about to erupt into a political storm, according to closed-door congressional testimony.

Monica Goodling, at the time an aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, sobbed for 45 minutes in the office of career Justice Department official David Margolis on March 8 as she related her fears that she would have to quit, according to congressional aides briefed on Margolis's private testimony to House and Senate investigators....

Margolis testified in private that he tried to console Goodling and listened to her discuss her personal life, a congressional aide said. He recalled telling a colleague that he was concerned about Goodling's emotional state, the aide said.

Of course, if Goodling hadn't tried to turn the Justice Department into the president's private law firm so that investigations of Republican political corruption could be squelched, she would have had less cause to weep ... as would the rest of us.

This diary at Daily Kos highlights a Broder answer in his chat today that exemplifies what shallow unthinking empty vessel he is:

Chaska, Minn.: As a political pundit how do you calibrate your perceptions on mainstream America? The reason I ask this is based on your recent columns. My guess is your views (as a lot of the Beltway punditry) is very skewed. Poll after poll validates that American values align with progressive positions on such issues as the Iraq war, abortion, Social Security and even health care. . . . So why keep insisting on bipartisan compromises when those views don't reflect the wishes of a large majority of Americans? . . .

BRODER: . . . This first letter from Minnesota challenges the conventional wisdom by asserting that the country overwhelmingly supports the liberal agenda, both at home and abroad. I have to disagree. I think the country is closely balanced, with a controlling group in the center that rejects extreme positions and seeks practical solutions drawn from the agendas of both liberals and conservatives. Most Americans I meet are not ideologues of any sort; they are practical people seeking practical solutions to real challenges.

Broder seems so incapable of thinking that he can only argue by label. To wit, the Democrats hold one extreme position and the Republicans another. Of course the question challenged that very assumption and instead of addressing the point, Broder is only capable of falling back into his shallow mindset.