Jury selection has begun in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Pachacutec from Firedoglake is in the media courtroom, blogging away (make sure you read the comments where's he is posting continual updates.)

The Judge has read the jurors the list of potential witnesses. Here they are:

Update: It looks even worse.

The end may be near for Fidel Castro. A Spanish newspaper is reporting he has had three failed surgeries.

The newspaper El Pais cited two unnamed sources from the Gregorio Maranon hospital in the Spanish capital of Madrid. The facility employs surgeon Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido, who flew to Cuba in December to treat the 80-year-old Castro.

Here's a graphic description:

CNN's Situation Room Monday ran this segment on bloggers covering the Scooter Libby trial. [Via Raw Story.] TalkLeft is prominently mentioned, with some quotes by me, as to what readers can expect from our coverage, namely, a fresh perspective and gut reactions, from those of us who have followed and written about the case from Day 1.

Thanks to the Media Bloggers Association, I will go to Washington after Feb. 15 (hopefully to cover some of the defense portion, assuming the trial, which is expected to last six weeks, is still going on.) Crooks and Liars will cover a week in early February.

Jane and Christy of Firedoglake have their own press passes, in conjunction with Huffington Post, and are already on the scene in D.C. Marcy Wheeler, whose book on the case, Anatomy of Deceit, will be published in February, who writes as Empty Wheel at the Next Hurrah and used to write for Daily Kos, is also covering the trial.

Via Raw Story, the Detroit Free Press has this unsettling report:

Michigan's second-highest court says that anyone involved in an extramarital fling can be prosecuted for first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to life in prison.

"We cannot help but question whether the Legislature actually intended the result we reach here today," Judge William Murphy wrote in November for a unanimous Court of Appeals panel, "but we are curtailed by the language of the statute from reaching any other conclusion."

Every now and then a lawyer gets arrested for raising a voice against injustice. Faya Rose Toure tells her story to The Selma Times:

According to Toure, a Selma officer - whom she referred to as Jim Crow - arrested her for attempting to defend her client Roosevelt Cleveland. Toure claims Selma Municipal Judge Valerie Chittom "found this young man guilty without any opportunity to present any evidence."

When voicing her opinion, Toure said she was found in contempt of court, arrested, manhandled and charged with disorderly conduct and failure to obey. She was later released on a signature bond.

Toure, who is the wife of Sen. Hank Sanders, D-Selma, added both the Selma Police Department and the mayor's office are blind to the injustice taking place in Selma courtrooms and "it's our job to shed light," saying she was stripped of her right to free speech.

And now for something different. The Golden Globes are about to begin. The dresses and hairstyles are the best part for me. If you watch tonight, let us know who you admired and who you thought was a dud.

I also love that it covers both tv shows and movies, and takes place in such a different setting than the Oscars.

Update: Pretty boring so far. As I expected, the best part is the dresses. Very few faux pas so far. Most of my favorites for the awards didn't win, but the night is still young.

Update: Excellent tribute by Tom Hanks to Warren Beatty. Annette just glowed. I wondered why no one mentioned the Parallax View, though.

Colorado Senator Wayne Allard, a Republican, announced today he will keep his term-limits pledge made before the 2002 election and step down in 2008. He said it's a matter of integrity.

"The people of Colorado placed their trust in me based on a promise I made to them and I am honoring that promise. In an age when promises are cast away as quickly as yesterday’s newspaper, I believe a promise made should be a promise kept."

Rep. Tom Tancredo, who in the past indicated his interest in the seat, should Allard retire, has repeatedly breached a similar term-limits pledge to Colorado voters. What does that say about his integrity?

It probably doesn't matter much, as Tancredo is off to Iowa to gauge interest in Presidential run which his spokesman admits would not be launched for the intent of winning, just to raise attention to what seems to be his main purpose as a politician, kicking undocumented residents out of the U.S. Today he said he's not interested in the Senate seat.

The Justice Department is out for blood in Brooklyn's federal courthouse, where three death penalty trials are underway.

A fourth capital trial involving a triple-murder defendant has opened in Manhattan federal court as well.

"It's totally unprecedented to have two, let alone four cases going on at one time in one city," said Kevin McNally, a death penalty expert.

Even as states back away from the death penalty, federal capital prosecutions have increased. The US Attorneys who favor capital punishment find support in the Bush administration's Justice Department.

Death penalty opponents have complained that starting with President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, officials in Washington began rubber-stamping the pursuit of the death penalty in federal cases, particularly in states with no capital punishment laws of their own.

How about a little congressional oversight of the Justice Department's increasing reliance on death as a punishment?

At TPM Cafe, Matt Stoller kicked off a discussion about the nature of the Netroots. May chose to contrast it to the 1960s New Left. I don't see it that way. First, I am a Centrist Democrat who believes in a Big Tent and frankly, do not agree with many of my friends in the Netroots. A few examples: I think Atrios is wrong about Desert Storm; I never got so worked up about the Bankruptcy bill; I am a free trader. But I think I am part of the same Netroots as Stoller. So what are the ties that bind?

Ed Kilgore hints at some of it:

Matt differs from a number of other progressive netroots prophets (most notably Markos Moulitsas) in emphasizing the ideological, as opposed to simply partisan, nature of the "movement."

. . . Matt's brief note on the relationship of the netroots with the Kerry presidential campaign also doesn't quite get around to mentioning that the unhappiness of bloggers with KE04 was more than echoed by DC establishment Democrats. . . . So it's all a bit more complicated than the usual netroots versus Establishment--or left versus center--analysis tends to admit.

As anyone who reads progressive blogs or subscribes to progressive sites will readily acknowledge, the single largest political change enabled by the Internet revolution has been centrifugal, not centripital. Almost overnight, hundreds, maybe thousands, of well-informed and articulate advocates whose views would in the past have been consigned to the cranky confines of Letters to the Editor columns have been given a platform that rivals newspapers and magazines in readership and influence. . . .

Ed is right as far as he goes, but he downplays the key component that has been the glue of the Netroots - the very real rejection of the Establishment Media and Democratic Party by the Netroots. More.

Jon Chait has chutzpah, that's for sure. Today he writes:

I DON'T WANT to accuse American doves of rooting for the United States to lose in Iraq because I know they love their country and understand the dire consequences of defeat. But the urge to gloat is powerful, and some of them do seem to be having a grand time in the wake of being vindicated. . . . Most liberals made the same argument as Schell in 1990, and as subsequent years exposed the silliness of the claim, many of them were humbled. . . . What's even sillier is judging someone's foreign policy insight solely based on his or her stance on the last war. Over-learning the lessons of the last war is a classic foreign policy blunder. Yet many liberals want to make the lessons of the Iraq debacle the central basis of American foreign policy. The story in Radar is of a piece with this growing impulse.

Gloating by Chait is ok I guess. But like Gore and (Howard Dean, Chait), I and many people got it right in both wars, and for good principled reasons. More.

Absolutely gruesome:

...as the trapdoors swung open, they dropped and the rope severed the hooded head of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's younger half-brother and former intelligence chief.

Government officials said they had decided not to distribute any part of the film to the public.

Iraq says the beheading was caused by a hangman's error "in setting the noose or the length of the rope."

They showed the video to journalists because there was no possibility of a cover-up...the bodies were being turned over to families for burial.

Here's a video of a BBC journalist describing the hanging video.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

Dr. King's Letter from the Birmingham Jail .

Today, Public Defender Stuff, written by investigators at Public Defender's Offices, hosts an excellent and eloquent tribute they call Welcome to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Blawg Review.