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.

Jury selection in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby begins Tuesday.

I will be doing a live chat at 2:00 pm ET for the Washington Post. It will focus on the key players, the charges, the likely defense, the jurors each side will look for, and the probable key witnesses for each side.

I hope you'll join me. You can begin submitting questions now on these or other related issues at this link.

Iraq has carried through with its plans to hang Saddam Hussein's half-brother as well as the former head of the Revolutionary Court. Both were hanged before dawn today.

I wonder how long it will take for the hanging video to hit the internet.

President Bush will be on 60 Minutes tonight, admitting that his strategy in Iraq has led to increased instability.

Anyone watch? Any observations?

Update: Some highlights (or lowlights, depending on your perspectvie:)

• He watched part of the video of Saddam's hanging but not the part with him going through the trap door. Iraq could have handled the execution a lot better

• He knows he's unpopular right now but it doesn't bother him

• Using language like "Bring 'em on" was a mistake. The troop levels could have been a mistake. He's proud of our efforts, we liberated that country, Iraq should show more gratitude.

The DNA expert in the Duke Lacrosse case will be on "60 Minutes" tonight admitting to "big errors" in the case.

The forensic expert hired by the prosecutor in the Duke rape case says he made a "big error" in judgment by not stating in his report that the only DNA he found on the accuser was from several men who were not on the Duke lacrosse team.

....Meehan acknowledged that he has never omitted potentially exculpatory evidence before. "We haven't done that before," he tells Stahl. "In retrospect, I should have done a better job of conveying that information."

Always good to hear a mea culpa. Now, if we could only get one from D.A. Mike Nifong.

The full transcript is here.

There are 1,800 articles about the missing boys found in Kirkwood, Missouri. All three cable news networks are giving the story Runaway Bride-type coverage. I've tried avoiding it, but it's almost impossible. Here's the latest.

It makes no sense, particularly the story about Shawn Hornbeck, the now-15 year old. I'm tired of the experts' pat explanations: Stockholm syndrome, fear his family members would be killed, etc. The interview with the cops who found the pick-up truck was non-informational.

The man arrested, Michael Devlin, held the same job at the same pizza joint in Kirkwood, Mo., (population 25,000) where he lived and near where he grew up and where numerous family members still reside, for 25 years. The pizza owner says he was shocked to learn he had a kid. Did Devlin's family not know he had a kid? He never married. What about Christmas and holidays -- did Devlin just go alone? Did his brothers never visit his apartment and see signs of a kid living there? Or, did he introduce the family to the kid, passing the kid off as his own with an improbable story?

In the neighborhood, parents and kids say the kid was just like every other kid, had sleepovers, was allowed to go out to play,etc.

It looks like President Bush and the Pentagon are trying to sneak another fast one by us. This time, it's the deletion of a wiretapping provision that has been in the Army Manual since 1984.

The manual, described by the Army as a “major revision” to intelligence-gathering guidelines, addresses policies and procedures for wiretapping Americans, among other issues.

The original guidelines, from 1984, said the Army could seek to wiretap people inside the United States on an emergency basis by going to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, or by obtaining certification from the attorney general “issued under the authority of section 102(a) of the Act.”

That last phrase is missing from the latest manual, which says simply that the Army can seek emergency wiretapping authority pursuant to an order issued by the FISA court “or upon attorney general authorization.” It makes no mention of the attorney general doing so under FISA.

Bush asks us to trust him.

Military law expert Donald G. Rehkoff, for whom I have the utmost respect, being familiar with his work, had this to say on a message board today about Charles "Cully" Stimson, the Bush deputy for detainee affairs who made reprehensible comments about lawyers who represent the detainees. (He has graciously given me permission to reprint it.)

First, he reminds us of President John Adams, quoting from Key Figures in Public Trials:

John Adams, in his old age, called his defense of British soldiers in 1770 "one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country." That's quite a statement, coming as it does from perhaps the most underappreciated great man in American history.

The day after British soldiers mortally wounded five Americans on a cobbled square in Boston, thirty-four-year-old Adams was visited in his office near the stairs of the Town Office by a Boston merchant , James Forest. "With tears streaming from his eyes" (according to the recollection of Adams), Forest asked Adams to defend the soldiers and their captain, Thomas
Preston.

The Boston Globe reports today that House Democrats may try to force a closure of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other secret prisons by cutting off funding for them.

Representative John P. Murtha, the chairman of the powerful Defense Appropriations subcommittee and a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said he wants to close both prisons by cutting their funding, "to restore our credibility worldwide." If he succeeds, it would force the administration to find a new location for high-value terrorism suspects.

Murtha said Nancy Pelosi supports the closure move.