Congratulations to Monica Lewinsky, who just graduated from the London School of Economics with a master of science degree in social psychology. Her thesis topic was: In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of the Third Person Effect and Pre-Trial Publicity."

You Go. Girl. More power to you. I spent years on tv night after night sticking up for you (and trashing Linda Tripp) and I'm glad it turned out so well for you. Your mother may have gotten the rawest deal of all, getting called to a grand jury to disclose mother-daughter secrets, but she was there for you. Your parents got you good lawyers, once you got past the Ginsberg guy who wanted to be on every sunday news show every Sunday.

You came out of this classy and rose above it and came out in tact. If you are pondering what to do next, let me suggest law school.

I expect we'll be reading more about you in the years to come. Kudos for rising above the media nastiness and going to a better place with a stronger sense of self. Good luck to you in the future.

Frank Rich has been a very good columnist of late. But he was not always so. And it is columns like his most recent that remind us that he is still capaable of extreme fatuousness:

[I]n Time’s defense, let me say that the more I reflected on its 2006 Person of the Year — or perhaps the more that Mylar cover reflected back at me — the more I realized that the magazine wasn’t as out of touch as it first seemed. Time made the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons. As our country sinks deeper into a quagmire — and even a conclusive Election Day repudiation of the war proves powerless to stop it — we the people, and that includes, yes, you, will seek out any escape hatch we can find. In the Iraq era, the dropout nostrums of choice are not the drugs and drug culture of Vietnam but the equally masturbatory and narcissistic (if less psychedelic) pastimes of the Internet. Why not spend hour upon hour passionately venting in the blogosphere, as Time suggests, about our “state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street”? Or an afternoon surfing from video to video on YouTube, where short-attention-span fluff is infinite? It’s more fun than the nightly news, which, as Laura Bush reminded us this month, has been criminally lax in unearthing all those “good things that are happening” in Baghdad.

Who does Rich think he is describing there? His Johnny Come Lateliness to understanding what Bush is is great and all, but he was part of the problem when Bush was [s]elected. Bob Somerby has documented it and asked this:

Why has a “liberal” like Rich been so tough on Gore through the years? Why did he invent Love Story in 1997? Throughout the course of Campaign 2000, why did he keep pretending that Bush and Gore were a perfectly-matched pair of bumblers? When Gore spoke out on Iraq in 2002, why did Rich attack him again (inventing his facts as he went)? And in his new column, just two weeks ago, why did he nit-pick those ludicrous complaints about Gore? For example, why did he pretend—in that pathetic example—that Gore “waffled” on creationism in 1999? For the most part, readers have no way to evaluate such claims. Why does Rich just keep making them up?

So we DO know the blogs are good for calling exhalted columnists on their hypocritical nonsense at the least. You won't get THAT in the MSM, Frank.

Phill Kline was voted out of office as the Attorney General of Kansas by citizens who rejected his mindless crusade against abortion providers and their patients. He should have spent his last weeks in office sitting quietly or taking some vacation time. At the very least, he should have respected his successor's request not to file abortion-related charges before leaving office.

Instead, Kline filed charges (pdf) against an abortion provider for performing unlawful late term abortions. The charges were the culmination of a controversial investigation that relied on subpoenas to review private medical records.

Fortunately for the doctor, a judge ruled that Kline exceeded his authority and almost immediately dismissed the charges. The district attorney argued that Kline could not act as a prosecutor in her county without being invited. Translation: go away, Phill.

Here's a gift idea for your local pot dealer:

A one-time Texas drug agent described by a former boss as perhaps the best narcotics officer in the country plans to begin selling a video that shows people how to conceal their drugs and fool police.

Barry Cooper, who once worked for police departments in Gladewater and Big Sandy and the Permian Basin Drug Task Force, plans to launch a Web site next week where he will sell his video, "Never Get Busted Again," the Tyler Morning Telegraph reported in its online edition Thursday.

A promotional video says Cooper will show viewers how to "conceal their stash," "avoid narcotics profiling" and "fool canines every time."

Cooper says he made the video "because he believes the nation's fight against drugs is a waste of resources."

Busting marijuana users fills up prisons with nonviolent offenders, he said.

Brian Williams wuz robbed!:

. . . Mark Halperin claimed that the "old media" -- broadcast news outlets and major newspapers -- were "biased against conservatives; there's no doubt about it." He stated, "I think we've got a chance in these last two weeks [before the then-upcoming midterm elections] to prove to conservatives that we understand their grievances. We're going to try to do better." But if "try[ing] to do better" to not appear "biased against conservatives" meant offering viewers conservative misinformation, Halperin shouldn't have worried; a review of dozens of items by Media Matters for America identifying and correcting conservative misinformation from ABC suggests that Halperin's network was "try[ing] to do better" throughout 2006. . . . These examples, and many more, earned ABC the distinction of being named Media Matters' Misinformer of the Year for 2006.

I'm sure Williams will be in the running for 2007.

The NY Times blames “some Democrats and Internet bloggers” for “stirring up talk of a ‘secret plan’ by the Bush administration to resume the draft.” The stirring was prompted by a press report of a Selective Service plan to stage a mock draft “to determine how, if necessary, the government would get some 100,000 young adults to report to their local draft boards.” The exercise, the Service assures us, is unrelated to recent proposals to send a “surge” of new troops to Iraq. Heck, they schedule and cancel mock drafts all the time. Nothing to see here.

Speculation about a draft is actually stirred by surge proponents, who have yet to explain where they will find the surging troops without drafting them, by the secretary of veterans affairs, who recently opined that a draft might benefit the country, and by the president, who wants a bigger Army despite the military’s struggle to meet existing enlistment quotas. When the Selective Service director complains that “you have people trying to create fear when there’s nothing there” – referring, like the Times, to Democrats – he’s talking past the disconnect between Republican support for plans that require more troops and the absence of any meaningful plan to find them. If Republicans don’t want the country to worry about a draft, they should give us a realistic plan for increasing the size of the military without one.

We're about to head into what is likely the blogoshpere's lowest week of readership.

I'll be offline most of Saturday as the TL kid is flying in -- assuming the airport stays open.

Let's give the gift of links to other bloggers. Who are you reading? If you have a blog and have a post that you think TalkLeft readers would be interested in, link to it in the comments (just use the html buttons so the site doesn't get skewed.)

And if there's anything else you want to say, here's a place.

While one of DA Mike Nifong's investigators was interviewing the accuser Thursday, he was giving a three hour interview to the New York Times.

Shorter version: If the accuser cannot with certainty identify the players she claims sexually assaulted her at the lineup hearing in February, he'll drop the case against those not identified.

Mr. Nifong declined interview requests Friday, but said in an e-mail message that his decision to dismiss the rape charges showed he was “willing to go in whatever direction the evidence takes me.” And in a three-hour interview on Thursday, Mr. Nifong said he would not hesitate to drop all the charges if the accuser expressed doubt about the identity of the men she has accused when she sees all three defendants at a pretrial hearing set for February.

“If she came in and said she could not identify her assailants, then we don’t have a case,” Mr. Nifong said. On the other hand, he continued, “If she says, yes it’s them, or one or two of them, I have an obligation to put that to a jury.”

I was going to write about the most inappropriate criticism of Time Magazine's choice of Person of the Year but Jamison Foser does the job:

[P]erhaps the weightiest complaint came from NBC's Brian Williams, who suggested in an essay in Time that the democratization of the media comes at great "cost to our democracy":

The problem is that there's a lot of information out there that citizens in an informed democracy need to know in our complicated world with U.S. troops on the ground along two major fronts. Millions of Americans have come to regard the act of reading a daily newspaper -- on paper -- as something akin to being dragged by their parents to Colonial Williamsburg. It's a tactile visit to another time ... flat, one-dimensional, unexciting, emitting a slight whiff of decay. It doesn't refresh. It offers no choice. Hell, it doesn't even move. Worse yet: nowhere does it greet us by name. It's for everyone.

Does it endanger what passes for the national conversation if we're all talking at once? What if "talking" means typing on a laptop, but the audience is too distracted to pay attention? The whole notion of "media" is now much more democratic, but what will the effect be on democracy?

The danger just might be that we miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we fail to meet the next great challenge ... because we are too busy celebrating ourselves and listening to the same tune we already know by heart.

. . . "We're chosing cat videos over well-thought-out, well-reported evening newscasts," Williams sniffs. Which well-thought-out evening newscasts are those, exactly?

Brian Williams argues against Time's choice by pointing to the Media? Unfreakingbelievable.

And to top it all, while the Media generally has stunk to high holy heaven, Brian Williams is among the most notably awful journalist of the bunch. And anyone who has known his work, including his horrible work on local news in New York, can only shake their head and laugh at him. Indeed, it is a sign of how clueless he is that he dares to speak of "well thought out evening newscasts." I have no idea if Williams is biased, I do know he is not well informed, and not good at his job. That he criticizes Time's choice in the way he does is truly jawdropping.

Rumor had it that John Edwards was going to announce his candidacy for President last weekend in New Orleans, but it didn't happen.

The Des Moines Register says it will happen next week in Iowa.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards plans to announce his candidacy for president next week during a nationwide swing scheduled to include a stop Thursday in Des Moines, Democratic activists in early nominating states said.

The plans indicate that Iowa's lead-off nominating caucuses could be competitive, despite home-state Gov. Tom Vilsack's candidacy for president.

By getting into the race before year's end, Edwards would pre-empt announcements by prospective Democratic candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, on whom national news media attention has focused in recent weeks.

I'm glad. I don't think Vilsack has a prayer and if he doesn't run away with his home state, maybe he'll drop out quick. As to why Edwards is choosing Iowa:

Embattled DA Mike Nifong has dropped the rape charges against the Duke lacrosse players.

But he's leaving the sexual assault and kidnapping charges.

Nifong said he plans to proceed with kidnapping and sexual assault charges against the three players....

Nifong's investigator interviewed the woman Thursday, and she told the investigator that she couldn't testify "with certainty" that she was raped. Prosecutors said they couldn't proceed without her testimony, so they decided to dismiss the rape charges in the case.

Nifong's motion states she is no longer sure it was a p*nis that was inserted into her, as opposed to an object.

Remarkable if true:

A documentary says French special forces had Osama bin Laden in their sights twice about three years ago but their U.S. superiors never ordered them to fire. . . . The documentary, due to air next year and seen by Reuters on Tuesday, says the troops could have killed the al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan but the order to shoot never came, possibly because it took too long to request it. "In 2003 and 2004 we had bin Laden in our sights. The sniper said 'I have bin Laden'," an anonymous French soldier is quoted as saying.

Wanted dead or alive? Maybe not. Grain of salt however:

The French military, however, said that the incidents never happened and the report was "erroneous information."

h/t Devil's Tower