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

Ezra Klein takes an interesting column from Paul Krugman on Demoracts and the Deficit and jumps to an entirely inccorrect conclusion about deficits, arguing like Kemp and Cheney, that deficits do not matter. that is simply wrong.

First, Krugman's point:

Now that the Democrats have regained some power, they have to decide what to do. One of the biggest questions is whether the party should return to Rubinomics — the doctrine, associated with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, that placed a very high priority on reducing the budget deficit.

The answer, I believe, is no. Mr. Rubin was one of the ablest Treasury secretaries in American history. But it’s now clear that while Rubinomics made sense in terms of pure economics, it failed to take account of the ugly realities of contemporary American politics.

And the lesson of the last six years is that the Democrats shouldn’t spend political capital trying to bring the deficit down. They should refrain from actions that make the deficit worse. But given a choice between cutting the deficit and spending more on good things like health care reform, they should choose the spending.

In a saner political environment, the economic logic behind Rubinomics would have been compelling. Basic fiscal principles tell us that the government should run budget deficits only when it faces unusually high expenses, mainly during wartime. In other periods it should try to run a surplus, paying down its debt.

I get Krugman's point. To wit, when Democrats bring down the deficit and create surpluses the Republicans take all that hard work and then give away tax breaks to the extremely wealthy. And that is obviously what happened in the last 6 years.

But that does not mean deficits do not matter. More.

Tyrone Brown violated his Texas probation by testing postive for marijuana use. He was 17. The judge sentenced him to life in prison. He has served 16 years.

20/20 ran a story on Brown in November and viewers were outraged. The Judge was voted out of office.

Now, it appears, Brown may be freed.

Brown, who pleaded guilty to his first and only offense at age 17, was given probation after a $2 armed robbery in which the victim wasn't harmed and had his wallet returned. But months later, Brown violated his probation by testing positive for marijuana. In most cases of marijuana violations, Texas judges — and Dean — often recommend counseling and allow the defendant to remain on probation with a stiff warning.

In this case, however, without explanation, Brown was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Check out this You Tube video -- I had to delete the embedded link because it was slowing down the site, but it's well worth watching.

Warning: very graphic war images

President Bush has issued fewer pardons than any president since World War II. But, Thursday, he awarded 16 of them.

Five of the pardons were in cases that involved drug crimes. Other cases involved bank fraud, mail fraud, the acceptance of a kickback, a false statement on a loan application and conspiracy to defraud the government over taxes.

Seven of the 16 received no prison or jail time when they were sentenced, instead getting probation or a reduction in their military pension. The longest sentence was nine years, for aiding cocaine distribution, followed by a six-year term for conspiracy to possess marijuana.

More stats:

I was about to write "Kudos to Mass. Gov. Elect Deval L. Patrick, who announced that when he takes office, he will rescind a plan endorsed by Mitt Romney that allows state and local police to bust undocumented residents."

The agreement, which Gov. Mitt Romney signed on Dec. 13, gave 30 state troopers the power to question, detain and arrest people whom they found in the course of other investigations to be illegal immigrants.

....“If I have that power, I’m going to rescind that agreement,” he told reporters. “I do believe I have that power.”

But kudos may be premature because Patrick's spokesperson is hedging:

“I think going forward he’ll be able to set out a timeline,” [spokesperson Cyndi] Roy said. “He has a lot to accomplish in his first couple of months in office, and I don’t know that it will be the very first thing he does.”

Memo to Gov. Elect Patrick: Do it. It's the right thing to do. Keep your police addressing state and local crime. Immigration enforcement is not within their jurisdiction, nor should it be.

Kudos to Murray Waas for writing this brave article at HuffPo.

Shame on the Washington City Paper, which I vow never to read, and on Murray's former research assistant.

I am never suprised to see ignorant, debased statements about alleged criminals, but cancer survivors? This is a new low.

Murray ends his article with these heartfelt comments: