Round the blogosphere today:

• Water Tiger at Firedoglake does the heavy lifting.

• Arianna has a Sunday roundup.

• Avedon Carol at Sideshow wonders if "Memo from Turner" from Mick Jagger's movie Performance is on YouTube. Right here.

Check out this news release from the Defense Department.

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently began funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs. Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.

The study will include, but not be limited to, researching blog patterns:

"It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what's important in blogs unless you analyze patterns." ...Patterns include the content of the blogs as well as what hyperlinks are contained within the blog.

They even have a unique moniker for the blogosphere: "Information Battlespace"

"The fact that the web is a vast source of information is sometimes overlooked by military analysts," Kokar said. "Our research goal is to provide the warfighter with a kind of information radar to better understand the information battlespace."

James Carville and Mark J. Penn have an op-ed in today's Washington Post positing that Hillary Clinton is electable and that the key may be women voters.

The X factor for 2008 -- and we do mean X -- is the power of women in the electorate. Fifty-four percent of voters are female. George Bush increased his vote with only two groups between 2000 and 2004: women and Hispanics.

...Hillary's candidacy has the potential to reshape the electoral map for Democrats. ....with the pathbreaking possibility of this country's first female president, we could see an explosion of women voting -- and voting Democratic. States that were close in the past, from Arkansas to Colorado to Florida to Ohio, could well move to the Democratic column. It takes only one more state to win.

They discount her polarization factor ("some people say she is too liberal, some that she is too conservative") pointing out:

We believe that she is squarely in the mainstream of America.

Time Magazine has a long feature article, How to Fix Guantanamo.

It offers five suggestions, all well-taken:

• 1. The White House must work with Congress
• 2. Repatriate the small fish
• 3. Process the 400 plus habeas cases through the courts. In other words, let the judiciary do its job
• 4. Live by the Geneva rules
• 5. Lift the veil of secrecy

The article also notes that 75% of those being held are no longer being interrogated. If they haven't been charged with a crime and have no useful intelligence information, it's time to send them home -- or to another country that is willing to take them and allow them to live in freedom.

by TChris

My stay in Madrid happened to coincide with the city's annual gay and lesbian pride festival. From my balcony yesterday, I had a great view of the colorful parade, and of the thousands of onlookers lining the street. The celebration of unity and diversity was inspiring, but I was most taken by the absence of protest. There were no religious fundamentalists attempting to disrupt the parade, no counter-demonstrators claiming that any acceptance of LGBT rights will bring about the destruction of society. Just people enjoying the opportunity to support the right of every human being to live without oppression or discrimination.

Gay marriage, such a divisive topic in the United States, has been legal in Spain for about a year. The wild claims in the U.S. that gay marriage is a threat to the family are belied by all the heterosexual couples in Spain whose marriages have survived nicely since the law was changed. There are, of course, Spaniards who oppose equal rights for gay couples: a judge was recently censured for refusing to perform same sex marriages. But experience shows (in Spain as in Massachusetts) that gay couples function as family units just as well as straight couples. In fact, Spain recently had its first gay divorce -- just one, of the 1,300 same sex marriages performed in the last year. Let those who think that gay marriage destroys families explain that statistic.

I'm very proud to announce TalkLeft's first video promo. It was produced by Actor Will Keenan and designed and edited by 3rdi of Intellectual Design and Defcon Films 2006. The theme:

"Believe in people powered politics. Crises precipitate change. Let's right their wrongs before there is nothing left to talk about."

It's on You Tube, I hope you will watch and go over to rate it.

Thanks, Will!

One more shout of gratitude, to TalkLeft's anonymous artist, our man in Hollywood, C.L., for contributing so many outstanding graphics to TalkLeft. And of course, to TChris, who will be back from Europe this week, and Last Night in Little Rock, whom I hope gets a break soon from the trial trenches.

Jane Mayer's extensive profile of Cheney aide David Addington in the New Yorker is an excellent read.

Addington, who now holds Scooter Libby's job, has been a formidible force in the Administration's positions on everything from torture to Guantanamo to presidential signing statements.

He insisted, for instance, on maintaining the admissibility of statements obtained through coercion, or even torture. In meetings, he argued that officials in charge of the military commissions should be given maximum flexibility to decide whether to include such evidence. "Torture isn't important to Addington as a scientific matter, good or bad, or whether it works or not," the Administration lawyer, who is familiar with these debates, said. "It's more about his philosophy of Presidential power. He thinks that if the President wants torture he should get torture. He always argued for 'maximum flexibility.' "

Duke lacrosse player Colin Finerty's parents are abandoning their silence. His father says he has passed a polygraph administered by a former FBI polygrapher and that he has "eyewitness testimony, phone records and receipts showing it was "impossible" for him to have committed the crimes."

The polygrapher came out of the interview room after administering the recent test and said, "'This boy is innocent. He's telling the truth,'" Kevin Finnerty said. "He passed with flying colors."

Finnerty's mother, Maryellen, said the accuser's photo identification of her son "was sort of a pin the tail on the donkey."

Finnerty's parents are speaking out against the advice of Colin's counsel. An interview with them by Dan Abrams was aired on the Today show Friday. [link here.]

Matt at MyDD is having a YouTube open thread where commenters are posting links to videos. Here's one I have never seen this one before and it's a a crack-up -- Mick Jagger and David Bowie from 1985 performing Dancing in the Streets. Enjoy, and thanks to the commenter at My DD for pointing it out.

Via Kevin at LexBlog: Presidential hopeful John Edwards spoke to the crowd at Gnomedex in Seattle. He got a standing ovation when he left the stage.

One Gnomedex attendee pointed out that the human voice so fundamental to blogs contrasts with the practiced messages delivered by many politicians. Edwards agreed, and acknowledged his own shortcomings in that regard, saying that he can often sense when he is slipping into that mode.

"The problem is that we're so trained and so conditioned over a long period of time that being normal and real and authentic requires you to shed that conditioning," Edwards said of politicians. "It is not an easy thing to do."

I think that's right. I'm sure there are exceptions, but the polticians whose blogs I've read sound like they are reciting their campaign speeches. There's no persona, no sense of human being inside. They are all too predictable, as if three handlers vetted their blogposts to make sure no potential voter would be offended before posting them.

Alberto Gonzales, speaking from Egypt today, says the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision "hampers our ability to deal with terrorists." Shorter version: We're not going to stop holding people indefinitely, without charges and without access to lawyers.

Gonzales emphasized that the court ruling didn't say "that we could not continue to hold enemy combatants indefinitely for the duration of hostilities, which was something the Supreme Court said we could do..." The prison was established in early 2002.

"That path is still available to us. The president of the United States can continue to hold enemy combatants at Guantanamo. But we are looking at ways to provide as many tools as possible to the president of the United States in dealing with terrorists," he added.

Shorter version II: We will use all our political capital to get Congress to approve what the Supreme Court threw out.

Yale law professor Jack Balkin at Balkanization discusses this strategy.

Wow. Who would have thought? Great work by New York defense lawyer Joe Bondy, building on work done by the trial lawyers, Ed Hayes and Bruce Cutler. U.S. District Court Jack Weinstein has tossed almost all of the "mafia cops" convictions because the charges were brought after the statute of limitations perios had expired.

In a shell-shocking written order, a federal judge ruled today that, despite overwhelming evidence of "heinous and violent crimes," the two retired detectives at the center of what has been termed the Mafia Cops corruption case should be acquitted of all federal racketeering charges -- including eight murders -- because the statute of limitations in their case had run out.

....Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa.... were found guilty in April of some of the most spectacular corruption charges in the city's history. Although a jury found that Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa had participated, as paid assassins, in killings for the mob, the judge's order vacated the racketeering convictions on legal -- if not evidentiary -- grounds.

As to the 102 page ruling: