Howard Bashman of How Appealing , in the last paragraph of his post, sends us to Memeufacture, a Weblog and Automated Trend Reporting site. Memeufacture scans hundreds of websites of different "genres" with some sort of formula using a python program, and comes up with the most popular sites in various categories, followed by the most influential sites in the same categories.*

How Appealing is the second most influential blog in the "law" category. We thought Howard was just being modest when he said there must be an error in balloting. So we went to Memeufacture to take a look. TalkLeft isn't in the law category at all, it's in the Politics-Left category, and they list TalkLeft as the second most influential weblog in the "Politics-Left" Category. Here are their top ten (as of this moment):

1 : Eschaton
2 : TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime
3 : BuzzFlash - Daily Headlines and Breaking News
4 : Taegan Goddard's Political Wire
5 : TAPPED
6 : Cursor.org -
7 : Daily Kos: Political analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation
8 : Matthew Yglesias
9 : NathanNewman.org - News and Views
10 : Eric Alterman: Altercation

Now, we know we get linked to a bunch, but still, number two in that category, when compared to the others? In our dreams, maybe.

For Politics - Right, Instapundit is the most influential, and Oliver Willis is number 6. Wonder what Oliver will have to say about being in this category at all.

The most popular left political sites (as opposed to most influential) are:

1 : NathanNewman.org - News and Views: Pickering and Anti-Klan Testimony
2 : Eschaton
3 : Spinsanity - Taxing the public's trust: The Bush administration is stretching the truth again to sell its latest tax cut
4 : Long story; short pier.: Boom and Bust.
5 : Altercation: Slacker Friday
6. the next five are mainstream media newspapers

*This is Memeufacture's description of what they do: "The automatic content is generated using a simple Python program (about 200 lines.) Memeufacture scans hundreds of websites of several different genres. It determines which links are most popular and which websites posted those links first."

We are obviously missing something here. Can anyone explain Memeufacture and what they are measuring?

Update: We also expressed our puzzlement via e-mail to Memeufacture's chief, John Weher. He has replied:

The ranking mechanism is automated and objective.

Essentially it works by recording who links to what first. If two sites link to the same site at once, it is counted as a tie and disqualified. The rankings change quite frequently, but it is interesting to see the sites that consistently stay near the top, such as instapundit, metafilter and talkleft.

Your being listed in the top means that you tend to point out issues that others find important (and link to) later on. Congratulations for running a great site.

Pete Karas of the Progressive Racine Blog advises that court dates for the hundreds of rave-goers arrested in Racine, Wisconsis have been canceled .

"75 people had been scheduled to meet with city prosecutors today in Municipal Court to discuss their cases."

"Police issued $968 citations to more than 440 people who attended the Nov. 2 party at a bar, which had been billed as a fund-raiser for the Uptown Theatre. The citations were for being an inmate of a disorderly house. Police had said drug activity was obvious to all attendees, but only three people were arrested on drug charges."

"The Racine City Attorney's Office offered to reduce the fines to $100, but most of the people cited pleaded not guilty and demanded trials."

Apparently, negotiations are underway between the Attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union, including Racine attorney Erik Guenther, who is volunteering his time to the Milwaukee-based American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, and the City of Racine.

This has us a bit curious:

"Guenther said any rave-goers who have pleaded not guilty prior to Friday will be notified by the court if any proceedings are rescheduled....Guenther also said people who had pleaded no contest but not yet paid the fine should not pay the fine and should await further instructions from the court."

What do they mean "if any proceedings are rescheduled?" And why are they instructing those who agreed to pay the fine but haven't yet done so not to pay? Pete at Progressive Racine Blog says his sources are telling him the negotioations may lead to a very quick "settlement or closure" in all of these cases. We have no sources, but it sounds like a done deal to us--and a favorable one. If so, our hat is off to Mr. Gunenther and the Milwaukee ACLU.

Further Update: Two mayoral candidates think charges should be dropped against all those arrested.

"I agree that the party probably did get out of hand, but I think they've taken it too far, and I think they're wasting the taxpayers' money," said political newcomer Laurie Kell. Added County Supervisor Ken Lumpkin, another mayoral candidate: "I think they should cut their losses and walk away from it."

Nathan Newman says Bush Judicial Re-Nominee Charles Pickering is " milking false kudos for "courage" in testifying in an anti-Klan trial in the 1960s." Nathan says the case "involved a town where WHITES were being attacked by the Klan as a series of bombings threatened the white establishment. And it was interlaced with violent labor struggle in the primary employer." Here is the source article.

MediaWhoresOnline has more, and says Pickering lied not once, but twice.

Anyone who reads Altercation, Eric Alterman's hip and biting MSNBC weblog on a regular basis, and that's lots of folks, including us, looks forward to "Slacker Friday"--the day that Eric posts replies from readers. Today, MSNBC gave Slacker Friday its own home .

Eric's new Nation column is out, but the editors have decided no longer to publish it on line for free. That's a shame, we suggest you write them in protest. At least you can still access his last column on Howell Raines.

Faysal Galab, one of the Buffalo Six, is in Court this afternoon and has agreed to plead guilty to a criminal charge. Details available soon, check the AP wire.

In other news, as we expected, the Judge in the trial of accused sniper John Lee Malvo has refused to close next's week's preliminary hearing to the media and public.

From Nat Hentoff's new Village Voice column, An Indispensable Gay Man .

"On Monday, January 20 (Martin Luther King Jr. Day), the Public Broadcasting Service (Channel 13 in New York) will air Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin. This long-due tribute vividly brings back to life a man who deeply and brilliantly influenced the course of the civil rights and peace movements."

"Because Bayard never hid that he was gay, he was abandoned, for a time, by leaders of both movements in this country. He died in 1987, and late last year, hundreds of residents of West Chester, Pennsylvania, where Rustin was born, signed petitions protesting the decision of the school board to name a new high school after him."

Hentoff says the film, Brother Outsider, "is a thoroughly honest portrait of Bayard and his tumultuous times." Hentoff knew him well in those years and says Bayard was a mentor to him. Go read the whole thing and then check out the movie site. (link above.)

Illinois Governor George Ryan has granted pardons to four inmates on death row. He said ''a manifest injustice'' had occurred when they were apparently tortured into confessing by Chicago police.

He is also expected on Saturday to commute many of the state's remaining 150 death sentences to life in prison."

Update: Ryan's press conference Saturday on who will get clemency (meaning their death sentences will be converted to life sentences without) will be at 1:00 pm at Northwestern University.

Also, don't miss reading Crime, False Confessions and Videotapes, an editorial in today's New York Times.

According to the Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, 23 percent of the people who are exonerated after conviction turn out to have falsely confessed to the crime. Many of those confessions were taped and played as compelling evidence to a jury. As the jogger case and other reversals demonstrate, innocent people can be led into confessions. Their questioners — wittingly or not — also often provide them with details that would seem to be known only to the real criminal....

Beyond the injustice of punishing the wrong people, false admissions of guilt allow the real culprits to remain free to commit more crimes, as did Matias Reyes, who raped four other women, killing one of them, after he attacked the jogger in Central Park....

By videotaping every minute of interrogations, the police would help protect themselves against charges of coercion, improve the integrity of confessions and plug a gaping hole in the system.

Only Alaska and Minnesota now require videotaping of interrogations. Bill Perkins, a city council member in New York, has introduced a bill to require it.
If you are in New York, get on the horn (or the internet or to a fax machine) and support it.

This is in technical terms, and will probably make all non-lawyer readers snore, so we apologize in advance, but we think it's important news for the criminal defense community and journalists who cover this beat, and this is the fastest way we know to get it out.

The following is taken verbatim from our Sentencing Guidelines Guru, Carmen Hernandez, Attorney-Advisor for the Defender Services Division Training Branch of the Federal Defenders Organization:

Fresh off its win in the Hamdi case, the "Bush administration asked a federal judge in New York last night to reverse his decision allowing a Jose Padilla, the man suspected in a plot to detonate a radioactive bomb, access to a lawyer to challenge his detention as an enemy combatant."

"In a new court filing, the government disclosed that Mr. Padilla has been under interrogation by military personnel for several months. The government said letting a lawyer into the process "would threaten permanently to undermine the military's efforts to develop a relationship of trust and dependency that is essential to effective interrogation." That could "set back his interrogations by months, if not derail the process permanently."

This is what we mean when we say, with respect to constitutional rights, give them an inch and they'll take a mile.

Atrios is right, Jesse over at Pandagon is priceless today. Our favorite lines:

"I know next to nothing about law enforcement, but I know enough to not wag my tail when someone's got a gun pointed at me."

"Those without faith in law enforcement, namely liberals, will point to this as an abuse of power, yet I ask - what if that dog had gone on to injure someone? Who knows what information the police had.

"I'm sure we've all watched the hit series "The Shield". The cop on the show is abusive, but he gets the job done.

Great work Jesse!

Our congratulations to Law Professor Glenn Reynolds, best known to blog readers as Instapundit, who just received a Chair at the University of Tennessee law school. He is now the "Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law."

Via Media Whores Online, "Most Americans believe that between 1 and 5 million people live in poverty in the United States when the actual number is nearly 33 million," according to results of the national "Poverty Pulse" survey released this week by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD).