At Sportsleft, I've posted the first of my group previews. This one discusses Groups A and B. Of note, I predict that the best player in the world will not be playing in the second round - Argentina does not get out of Group B and Messi won't be doing this:

A shame really. But Maradona? What were they thinking?

The TL kid and I are headed up to Aspen for the annual NORML drug law conference. There's live coverage this year. We're staying with Anita at Owl Farm. The TL kid gets to sleep in Johnny Depp's room. (No, he won't be there, it's called that because it's the room he always slept in when he visited Hunter.) Here's the speaking agenda . I'll be speaking Saturday on new forms of electronic surveillance.

I'll have my iPad and my laptop and will be checking in, and maybe posting occasionally. (I will be following developments in Peru with Joran Van der Sloot but won't be able to devote as much time to them.)

Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

Jack Abramoff has been released from prison to finish serving his 70 month sentence in a half-way house.

He started his sentence in November, 2006. He's served 3 years and 7 months. He'll be discharged from the halfway house December 4.

On the day he was sentenced, I wrote:

I don't think Abramoff will do more than three to four years. But, with a $21 million restitution order hanging over his head, he may never be a fat cat again.

News reports from Peru tonight say detectives in Peru will release their report tomorrow recommending Joran Van der Sloot be charged with homicide, not manslaughter, which carries a sentence of between 15 and 35 years. (Google translation here.)

The report lists as aggravating factors that he concealed evidence and fled the country. Also considered key: The statements of the hotel receptionist Adeli Abad and her supervisor, Antonio Kuanand that of Uruguayan poker player Elton Garcia. [More...]

Watch Stephany greet Joran when she enters the casino alone at 3:20 am. She walks right up to him and he extends his hand. She sits down and moves over to sit next to him. I think they had played together before. They are greeting each other, not meeting each other.

When they get up from the table together, they leave and Joran comes back to the table (I think to tip the croupier) and a guy starts talking to him and then Stephany walks up. Is that Elton Garcia? (Background here.)Is Elton Garcia in any of the images? See below for the fold for video of Elton Garcia.

When they leave the casino together, he and Stephany are chatting. From the moment she walks into the casino through the time they leave, you don't see her with her head down (like in the hotel video), following behind him. They seem together and comfortable together. [More...]

In an ironic sidebar to the White House's claim that Labor wasted $10 million, Tom Jenson of the PPP polling outfit writes:

It's nice for Blanche Lincoln that she won the runoff in Arkansas last night but I hope that no groups that care about getting Democratic Senators elected spend another dollar in the state this year. [. . . T]here are just a boatload of races where Democrats have a better chance to win this fall and could use their resources more wisely.

(Emphasis supplied.) To coin a phrase, apparently it would be "f--king retarded" to spend any money on Blanche Lincoln for November. Heh.

Speaking for me only

According to El.commercio.pe, when Joran Van der Sloot was questioned by the Chilean police, he provided quite a different version of the events that transpired the night Stephany Flores accompanied him to his hotel room. (Google translation here.)

In the Chilean version, Joran and Stephany were stopped by two men in a white car as they were leaving the casino. The men were wearing police uniforms, put them in the white car and demanded money. When Joran and Stephany later got to his hotel and went inside, there was a man in the bed with a gun in his belt. A second man came out of the bathroom with a knife. One of the men hit Stephany in the face. The men were the same two men dressed as police that had stopped them earlier. [More...]

Discussing why taxes on the rich have not been raised by this Democratic government, Kevin Drum writes:

Soaking the rich isn't the electoral loser I made it out to be. So then the question becomes: why is Congress unable to reform the estate tax, which affects only the very tippy top of the super rich? Why are negotiations over the carried interest loophole, which affects only zillionaire hedge fund managers, retreating from 100% repeal to 75% repeal to 65% repeal? The answer, of course, lies primarily in the ideology of the Republican Party, aided and abetted by the ideology of "centrist" Democrats, which is strong enough to overcome public sentiment. So then, how about this question instead: Americans apparently are sympathetic to higher taxes on the rich, but equally apparently, [. . . t]hey don't care enough, anyway, to sway their elected representatives much. How come?

My answer? Because progressives and moderates are too dependent on the Democratic Party to fight for policies they believe in. In terms of a progressive agenda, the Democratic Party is a failure. Activists and citizens must hold their distance from the Democratic Party and understand they are not your advocates or your friends. Yes, my old refrain.

Speaking for me only

Guess what? People disagree. Let's do it civilly. How about a non-bickering Open Thread?

Open Thread.

The World Cup opens tomorrow and I will be covering and recapping every game at SportsLeft, starting Friday morning at 9 with the opening match South Africa v. Mexico. But today, I want to discuss our boys, the US team and their chances in the 2010 edition of the World Cup.

The Key Players. You will hear a lot about Landon Donovan ("Donovan is the key to success or failure for the U.S. in South Africa"), arguably the best player the US has ever produced, and Jozy Altidore,the new hope. But for my money, how far the US goes in the World Cup will depend on Clint Dempsey, the most instinctive scorer on the team. More . . .

Via Balloon Juice, Josh Green writes:

The assumption until a few minutes ago was that Lincoln would lose and her [derivatives] provision would quietly get stripped in the conference committee that's about to take place. Now that she's won--and won narrowly, and faces a very tough race in the fall--the calculus becomes a lot tougher. [. . .] The bank lobby and the Obama administration (both oppose the Lincoln provision) may simply prove too strong and do the deed anyway. But their task got a whole lot harder. The markup conference will now get a lot more attention. That could be tough for Lincoln. But it will be especially tough for Democrats who wanted to kill her provision without suffering any political damage.

What's fascinating about Green's writeup is the failure to examine why the Obama Administration and Democrats would want to kill Lincoln's derivatives proposal. Green assumes you know -- that pols are pols and do what they do and the banks have stuffed a lot of money in the pockets of the Obama Administration and Dems. This leads to the question I ask in my title - where does Lincoln go from here? Let's discuss that on the flip.