Peter Beinart questions the Netroots' commitment to issues. He asks why so much loathing for Gravel?

What does Markos Moulitsas have against Mike Gravel? The über-blogger recently called for exiling the longshot presidential candidate from future Democratic debates. "Mike Gravel is a waste of our time," he wrote in an August 7 post. "[He's] a running joke." That's an odd assessment coming from the founder of Daily Kos. Every time Gravel gets behind a lectern, he flays the Democratic Party for knuckling under to militarists and corporations. In other words, he sounds just like Markos Moulitsas. . . .

Actually he doesn't. And in my drive to be the most loathed person on the blogs, in a new piece at the Guardian website, I again flay the Netroots for caring more about horseraces than issues:

What we do not see from MoveOn or any of the leading left blogs are any attempts to pressure Democrats into taking action immediately to end the Iraq war. Every plan, every project, seemingly every post, is focused on how to exploit Iraq as a political weapon against Republicans in the 2008 elections. Very little thought is brought to bear on how to pressure Democrats to use the power of congress to end the Iraq war now.

My question is diffferent than Beinart's. It is not why the Netroots loathes Gravel. Rather why does the Netroots not fight for the issues that they are supposed to care about?

Last night, as I was walking into a local tv studio to do Dan Abram's MSNBC show, I tripped on an uneven sidewalk and splattered myself on the concrete. I'm nursing a swollen wrist and bloody cuts on both knees and palms. Whose responsibility is it anyway to keep sidewalks in good repair? Or are we just supposed to walk with our heads down all the time looking for danger spots?

I'm also writing an op-ed for tomorrow's Washington Examiner on the myth of the immigrant crime wave (the topic of my MSNBC segment last night, which you can view here, but you'll need to turn the sound up on your computer to hear it. My YouTube-ing skills apparently don't include the ability to make the sound on the video match that on the tape I'm recording from.)[Update: MSNBC now has a better version here.]

So, here's an open thread for you.

It never made any sense to me that Matt Bai was chosen as the moderator of the Yearly Kos Presidential Forum. Bai has a long track record of hostility towards Left blogs and the views espoused by them. Joan Walsh reviews his new book and finds, surprise! - that Bai is very hostile to the goals of the Left blogs. Kevin Drum, in a strange reaction, ignores this and likes the book very much:

As near as I can tell, she and I had an almost (though not quite) identical reaction to Bai on substantive grounds, but despite that I loved the book and she hated it. Basically, I thought it was a terrific and insightful piece of reporting even though I thought Bai's basic theme failed to hold water, while Walsh was exasperated by the cluelessness of the book's basic theme but allowed that it also had some colorful and interesting reporting.

So Kevin likes clueless and inaccurate books apparently. Good to know.

This post, ostensibly about economic efficiency, is just used as an excuse by me to post this:

Just click on "How Long" to play. Despite what I said earlier about it being "so.... Eagles. Really, like 1973 Eagles" it's really catchy. I like it more each time I hear it.

Or you can visit the Eagles My Space page.

I'm still in court mode today, happily back in Denver, so I've only got highlights for you until tonight.

• No plea yet from Michael Vick, but very bad allegations from his two co-defendants who got cooperation deals:

The court papers, filed as Quanis Phillips, 28, and Purnell Peace, 35, pleaded guilty to dogfighting charges Friday, said all three men "executed approximately eight dogs that did not perform well in testing sessions" in April of this year by methods such as hanging and drowning.

Peace, of Virginia Beach, and Phillips, of Atlanta, said the money behind the Bad Newz Kennels dogfighting operation, based on property Vick owns in Virginia, came "almost exclusively" from the Atlanta Falcons star. And they confirmed to prosecutors that all the accusations in the 18-page indictment are true.

• Rudy's 29 hours at Ground Zero. More from Barb at Daily Kos and Atrios and other bloggers.

• The Eagles are releasing their first new album in 28 years, Long Road Out of Eden. I heard the single, Long Road, on the radio this morning. It's so.... Eagles. Really, like 1973 Eagles. There's no mistaking them for anyone else and I love the Eagles, particularly Don Henley, but still, it's like going back in time. Then I read it's not a new song:

How Long' is sung by Don Henley and Glenn Frey and was written by J.D. Souther. How Long' is one of Souther's earliest songs. It first appeared on his 1972 debut 'John David Souther'.

More...

It's court in the mountains for me today. I've got an early flight there and a late flight back so that means an open thread day for you.

Here's the tiny plane I'll be flying on. No bathroom, no flight attendant. Even with the constant turbulance caused by the heat of summer it beats driving seven hours each way.

What it doesn't beat is getting up at 5am to arrive at the airport an hour and a half before the flight and on the other end, having to worry about whether the flight will be cancelled due to wind conditions or whether weight restrictions will make them bump some passengers. The worst part, of course, is that I like my client and I'll be very sad when for the first time after months of doing court hearings, I leave to go home while he stays in the custody of the Town Marshals.

I hope you all have a better day planned.

I used to think I was a liberal hawk. After all, I considered the Soviet Union an Evil Empire, believe that the US involvement in Vietnam was defensible though ultimately a strategic mistake, strongly supported Desert Storm and the war against the Taliban and Al Qaida in Aghanistan and agree with Barack Obama that if the US has actionable intelligence about Al Qaida in Pakistan, the US should strike if Pakistan will not. That's pretty hawkish you must admit.

But Glenn Greenwald disabuses me of this notion:

[T]here is virtually no debate within the foreign policy establishment about whether the U.S. has the right to continue to intervene and attack and invade and occupy other countries in the absence of those countries attacking us. . . . [I]t is an implicit, unexamined belief among our foreign policy elites that the U.S. is entitled, more or less, to use military force even in the absence of being attacked or threatened with attack.

When the heck did this happen? Even Iraq was sold as a "growing and gathering threat." And that was the big debate about preventive vs. preemptive war. The idea of preemptive war is one launched in the face of an imminent threat. General Wes Clark explained it well in 2002:

Glenn Greenwald makes many great points in his article discussing his interview of Michael O'Hanlon. I'll discuss those on the flip but I do want discuss O'Hanlon's offense at what he thinks were unfair attacks on him.

Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack are and were Iraq Debacle and Surge supporters. There was nothing as bad to me in their work on this than their misleading description of themselves as critics of the war. As Glenn states, they were critics the way Bill Kristol, Frederick Kagan and John McCain were critics - they wanted more troops. They wanted the Surge. They got the Surge. So their praise for the Surge was to be expected. Do I believe they were going to praise the Surge no matter what they saw? In a word, yes. Because they were going to see what they wanted to see.

Let's face it, the only way to make this trip and their Op-Ed a newsworthy story was to deceive as to their views as Iraq Debacle and Surge supporters. They had to be sold as critics of the Debacle and the Surge and they dishonestly did that. I have said from the beginning, that this was their major sin - their deliberately dishonest presentation of themselves in order to make their views on the Surge newsworthy. After that, I did not think their actual views merited a fair hearing. If they were willing to lie about that, how could you trust them on anything else? Personally, I think they should no longer be considered honest observers on Iraq after what they did. The dishonesty should disqualify them as persons to be listened to on the subject. More.

In the WaPo opinion pages, Kos and SusanG argue we are all Centrists now:

Convinced that this is fundamentally a conservative nation, [Harold] Ford demanded that Democrats unceasingly inch toward the right or risk electoral irrelevance. As then-DLC official Ed Kilgore put it in 2005, "If we put a gun to everybody's head in the country and make them pick sides, we're not likely to win." But we who live outside the D.C. bubble -- in all 50 states, in counties blue and red -- were hearing voices at odds with the Washington consensus. People wanted real choices at the ballot box. And given the disastrous rule of the Bush administration, they wanted a Democratic Party that stood tall and pushed back like a true opposition.

. . . In fact, we pushed the party so far left that we positioned it squarely in the American mainstream and last year won a historic, sweeping congressional victory, something the "centrist" groups had been unable to accomplish for decades -- not even in the DLC's glory days of the 1990s.

. . . The DLC had two decades to make its case, to build an audience and community, to elect leaders the American people wanted. It failed. . . . Their time is up. The "center" is where we stand now, promoting an engaged and active politics embraced by significant majorities of Americans.

Chris Bowers insists that the Netroots really do matter - but now about issues now - but about the 2008 election:

No matter the trend, and no matter the cause, I still think that this holds an important lesson for the progressive blogosphere: we still have the ability to drive the conversation on the 2008 Democratic primary. It was through the combined efforts of the progressive blogosphere that Clinton ended up going on record defending lobbyists. Once that happened, her comment received extensive news coverage, and has now been used as an avenue of attack by both the Obama and Edwards campaigns. During it all, we discussed the incident with our large, primary voting readerships.

Terrific!! The Netroots drove conversation on a "phony issue," as Matt Stoller concedes. Woo hoo! Hey Chris and Matt, how about driving a little conversation on ending the Iraq Debacle?

Oh BTW, the Netroots really did not drive the phony dispute on lobbying - it was MSM reporter Matt Bai who took over the "Netroots" Debate with this nonsense and created the MSM headlines the next day. Can the Netroots stop trying to pat itself on the back for a while and actually try to drive the conversation about something that actually matters? Like, say ending the Iraq Debacle?

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It's a court day for me and an open thread day for you. I'll be back tonight.

Law Prof Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy says there's lots of good stuff up at:

• Capital Defense Weekly
• Crime and Consequences
• Corrections Sentencing
• Grits for Breakfast
• White Collar Crime Prof

For news, check out the easy-on-your-eyes Hinesight Report and Prison Legal News.

Avedon Carol as Sideshow has her always excellent blog-roundup.

In the politics department, the New York Times reports on how much money John Edwards receives from lawyers. Lawyers have always been his biggest group of contributors, but Hillary and Obama are catching up. There's a chart showing how much each has received from lawyers and showing all sources for John Edwards (but not the others') contributions.