At 4:00 pm today in Room 100a-c, I'll be moderating the voting rights panel at Yearly Kos.

"Ensuring Every Vote Counts" features former Gore campaign Manager Donna Brazile, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's Director of Litigation Debo Adegbile, the Brennan Center's Justin Levitt and George Washington University law professor Spencer Overton, author of the book "Stealing Democracy," about voter suppression.

Donna will be highlighting Howard Dean's 50 state voter protection plan and providing tools and checklists to protect the vote in 2008. She'll also talk about voting problems affecting minorities. Debo will talk about voter denial and intimidation, including caging lists.

Justin Levitt will talk about the Department of Justice's alarming trend of using its authority in ways that limit rather than protect voting rights. Check out the Brennan Center's site, Truth About Fraud.

I hope they also discuss my favorite voting rights issue, restoring the right to vote to ex-offenders.

Hope to see you there!

Checking in from Yearly Kos in Chicago.

A few notes: The convention center is massive and between a 1/4 and 1/2 mile indoor walk from the hotel. Getting lost is quite easy.

Try to find someplace other than the hotel to eat. Last night Jane and Pach of Firedoglake and I ate dinner at the hotel restaurant. Drink, salad, small fillet and asparagus: $69.00. (a ribeye or strip steak would have been even more.) The food also took almost an hour to arrive.

On the positive side, Yearly Kos registration was smooth last night. We got canvas bags filled with stuff I haven't had time to rummage through yet, and a 70 page magazine consisting of the schedule,speakers and ads. I'd be lost without it, and if you'd like one, you can download it for free at Yearly Kos.

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Traveling Day here to Chicago and Yearly Kos. I'm not really bringing all that luggage, but close enough.

I'll stop in here at the airport as wi-fi and time allow. In the meantime, here's an open thread.

Leaving town for five days is always difficult, even more so when it's for a blogging event for which I feel compelled to bring a camera, camcorder, voice recorder, laptop and all the attendant cords, most of which end up staying in my hotel room.

Then there's trying to wrap up all the day job duties, make sure the bills are paid that are due on the first of the month and so on.

So, you're on your own today. All topics welcome.

Update: KingOneEye has a top ten list of media do's and don'ts for those attending YKos.

The San Francisco Chronicle writes up Yearly Kos and its growing influence. It makes the point that right wing sites are just not in the same league as Daily Kos and other widely read liberal blogs.

Here's all you need to know about how influential the YearlyKos convention has become: Five top presidential candidates are going....Analysts say the community of liberal online activists -- the "netroots" -- has become not only a coveted constituency for the left but a legitimate threat to conservatives, who trail Democrats in online campaigning and fundraising.

There will be 200 journalists covering Yearly Kos. The right will be criticizing, but, I suspect, speaking to their echo chamber.

The article also compares blogs in 2007 to those in 2004:

The netroots have come a long way from the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was big news that bloggers were given media credentials.

Most of the public didn't even know what a blog was then. We've come a long way, but it's where we're going and what we are going to do that counts.

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The whole world doesn't revolve around prosecutors. Other good things to read today:

• Say hello to Prison Legal News, gathering injustice stories from all across the country.

• Republican maybe-candidate Fred Thompson writes there are too many federal crimes and criticizes the expanding prison population, but as Ilya at Volokh notes, he ignores the elephant in the room, the war on drugs.

  However, there is a major elephant in this federalism room that Thompson doesn't mention. He is right to note the massive growth in the federal prison population over the last 20 years, but fails to point out that most of that growth is due to the War on Drugs.

• Don't miss the brief by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (pdf)filed in the Kimbrough case on crack cocaine penalties. It focuses on the racial impact of crack sentencing and how the disparity affects not only defendants but families and the community and undermines respect for law. [Hat tip to Peter Goldberger.]

• Also, via White Collar Defense Blog, check out the Federal Defender's amicus brief (pdf)in the Gall case on the reasonableness presumption of the federal sentencing guidelines.

I'm updating TalkLeft's Facebook page today.

For those going to Yearly Kos, the Live Blogging the Libby Trial panel is on Thursday at 9:30 am. Also check out the panel on Friday at 4:00 pm, Ensuring Every Vote is Counted

Can we trust our voting machines to count every vote? Are minority voters given a fair chance at the ballot box? What happens when elected representatives can draw their own district lines? This panel will consider a variety of issues, ranging from redistricting to voter ID laws to felony disenfranchisement to caging, and will explain what progressives can do to ensure every adult citizen may vote, and that every vote is counted.

For those of you following the news, here's a place to talk about it.

I'm off to the airport for a hearing in another state tomorrow. See you all back here Friday. Here's an open thread.

Big Tent wrote yesterday about Tuesday night's debate between Bill O'Reilly and Hillary Clinton's communications director, Howard Wolfson.

Crooks and Liars has the video. The You Tube version is here.

Peter Daou, Hillary's Internet Communications Director, has a post-show diary on Daily Kos pointing out this statement by Wolfson:

"I think it's unfortunate that in the last week or so you have cherry picked some comments on the Daily Kos site that you or I or others might find objectionable and decided to smear an entire community - hundreds of thousands of people who go to the site every day, who talk to one another, who participate vigorously in our democracy; and you are urging Democratic presidential candidates to stay away from their yearly conference. And unfortunately with all due respect for you, the days where you can dictate where Senator Clinton and other Democrats go, who we talk to, are over.

I'm getting excited about Yearly Kos. I'll be there for all of it. If you can't make it, you can still watch and participate through Second Life. The sign-up sheet is here.

So many readers responded by comments and e-mail to my Powerbook woes and request for help getting a new Macbook with helpful hints on how to save a failed hard drive, select a back-up system and transfer music and video files from an iPod to a new computer, and with donations, I thought I'd post a follow-up.

Things are looking up. Here's what happened.

After receiving the failed diagnosis from the Genius Bar at the Apple store on Sunday, I took the Powerbook in to the local authorized Apple repair shop on Monday. Hard drive failure diagnosis confirmed.

The options were: Buy a new hard drive and have them install Tiger on it and transfer the music and videos from the iPod to the new hard drive, for a cost of $400 (and maybe throw in a few hundred more for additional memory since the Powerbook only had 512 mb memory and then think about still more for an external hard drive).... or give them the Powerbook and they'd give me $400 for it, which I could then put to the cost of a new Macbook.

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last call

If you haven't contributed to TalkLeft in a while, and can spare a few dollars, I'm hoping you will do so now so I can get this new Macbook. All amounts are welcome and appreciated.

If you'd rather donate anonymously, please use Amazon here.

If anyone would like to buy it for me, I've put it on my Amazon Wishlist.

Thanks, everyone.