I'm spending the day writing briefs instead of blog posts, so if there's something you'd like to discuss, here's the place.

Let's also keep giving the holiday gift of traffic. Feel free to put links to your own blog posts in the comments -- so long as they are in html format (long urls skew the site and I can't edit comments on Scoop, I can only delete them.)

You might start with Mike's Blog Round-Up over at Crooks and Liars. Avedon Carol has Notes from the Blogosphere. Christy at Firedoglake has a great post on Habeas, Sentence First, Verdict Later. John Travolta defends Scientology against charges it is homophobic.

Your turn.

I've written about a species of analysis that I think is best described as "academic Broderism," a description coined by Jon Zasloff and endorsed by Scott Lemeiux. (See also Emily Bazelon.) The most notable practitioners that I have seen of this are Cass Sunstein and Jeffrey Rosen, both contributors to The New Republic and other "serious" publications. I want to provide a counterpoint example and it so happens that perhaps the finest Left law blog there is, Balkinization, gives us two of the best examples - Georgetown Law Professor Marty Lederman and Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin.

Lederman and Balkin consistently provide well reasoned analysis that understands the politics of the Supreme Court and the law, and also engages the real world consequences. On the discussion of the day, the utter predictability of how Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Alito would change the Court, Balkin and Lederman were clear eyed during the nomination process and urgent in their writings, and remain so now. The typical academic detachment was not deemed necessary by these two legal scholars. More.

Enjoy and stay for the credits.

For those not in a humorous mood, check out this collection from Harpers on Undoing Bush: how to repair eight years of sabotage, bungling, and neglect (Via Susie at Suburban Guerilla.)

Continuing from Friday's post on giving bloggers the the Gift of Traffic this holiday weekend, here's the latest.

• Avedon Carol of Sideshow has picked up the Traffic theme and found some great links to some of the better versions of some Traffic Songs.

"The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys" [Update: Live version, Pt.1 and Pt.2.]

Live Winwood: "Dear Mr. Fantasy".

... more here.

• Larry Johnson at No Quarter on Glasgow Burning, Run for Your Lives . The right-wing blogs and CNN are all London, all Glasgow all the time. It's like Dear Mr. Fanstasy, give us a terror attack so we can tell the world we're right to be in Iraq. Mahablog thinks so too.

More...

Here's a little song you can all join in on....

Everyone knows that blog traffic goes down substantially for political blogs on weekends. It declines more so on holiday weekends, like the one beginning today with the 4th of July just around the corner.

So, please, give the gift of traffic. It's free. All you have to do is visit your favorite blogs so they register your presence.

Just about every blog has a blogroll. Check out some of the blogs on them. If you're online and blogging, try to link more this weekend.

I'll start, and I'll be updating and occasionally bumping this post over the next few days.

• The Talking Dog has an interview with Gaillard Hunt, counsel for Pakistani National Saifullah Paracha, currently at Guantanamo Bay, where he may become our first non-suicide death if his heart problems continue to go untreated.

• Avedon Carol at Sideshow on the failure of the immigration bill.

• Law Prof Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy evaluates the Supreme Court's term from a sentencing perspective.

• For humor, visit TBogg and Wonkette and Jesus' General (who today rips Tom Tancredo on immigration.)

• The crew at Firedoglake has several great posts scheduled for the weekend. Start with For Life, For Jane.

More...

The day job beckons and it's time for an open thread. What's going on in your world today and which items in the news and on the blogs have caught your attention?

Are any of you buying Apple's hyped i-Phone which hits the stores Friday? If so, why? What makes it so special?

Author Gore Vidal is said to be extremely upset and considering a lawsuit against a play that portrays him as coming on to Timothy McVeigh.

Edmund White's "Terre Haute," which recently finished a successful run in Britain, involves the relationship between a thinly veiled, Vidal-like writer named James and a McVeigh-like killer, Harrison. In one sexually charged scene, James comes on to Harrison during a prison visit, gushing: "If I thought you'd never know, I'd unzip that orange jumpsuit just a bit so I could see your chest. Touch it." The McVeigh character opens his shirt to show off his torso as a "gift" to the Vidal character.

Anything to make a buck off a dead person, I guess. I have no knowledge of Gore Vidal's sexual orientation, but I can assure you that had the real Timothy McVeigh ever heard a male say that to him, his response would have been quite different. In other words, McVeigh was straight with a capital "S."

Hilzoy writes about the Left blog reaction and it related to a post I wrote arguing for the need that the Left blogs NOT pull their punches. Hilzoy writes:

I'd also be interested in reading reactions from bloggers on the left. However, as far as I can tell, most of the left-wing bloggers have gone dark on this one. . . . [I]t is striking that when I search the 60 left blogs that are on my main bookmarks list, I found three (3) posts on this story. . . . One is from Big Tent Democrat, and concerns the fact that the story's first two paragraphs are unfair. (I agree: it's speculation, not fact, that Edwards came up with the idea of this organization as a "solution" to the "problem" of keeping his public profile alive without a campaign. I also think the larger story is worth commenting on.) . . .

The implication is that the Left Blogs, and me, shied away from the Edwards angle. I reject that charge. Since I have been arguing that the Left blogs have been pulling their punches I'll respond to this on the flip.

I'm back from Telluride (the thousands at the blue grass festival are at the bottom, this was taken from very high above it.) It's really hard to picture a more scenic spot.

The flight back was very long...I could have driven the seven hours from Telluride to Denver in the time it took to fly back (a one hour flight) due to the winds being too gusty to take off so we sat on the runway forever to wait for the winds to shift. The plane actually ran low on gas after an hour on the runway so we had to deplane while they refueled and wait for the winds to die down It's an 18 seater but it can't fly full because of weight issues even without winds. When the winds exceed 10 knots, flights aren't allowed to take off. Instead of landing in Denver at 4:30 pm, we landed at 7:30 pm.

When you do take off from Telluride, as soon as the plane lifts, the ground drops thousands of feet beneath you. It's a very eerie feeling that makes quite a few people ill. Since I knew to expect it, I enjoyed it.

I'm really glad to be home, but blogging will have to wait until sometime tomorrow after I decompress, and have organized the 300 plus photos I took, so here's an open thread.

Mother Jones runs a rather overwrought and, in my view, wrongheaded article discussing the A-List Bloggers as "The New Gatekeepers." I think the problem is a different one, as I outlined in my post The Dangerous Cooptation of the Blogosphere. The thrust of my post was this:

What is Digby suggesting? That the blogs/Netroots not give its true opinions? That we pull our punches? This is a very very dangerous game Digby is suggesting. For what do the blogs really have going for them? Integrity. If we don't have that, we have nothing. We become the Right blogs. This is terrible thinking, especially coming from our best blogger.

The Mother Jones article sees the problem as one of personal aggrandizement and love of influence and money. In my experience, and I used to be an A-List blogger, it is not that at all.

The conduct of Senator Carl Levin on the Iraq War has clearly been the most disappointing and, in my opinion, most dishonorable among the "anti-war" Democrats. Today, he compounds his disrepute by misleadingly invoking Abraham Lincoln. Levin writes:

In his only term in Congress, Abraham Lincoln was an ardent opponent of the Mexican War. . . . But when the question of funding for the troops fighting that war came, Lincoln voted their supplies without hesitation.

This is incredibly disingenuous of Levin. He is misleadingly quoting a letter Lincoln wrote in 1858 while under political attack in a Senate race and trying to compare that with what he is saying and doing now. There are no pretty words to describe what Levin has done here - he has disingenuously and cravenly used Abraham Lincoln to defend his actions. Levin should defend his actions with his own honest arguments, not by the misleading tactics of the Right. He should be heartily ashamed.

Bob Geiger discovered that Fred Thompson writes a column at the ABC Radio web site. Bob spots this gem from the Washington lawyer-lobbyist turned Hollywood actor:

Harry Reid, though, has taken a different route. He made his statement about General Pace on a conference call with fringe elements of the blogosphere who think we're the bad guys. This is a place where even those who think the 9/11 attacks were an inside job find a home."

(Emphasis supplied.) As usual, Fast Freddie is fact-free. 3 of the callers were daily kos Contributing Editors. And at daily kos, in a policy I helped formulate in 2005, 9/11 conspiracy diaries are prohibited. It is a controversial policy in some parts of the Left blogs.

So sorry Frederick of Dollywood, but you can't apply your GOP/Hollywood game of changing the facts to suit your demagoguery. And you are fact-free yet again.