Getting past the smarmy pretension exhibited by Matt Yglesias and Dan Drezner in this discussion, at the 8:20 mark Matt makes an important point about brands in the political discourse. Not just for the Media, but for the entire chain, from the Times to the blogosphere. Discussing Mickey Kaus, Matt says:

It is not a political position that [Mickey Kaus]is espousing, [it is] a media product. . . . Mickey has created this persona for hmself, it is not . . . dishonest persona . . . but he is playing the Mickey Kaus character for Slate. And that is the same for columnists and stuff [I read "stuff" as all of the players in the political discussion] . . . . That is just the reality of it.

This is absolutely true. Everyone in the Media food chain is playing to persona. From figurative top to bottom. And that brings me back to what I always want to talk about, Iraq.

Great photos accompany this video of Crosby Stills and Nash's "Immigration Man."

Let me in, Immigration Man.

No Human is Illegal.

[This is a repeat of a post from Dec. 2006]

Politics TV has the video of James Comey's testimony yesterday about his rush to the hospital to pre-empt Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card's attempt to get former Attorney General John Ashcroft to sign off on the extension of the warrantless NSA wiretap program.

Update: Don't miss Marcy Wheeler on Comey in The Guardian today, The Constitution is in Intensive Care.

Via Jane at Firedoglake, Glenn Greenwald provides context and the Washington Post editorial calls the White House actions alarming.

More...

Lost in the shuffle of allegations of misogyny, the very dangerous and wrongheaded movement to eliminate pseudonymity in the blogs continues apace. Today it is Tom Grubisch in the Washingotn Post:

. . . [I]n late 2005, turned off by the venom of anonymous posters, Joseloff instituted a policy requiring anyone who wanted to comment to use his or her real name. . . .

[O]ne concern common to all sites is whistle-blowers: What about someone who wants to expose an injustice or unfairness, whether it's a civil servant pinpointing malfeasance in government or, perhaps, a waiter complaining about lousy tipping at a local restaurant? How can they be protected from retaliation?

Online pioneer Vin Crosbie suggests that sites -- whether personal blogs, community sites or major news providers -- should be flexible enough to grant pseudonyms to users who want to blow a whistle. This would require sites to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. How often would such intervention be required? Not enough to require most sites to hire extra staff.

Here is some vitriol, this is so unrealistic as to be laughably stupid. Decide on pseudonymity on a case by case basis? And how pray tell, do you plan to handle that disclosure to your audience? Or will you not tell them about who is pseudonymous and who is not? What about the site's transparency? Are readers to assume that all site operators are just good honest people? This is the proposal of a person who simply does not understand the way blogging works.

What's Mothers' Day without pictures of the kids who made us mothers? Here are some of my favorites of the TL kid, in chronological order, taken in Denver, Florence, Italy and New York City.

As for where is he today, he's in New York City studying for his law school finals. He graduates in a few weeks, and is looking for a job as a public defender or criminal defense attorney.

And now I'm off to visit my mother. I'll be back with a Sopranos' Open Thread this evening.

I'll be offline most of today so here's a space for you to hang out and discuss whatever is on your minds.

Some news I've been following:

• The Government is still pressing on with attempts to limit detainees' access to lawyers although it has withdrawn the most restrictive proposal of limiting the number of visits to three.

...the administration would continue to seek other limitations on the lawyers. These would include requests to permit only one visit for a detainee to authorize a lawyer to handle his case; to screen mail sent by lawyers; and to allow government officials, on their own, to deny lawyers access to secret evidence used against detainees by military panels.

• Equal and Splenda settled their lawsuit (background here)-- after the jury came in with a verdict but before it was announced. The jury had found for Equal and would have awarded substantial damages. How did the parties know to settle?

Settlement talks began after jurors asked the judge for a calculator and expert reports from both sides on how to determine damages. Lawyers rushed to the judge's office to try to delay the jury's announcement and then huddled in a courthouse meeting room.

More...

33 years ago this week I was sworn into the Colorado Bar. Here's a picture a classmate e-mailed me today of the reception following that event, taken in the law school courtyard, in 1974. How silly we looked, kind of like a cross between the BeeGees and the Mod Squad.

The "last round" of the Great Netroots Debate, about which I wrote previously here and here, seems to have taken place at TNR, with Jon Chait exchanging salvos with Chris Bowers, Matt Stoller, Rick Pearlstein and Ezra Klein. There is a lot there but I found Ezra's piece outstanding and was very interested in Jon Chait's response which actually identified two real dilemmas the Left blogs face today. Chait wrote:

[Klein] tries to defend the netroots' treatment of internal enemies, like TNR or the DLC . . . Having decided that TNR and the DLC are enemies, they go on to accuse their enemies of being monolithic institutions, of being tools of the right, and so on. I understand the reasoning. They have decided that their foes are more hindrance than harm. But, from there, they proceed to banish all cognitive dissonance: They wildly inflate the sins and studiously omit any mention of the countervailing evidence. Once you have become an unperson to the netroots, you can do no good. Admitting any countervailing evidence would just complicate their Manichean argument. Klein wants to defend their means by changing the subject to their ends.

First, Ezra did NOT say that but I think the description is somewhat, but not totally, accurate, for a goodly portion of the Left blogs. But there is a good reason for this as I will explain on the flip.

My very good friend Maryscott O'Connor takes the a bait laid by Jonah Goldberg, hook, line and sinker:

[GOLDBERG:] IT'S IRONIC. At precisely the moment so many people think that the Republican Party and the conservative movement went off the rails, the people who hate the right the most want to copy it.

Me again, sorry. I just want to remind anyone reading this that I've been saying the same thing for years, now.

Only someone who truly does not understand what the Right is and how it became what it is could possibly write that. MSOC has allowed her rage at the Left blogs, a sentiment I share on the Iraq issue (which MSOC never writes about by the way, so I throw My Left Wing in with the failing Netroots on Iraq), to blind her to the obvious - the Right does not respect the truth, like them or not, the Left blogs do.

I addressed this issue regarding Jon Chait's article and MSOC is just as wildly wrong now as Chait was in his article on this point.

I'm swamped by work today, so here's an open thread.

Check out Big Tent's article in The Guardian on the netroots (a form of which was originally published here on TalkLeft)

There are some new diaries up as well:

• Mutiple Deployments To Iraq Breaking Our Military
• The Cabal
• Priming the Deadeye impeachment pump

Chris Bowers writes a couple of posts that seem to argue against striving for diversity in the progressive blogosphere. Chris writes:

[T]he famous and thoughtful Kid Oakland . . . wrote the following:

Of course we want diversity in the blogosphere. We want the blogs to reflect the party and the nation...not perfectly...but as much as possible.

I have to seriously ask--why? Since when is blogging such an incredibly important public institution, ala our education system, government or business world, that the entire public needs to be represented in it? I'd like to think blogging is that important, but it just isn't.

As Chris himself notes, he has not always been so dismissive of the importance of the progressive blogs, but let's leave that aside. For Chris goes further. Chris argues that striving for diversity in the progressive blogosphere would actually be harmful:

I could not more strongly disagree with Kid Oakland's statement that this is something we would even want. If every individual subset of the larger institution were equally diverse as the institution as a whole, then all of the niches and different functions that each subset fills would be entirely erased. . . .

Come again? Diversity in the progressive blogosphere would erase its function? Wow!

The AP "reported" the following:

Olbermann’s popularity and evolving image as an idealogue has led NBC News to stretch traditional notions of journalistic objectivity.

This line in an AP news article is, in itself, stretching traditional notions of journalistic objectivity past the breaking report. This sentence is an opinion, namely, the opinion of the Giuliani campaign repeated as a fact by an AP news report. It also misspells the word ideologue.

Can the Associated Press, after this egregious breach of journalistic ethics, continue to cover the Giuliani Presidential campaign?

Of course it can. It screwed up. It should admit its error and move on. Keith Olberman, by the way, did not screw up. He labelled his Special Comment um, a special comment, not news. AP did not label its editorializing as opinion. The AP needs a lesson in journalism it seems to me.

Finally, for the record, a lot of journalists give their opinions. It is a bad thing imo. It makes them famous, always bad for reporters. But the AP may consider whether it is just as bad when other journalists, including their own, engage in punditry and pontification when the decide to criticque Keith Olberman.