Congress has decimated the U.S. asparagus industry by waiving tariffs for Peruvian asparagus. It's a backwards attempt to buffer coca eradication with crop substitution.

Notwithstanding divergent views on free trade among our readership, I'm sure we can all agree that tariffs shouldn't be arbitrarily lifted in support of a failed drug war policy in Peru.

The new Congress can fix this. The Seattle Times has more.

Judge Reggie Walton has issued the following trial decorum order (pdf) for the Scooter Libby trial. There will be two overflow courtrooms.

Also, from another order granting the following persons 24 hour access to the courthouse during the trial, here's a clue as to who's on the Government's trial team (some could be agents and paralegals in addition to lawyers.).

ORDER as to I. LEWIS LIBBY granting the following individuals access to the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse 24 hours a day/7 days per week from the date of the Order until the conclusion of the trial of this matter: Patrick Fitzgerald, Peter Zeidenberg, Kathleen Kedian, Debra Bonamici, Debbie Bond, Gerard Francisco, Jared Richards, Katie Hance, Bonnie Hansen, and Harry Brady.

Woo-hoo! Via the National Journal Hotline, Howard Dean and the DNC have chosen Denver to host its 2008 national convention.

A Democrat who was briefed said that chairman Howard Dean made the final decision yesterday, weeks later than planned. DNC comm. dir. Karen Finney declined to confirm the choice.

Colorado is a marquee states for Democrats, who have, in the past two years, gobbled up the governor's mansion, control of the state legislature, and two congressional seats.

How excited am I?

More from the Denver Post. The decision will be announced this afternoon.

Rudy Giuliani has ended his silence over Bush's proposal for a troop increase. After the speech, he announced he supports a troop increase.

"I support the president’s increase in troops," Giuliani said in a statement. "Even more importantly – I support the change in strategy – the focus on security and the emphasis on a political and economic solution as being even more important than a military solution."

The Washington Post reports that two of the coveted media seats in the Scooter Libby trial will go to bloggers.

After two years of negotiations with judicial officials across the country, the Media Bloggers Association, a nonpartisan group with about 1,000 members working to extend the powers of the press to bloggers, has won credentials to rotate among his members. The trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the highest-ranking Bush administration official to face criminal charges, could "catalyze" the association's efforts to win respect and access for bloggers in federal and state courthouses, said Robert Cox, the association's president.

Firedoglake announced last week that with the aid of Arianna Huffington, it had been granted a press pass for the trial.

Here are some excerpts from Bush's speech tonight.

Several Republicans are balking at the plan:

A number of Republican senators -- including Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Sen. Olympia Snow of Maine and Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas -- have publicly questioned whether Bush's plan to increase troop strength will help stabilize Iraq.

"A troop surge in Baghdad would put more American troops at risk to address a problem that is not a military problem," Coleman said Wednesday on the Senate floor.

"It would put more American soldiers in the cross hairs of sectarian violence and create more targets. I just don't believe this makes sense," Coleman said.

Democrats are upset, among other things, at Bush's lack of consultation with them over the plan. By the time he met with them, the plan was a fait accompli.

President Bush hasn't even given his speech yet, but the first new surge of troops is already en route to Baghdad and more are scheduled to leave tomorrow:

Ninety advance troops from the 82nd Airborne Division arrived in Baghdad today. An additional battalion of roughly 100 troops from the same division are expected to arrive in Baghdad Thursday.

There will also be more call-ups from the National Guard.

What's different about this troop surge? According to military commanders, the troops will be residing in local Iraqi neighborhoods:

New York's losing Attorney General candidate, Jeanine Pirro, won't be crying in her spilled milk.

Instead, she'll be raking in $1 million a year as host of her own Warner Brothers television talk show.

Good luck Jeanine, break a leg. We are all much safer and freer with you on television than directing crime policy.

My prediction: the show will be a big hit. Guilt still sells in America.

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton has unveiled a new approach to fighting gang crime.

The strategy is to concentrate on the gangs causing the most violence, to have the courts impose "stay away" orders as conditions of probation to make it easier to return violators to jail and to use the abatement and nuisance laws that allow the state to close and seize properties where gang members congregate.

Thoughts?

Two of the most publicized atrocities by U.S. soldiers in the War in Iraq have been Haditha and Mahmoudiya.

Today, the Associated Press reports that its own investigation into Mahmoudiya revealed the U.S. was aware PFC Steven Green, who allegedly raped a teenage Iraqi girl and killed her and her family, was known to have homicidal tendencies and a desire to strike out and kill Iraqis three months before the tragic event.

Now the U.S. is killing suspected Islamocists in Somalia in the name of the war on terror. But it's not releasing any details.

Are we about to get into another pre-emptive war or are we trying to bring democracy to Somalia or do we just believe we can go anywhere in the world and kill people because they might be al-Qaida followers?

Thoughts?

This is absolutely astonishing.

The chief judge in the city’s juvenile courts had a top public defender arrested Tuesday in a bizarre escalation of a fight over changes in the city’s troubled program for representing indigent defendants.

The judge, David Bell, was upset that no public defender was in his courtroom when he was ready to start this morning, and he drove to the defender’s office and waited outside for Stephen Singer, the chief of trials, to arrive.

The judge took Mr. Singer to his courtroom, where he found him in contempt for not being prepared to provide representation and ordered him jailed for 36 days, three days for each of the 12 items on Tuesday’s docket. Mr. Singer then spent about five hours in jail before a state appeals court stayed the order.

The New Orleans criminal justice system has been in a heightened state of crisis since Katrina. If there aren't enough public defenders to go around, the state needs to increase the funding to hire more of them -- not blame the already overworked, overburdened current defenders who are doing more than their fair share of the work.