President Bush is sending 3,500 troops to Kuwait. Is there any doubt they will then go to Iraq?

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates approved sending the 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division overseas after Gen. John P. Abizaid, who leads Central Command, requested the forces to replace the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which was sent into the western province of Anbar this fall. Abizaid requested a brigade -- which is significantly larger than the Marine unit -- to allow for greater flexibility in the region.

Arianna tells us this is not really the decision of military chiefs:

John Edwards was set to announce his bid for the 2008 Democratic nomination for President tomorrow in New Orleans. Due to a glitch on his website which went live with the news today, he made it official.

His campaign platform: Changing America, which includes:

"Providing universal health care for all Americans," "Rebuilding America's middle class and eliminating poverty," and "Creating tax fairness by rewarding work, not just wealth."

On November 5, after being convicted at trial, Saddam Hussein wrote a letter. His lawyers have confirmed its authenticity.

''I call on you not to hate because hate does not leave space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking,'' said the letter, which was written in Arabic and translated by the AP.

''I also call on you not to hate the people of the other countries that attacked us,'' it added, referring to the invasion that toppled his regime nearly four years ago.

Your employer wants you to submit to drug testing but assures you that the results will be kept confidential. Is your privacy protected? Don't count on it.

Baseball players supplied urine samples in 2003 to help Major League Baseball get a handle on the number of players who use steroids.

Baseball players were told the results would be confidential, and each player was assigned a code number to be matched with his name.

A day before the results were to be destroyed, federal agents issued subpoenas compelling production of test results for ten players, including Barry Bonds, who is suspected of fibbing to a grand jury when he denied using steroids. Armed with warrants for the ten test results, agents in 2004 seized the results of tests of about one hundred players, most of whom weren't named in the subpoenas or warrants.

This expanded search didn't bother the Ninth Circuit, which reversed (pdf) two lower court rulings favoring the Players Association that would have required the government to return any test results that weren't described in the warrants. The dissent offers an analysis that's more faithful to players' legitimiate expectations of privacy in their medical records. Here's the concluding paragraph:

Again we are regaled with stories about "Values Voters" and how to get them. Self proclaimed Dem values voters guru Mara Vanderslice has a good publicist and was able to have this story placed in the NYTimes:

Party strategists and nonpartisan pollsters credit the operative, Mara Vanderslice . . . with helping a handful of Democratic candidates make deep inroads among white evangelical and churchgoing Roman Catholic voters in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Exit polls show that Ms. Vanderslice’s candidates did 10 percentage points or so better than Democrats nationally among those voters, who make up about a third of the electorate.

Sounds impressive right? It is a load of crap. I'll explain on the flip.

Former President Gerald Ford has died at age 93.

He was our country's longest-living President.

Ford was an accidental president, Nixon’s hand-picked successor, a man of much political experience who had never run on a national ticket. He was as open and straight-forward as Nixon was tightly controlled and conspiratorial.

He took office minutes after Nixon flew off into exile and declared “our long national nightmare is over.” But he revived the debate a month later by granting Nixon a pardon for all crimes he committed as president. That single act, it was widely believed, cost Ford election to a term of his own in 1976, but it won praise in later years as a courageous act that allowed the nation to move on.

Amendment 44, by SaferChoice, was on Colorado's ballot this year. It would have legalized adult possession of up to one ounce of pot. The measure passed in Denver in 2004, and this was an attempt to make it state-wide. It failed.

For anyone who is interested, NORML has put up the audio of my talk to college kids the week before the election on why it should pass and why it is so critical for young people to register to vote and then weigh in on election day. It's about 15 minutes long.

Kids are the future. If you have a political pulpit to reach them, please use it. Rome wasn't built in a day and the Amendment will be back in 2008.

If his life were made into a movie, Orlando Boquete would like Johnny Depp to star. Depp probably wouldn’t take a role that seems like a rip-off of The Fugitive: innocent man serves a dozen years in prison before escaping, then spends another decade evading capture. Boquete didn’t find the one-armed man, but the ending of his story is almost as dramatic. New DNA testing proved he didn’t commit the rape that resulted in his conviction, and Boquete walked free. Or almost free – since he can’t be deported to Cuba, he has to report regularly to ICE.

Boquete traveled from Cuba to Miami during the Mariel boatlift.

Two years later, police charged him with the sexual assault of a Stock Island woman after she pointed him out on the street as the man who had just attacked her in her bed. In 1983, a jury convicted him based on the victim's ID. He escaped two years later and ran for a decade before he was caught and sent back to prison. In 2003, he saw a television show about the Innocence Project and asked the organization for help.

Boquete was surprised to see how his face had aged in prison.

Via the New York City Independent Media Center and the DMI blog:

These are some statistics from the Department of Justice reflecting data through 2005.

What they tell us: America continues to be a prison nation. The drug war doesn't work. Over-incarceration doesn't work. Our elected officials in Congress need to spend time addressing these issues in 2007.

• the prison population grew 1.9% over the past year
• the United States has 2,320,359 people incarcerated
• in 1995, America sentenced 411 people per 100,000 residents; today it is 491
• there are around 600,000 more people in jail today than 10 years ago
• since 1995, the total number of male prisoners has grown 34%; female prisoners have risen 57%

The BBC Reports:

He's out of appeals and under Iraqi law, his execution must occur within 30 days and could be "at any time."

The court rejected an appeal by Saddam Hussein's lawyers and confirmed that he would be hanged, court spokesman Raed Juhi told the BBC.

...."It cannot exceed 30 days. As from tomorrow [Wednesday] the sentence could be carried out at any time," appeals court judge Arif Shaheen told a news conference in Baghdad.

Saddam has asked for a firing squad but authorities say he may be hanged in his cell. Parts will be televised on Iraqi tv.

Steve Benen points us to an example of how NOT to demonstrate it:

A liberal-bashing book by a veteran St. Louis judge is to become available publicly this week, but it is already causing a stir in political and legal circles — and prompting some to say it could cost him his job.

Chapter 1 of Circuit Judge Robert H. Dierker Jr.'s book, "The Tyranny of Tolerance: A Sitting Judge Breaks the Code of Silence to Expose the Liberal Judicial Assault," has circulated via e-mail since last month and been widely read in legal circles, lawyers and judges say.

The sentiments expressed in that chapter, which frequently uses the term "femifascists" and is titled "The Cloud Cuckooland of Radical Feminism," have already prompted a complaint with the state body that can reprimand or remove judges.

. . . The first chapter was heavily discussed at the recent holiday party for the Women Lawyers' Association of Greater St. Louis. One judge who attended noted, "Everyone's just pretty much shocked." Association President Lynn Ricci said, "I have read it. I find it disturbing." She also said, "I frankly think that it is a shame that this very smart man has lowered himself to name-calling."

Heh, yes that is a shame isn't it? I assume he is planning a careeer as a Right Wing radio talk show host but I could be wrong.

WaPo Columnist Richard Cohen names his person of the year: Gregory Thompson, a delusional death row inmate:

Thompson, 45, is delusional. He is also paranoid, schizophrenic and depressed. For these ailments, he receives daily doses of drugs and, twice a month, anti-psychotic injections. The state of Tennessee wants very much to put him to death for the horrendous 1985 murder of Brenda Blanton Lane, of which there is no doubt about his guilt.

There is grave doubt, though, about the constitutionality, not to mention the decency, of executing an insane man. Thus the 12 pills Thompson takes every day. The idea, according to a recent account of his case in the Wall Street Journal, is to make him sane enough to be put to death.