Update: John Edwards will be live-blogging at his campaign blog at noon ET.

Former Senator and vice-presidential candidate John Edwards is running for President. We all knew that yesterday, but today he made the official announcment in New Orleans.

In addition to his campaign against poverty, he's blasting the war in Iraq, particularly John McCain's plan to increase troops in Iraq.

Edwards says we can bring 40,000 troops home now.

From the setting to the words, Edwards is using the day to signal that he intends to run a grassroots, insurgent campaign with an anti-Washington flair. He directly criticized Arizona Sen. John McCain, seen as a leading candidate for the Republican nomination, for recommending that more troops be sent to Iraq to help quell the violence there.

"We need to reject this McCain doctrine of surging troops and escalating the war in Iraq," he said in his campaign video, recorded on Wednesday. "We need to make clear we're going to leave and we need to start leaving Iraq."

I have resisted buying either a Blackberry or a Treo for years. I'm not part of a corporate structure and I'm online at a computer more hours than offline anyway. I also don't use text messaging. I mostly use my cell phone for outgoing calls and very few people have the number. The plan I'm on costs $39 a month and I never go over the limit. So, what's the advantage?

Well..the TL kid was home for the holidays this week and semi-complaining about his age-old Nokia cell phone. And it is a real dinosaur. I've been using a Motorola Razor phone, which I've never liked -- it's an awkward thumb movement and I like popup keys rather than the Razor's flat keys -- so we went to a Cingular store in the mall the day after Christmas.

I ended up buying the new Treo 680 for me, and giving him my Razor. It was a simple switch of Sim cards.

Woodward says:

Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. "I don't think I would have gone to war," he said a little more than a year after President Bush had launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford's own administration.

In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney -- Ford's White House chief of staff -- and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."

Public defenders toil daily in the courtroom trenches protecting constitutional rights for very little money and even less glory.

Now there's a blog awards just for them. Sentencing Law and Policy explains here.

But don't take our word for it, head on over to the Inaugural 2006 Public Defender Blog Awards and check out the diverse and thoughtful blogs and cast a vote.

The 2006 Blawg Awards didn't include a category for public defenders, an oversight that will be remedied next year. But there are some good sites there, so mosey over there too and check out the winners. TalkLeft won the Best Politico Law Blog Award this year.

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.