If you need to get up to speed on Halliburton, which likely will be a focus of John Edwards' debate responses, here's a guide.

Speaking at the Insurance Leadership Forum in West Virginia, Paul Bremer, the top civilian official in Iraq, said the U.S. had insufficient troops in place to fight the war:

In remarks published Tuesday, the official, L. Paul Bremer, said he arrived in Iraq on May 6, 2003 to find "horrid" looting and a very unstable situation - throwing new fuel onto the presidential campaign issue of whether the United States had sufficiently planned for the post-war situation in Iraq.

"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," Bremer said during an address to an insurance group in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. The group released a summary of his remarks in Washington. "We never had enough troops on the ground," Bremer said, while insisting that he was "more convinced than ever that regime change was the right thing to do."

Whoops. The White House has no comment. And true to Administration style, today Bremer backtracks and says:

In a statement Monday night to The Washington Post, Bremer said he fully supported the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq. "I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq," he said in the e-mailed statement, according to Tuesday's edition of the Post. He said references to troops levels related to the situation when he first arrived in Baghdad "when I believed we needed either more coalition troops or Iraqi security forces to address the looting."

Like Rumsfeld backtracking to cover Cheney on WMDs.

Remember that old Animals' song?

I'm just a soul who's intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood

This Administration is becoming laughable. Not just in our eyes, but in the eyes of the world. The right hand doesn't have a clue what the left hand is doing. Their spin machine is working overtime. No wonder voters lined up in droves to register to vote.

See: Hesiod at Counterspin here. Left Coaster here.

Here's an open thread for your thoughts on tonight's Cheney-Edwards debate. Mine are here and here.

Eric Mueller of IsThatLegal weighs in here, commenting on this op-ed in the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer.

If Edwards speaks these difficult truths about our past mistakes and future challenges with courage and skill, then he will win the debate, even if he can't explain exactly how the new administration will go forward. As long as Kerry and Edwards are resolute about the ends, they can appear flexible about the means of finishing the war. The president's mistakes need not remain the country's mistakes, and the public will conclude that Kerry and Edwards will do a better job of fixing mistakes than a president who cannot even bring himself to admit them. John Edwards is the best trial lawyer since Lincoln to participate in a presidential campaign. Tonight the country needs him to give the argument of a lifetime.

The Wall St. Journal (subscription only) presents this news article, calling Cheney, "an intense and understated government veteran" and Edwards a "a smooth-talking former trial lawyer." Sounds more like an op-ed to me. A non-partisan article would have referred to each candidate by their current government position, or both by their former jobs. Edwards should have been described as a United States Senator first, and trial lawyer second. Instead of "smooth talking", more neutral words such as articulate, successful, convincing or passionate should have been used. Alternatively, Cheney should have been called the former head of Halliburton rather than a "government veteran."

American Progress Report on What Cheney Will Say.

One more: The Rude Pundit on what Edwards should say. [link via Atrios.]

Lots of work today and I want to get done early so I can provide full coverage of the debate. Here's a second open thread for non-debate topics (debate open thread is here) and some things to read.

Saddam Hussein as the 20th Hijacker by James Bovard, and

Bush is Engagering America, a Buzzflash guest editorial by Carla Binion.

Everything at Raw Story and Memeorandum.

Betty Bowers is going after Bush for his "Don't Forget Poland!" remark during the debate.

Poland has announced it will begin the withdrawal of its forces from Iraq by January 1. [link via Cursor .]

The LA Times today urges voters to vote for Proposition 66 which would reform the state's notorious and draconian three-strikes sentencing law. After noting that the law was passed in a hurry in a response to the killing of 12 year old Polly Klass, the Times says:

..only in California can conviction on any third felony put someone behind bars for life. That singularity points to what is wrong with the California law, despite its emotionally wrenching origins.

Here are some facts on the law and proposed reform:

Three years of being held in captivity, without charges or lawyers, and now, it's going to be "never mind, you can go now"? This should go down in history as one of the biggest abuses of human rights the U.S. has ever engaged in. According to Brig Gen Martin Lucenti, deputy commander of the joint task force that controls Guantanamo:

"Of the 550 [prisoners]that we have, I would say most of them, the majority of them, will either be released or transferred to their own countries," he told the Financial Times. "Most of these guys weren't fighting. They were running.

"Even if somebody has been found to be an enemy combatant, many of them will be released because they will be of low intelligence value and low threat status. We don't have a level of evidence to feel that we can be confident to prosecute them [all]. We have guys here who have never told us anything, except to say that they want to cut off the heads of the infidels if they get a chance," Gen Lucenti added.

How would you feel if you were running from the enemy you knew, only to be caught by the enemy you didn't know...and then transported across the world to be interrogated and caged for three years?

Don't miss this AP article on how and who we are fighting in Iraq. Look what this Administration got us into. How how will it ever get us out?

The U.S. military is fighting the most complex guerrilla war in its history, with 140,000 American soldiers trained for conventional warfare flailing against a thicket of insurgent groups with competing aims and no supreme leader.The three dozen or so guerrilla bands agree on little beyond forcing the Americans out of Iraq.

In other U.S. wars, the enemy was clear. In Vietnam, a visible leader - Ho Chi Minh - led a single army fighting to unify the country under socialism. But in Iraq, the disorganized insurgency has no single commander, no political wing and no dominant group. U.S. troops can't settle on a single approach to fight groups whose goals and operations vary. And it's hard to sort combatants from civilians in a chaotic land where large parts of some communities support the insurgents and others are too afraid to risk their lives to help foreigners.

"It's more complex and challenging than any other insurgency the United States has fought," aid Bruce Hoffman, a RAND counterinsurgency expert who served as an adviser to the U.S.-led occupation administration.

Next, a look at who we are fighting: 20,000 insurgents who belong to four groups with different goals. If there is a central theme it's this:

...inflicting as much pain as possible on the United States and its Iraqi and foreign allies.

Congrats to Skippy who received a listing as an entertaining, far-out website from Time Out - New York:

Named for a popular Australian TV show, this blog is a brew of wiseass remarks and reports that make no claim to unbiased journalism. (President Bush is routinely referred to as "AWOL.") Skippy is most useful for its links to similarly minded blogs. It's a good way to keep abreast of which vast right-wing conspiracy is attracting the attention of the lefty blogosphere on a given day.—Elana Berkowitz

Jeralyn E. Merritt is criminal defense attorney in Denver representing persons accused of serious federal and state offenses. She served as one of the principal trial lawyers for Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City Bombing Case.

She has served as Secretary, Treasurer and member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers as well as on the ABA Criminal Justice Section Council and the Board of Governors of the American Board of Criminal Lawyers.

She is co-author of a treatise on the U.S.A. Patriot Act, published by Lexis-Nexis. She has testified before both Congress and the United States Sentencing Commission on drug sentencing laws.

From 2001 through 2003, she was a Lecturer in Law at the Denver University College of Law teaching "Wrongful Convictions" and "Criminal Defense."

She is the creator of CrimeLynx, an internet resource for legal professionals and TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime. All entries on TalkLeft are written by her, except those that specify at the top that they are written by TChris or Last Night in Little Rock. She is also an online contributor for Denver's 5280 Magazine, where she blogs on Colorado issues.

She lectures nationally on a variety of legal and political topics and has been a cable television legal analyst since 1996, most frequently appearing on MSNBC and Fox News. A more detailed list of appearances is available here.

Speaker fees are available upon request. If you would like Ms. Merritt to speak to your organization, or write a commentary piece for your publication, please contact her directly.

E-Mail: talkleft-at-aol-dot-com.

Earlier we linked to law bloggers' reactions to today's oral arguments on the federal sentencing system. Tonight, the mainstream media weighs in. Court-blogging might be a little like convention-blogging--the blogs are long on enthusiasm, personal impressions and minor details the mainstream press might overlook, but short on providing "just the facts." For the latter, check out the New York Times article, Justices Show Inclination to Scrap Sentencing Rules.

In a welcome about-face by the Bush Adminstration, plans have been scrapped to require emergency rooms to inquire about immigration status from those seeking medical care.

The National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems, representing more than 100 safety-net hospitals that treat many undocumented immigrants, said the original proposal would create "peril for those individuals, a public health threat to the entire community, and higher costs for treating patients at later disease stages."

California voters take note. Here's one Congressperson that deserves to be roundly defeated in November:

The House rejected legislation from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., in May that would have explicitly required hospitals to determine immigration status, leading to deportation proceedings against people in the country illegally.

On a related note, say hello to The Public Health Press, by Ross Silverman, formerly Bloviator.