Colorado Congressman Mark Udall announced yesterday he would run for Senate. Today, Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar announced his intention to run, and to avoid a primary fight, Udall pulled out.

Udall, 53, had announced his candidacy just one day earlier. On Wednesday, he deadpanned: "I think maybe this was the shortest Senate campaign in history."

We would have preferred Udall, as he's more liberal than Salazar, but we like Salazar too.

Update: More details here.

From Salon.com:

A proposed amendment to California's constitution would give 16-year-olds a half-vote and 14-year-olds a quarter-vote in state elections. State Sen. John Vasconcellos, among four lawmakers to propose the idea on Monday, said the Internet, cellular phones, multichannel television and a diverse society makes today's teens better informed than their predecessors. The idea requires two-thirds approval by the Legislature to appear on the November ballot.

This strikes us as patently unfair. Singer Diana Ross was sentenced to 48 hours in jail for a Tuscon, AZ D.U.I. conviction. She was allowed to serve the time in jail in her home town of Greenwich. The Greenwich police chief certified she completed her sentence over three days, with two overnights.

The Judge in Tuscon has ordered her back to Tucson to spend another 48 hours in jail. Why? She only spent 47 actual hours in custody, and left the Greenwich jail on occasion so that her 47 hours were not continuous.

So why not have her makeup the excess hours? Why does she lose credit for the 47 hours she spent in jail? The original sentencing order did not specify the hours had to be continuous. Sounds bogus to us. We hope she appeals.

Here's the list of who slept over at the White House and Camp David as guests of the President. Here's the AP's analysis.

A new fifty-minute documentary, Life on the Outside, explores problems facing those who leave prison or jail to return home and re-integrate back to their communities. It offers strategies for meeting those challenges. You can view a video clip here.

Findlaw columnist Mark Allenbaugh calculates Martha's federal sentencing guidelines at 30 to 37 months, and predicts she will serve 32 months. We disagree. Our calculations are here. Note: If you're not a lawyer, your eyes may glaze over at this.

We predict her guidelines will come out at either 10 to 16 months or 18 to 24 months--depending on whether the Judge enhances her guidelines based on a finding that her obstruction significantly interfered with the administration of justice.

Substantial interference with the administration of justice" includes a premature or improper termination of a felony investigation; an indictment, verdict, or any judicial determination based upon perjury, false testimony, or other false evidence; or the unnecessary expenditure of substantial governmental or court resources.

Also, the obstruction enhancement generally doesn't apply to convictions for obstruction. While it might apply to the false statements charge, the grouping rules provide for use of the obstruction guideline so we don't think that will come into play.

2. Nonapplicability of Chapter Three, Part C.—For offenses covered under this section, Chapter Three, Part C (Obstruction) does not apply, unless the defendant obstructed the investigation, prosecution, or sentencing of the obstruction of justice count.

The base guideline for obstruction is now 14, but we believe it was 12 at the time of the crime. The guideline to be used is that in effect at the time of sentencing, unless it was less at the time of the crime. [fn1]

We'd like to see appellate lawyer Peter Goldberger (and any other federal sentencing guideline pros) weigh in on this.

Jury selection continues in the Terry Nichols trial. A potential juror yesterday told the Judge she heard 4 or 5 other potential jurors saying they intended to lie to get on the jury and convict Nichols. The Judge refused a defense motion for a mistrial. None of those jurors made it through the initial phase.

Still, if there were 4 or 5 who said it aloud, how many more were thinking the same thing? How many others were swayed by the remarks?

More details are here.

A potential juror revealed Tuesday that she overheard three or four others talk about lying to get on the jury so they could convict Terry Nichols. "I had to tell them right offhand that's not what we're here for," she told the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys. "We took an oath to be fair and impartial, and this whole time they're lying. That's wrong."

Judge Steven Taylor refused a defense request for a mistrial because of the revelation but promised to "deal with this."

John Kerry, a fairly staunch opponent of capital punishment, reiterates his stand today: Only for terrorists. While we'd prefer the death penalty be abolished and a moratorium put in place until then, Kerry is light years ahead of Bush on this issue.

Of course, most executions are done by the states, not the feds, so many will say his stand isn't likely to have a huge impact. Still, it's important to us that the leader of the free world oppose the death penalty, and we think it will be a position that foreign governments, most of whom have abolished the death penalty, will champion.

Kerry has some more good news this week in the polling department:

Kerry's momentum toward the Democratic nomination, meanwhile, has fueled increased belief among Democratic voters in Illinois that he can defeat Bush in November, a new Tribune/WGN-TV poll shows.

The poll, conducted March 3-6 among 602 likely Democratic primary voters, found that 76 percent believe Kerry has a good-to-excellent chance of beating Bush in the general election, up 5 percentage points from a similar poll three weeks ago

TomPaine.com today has an interesting article by political psychologist Martha Burk about how important the "Sex and the City" crowd vote will be this fall--single women voters.

Sorry, NASCAR dads, your 15 minutes are up. Single women are the new flavor of the month for the political punditocracy. Inspired by a survey conducted by Democratic pollsters Stan Greenberg and Celinda Lake showing an untapped gold mine of votes among women sans men, the buzz is all about how these babes can swing the election. With 16 million unmarried women now unregistered and 22 million unmarried women who are registered but didn't vote in the last election, this could be a formidable bloc.

According to Burk, 65% of the single women in this country think we are headed in the wrong direction.

Bush will be a tough sell this go-round for moderate women who believed him when he said he was a compassionate conservative. Women know he gave them a bait and switch. He tried to bench those soccer-daughters with an initiative to weaken Title IX. He has dismantled international family planning, even in countries with AIDS epidemics, closed the White House Office on Women's Issues and opened one on faith-based initiatives. That translates into federal dollars going to churches that work against women's rights, most notably in the fundamental right to control their own bodies. The War President is widely expected to tout advances for women in Afghanistan and Iraq as evidence that women should help him get re-elected. Putting aside the debate over whether women in those countries really are better off, the last time I looked, neither group could vote in the USA.

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Here's our final surgery update--about our wrist, not Ashcroft. We got the stitches out this morning. It was a success. Dr. In Sok Yi is our hero. We don't need any more therapy. We can resume all activities, using common sense. The area is still tender, and will be for a while, but the pain is gone. Thanks to all of you for your good wishes, they really felt good to read.

The hand-selected newsfeed on the left side of TalkLeft will resume next week. We're using common sense which tells us to wait until then.

Harvey Silverglate and Carl Takai, writing for the Boston Phoenix, say:

While we’re all fretting over the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft’s Justice Department is after much bigger game

First, let's take a look at the Patriot Act:

Personally shepherded through Congress by Attorney General John Ashcroft, it authorizes the kinds of things that send shivers down civil libertarians’ spines: invasions of personal privacy, restrictions on financial transactions, racial and ethnic profiling, blurring the line between foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement, and punitive registration requirements for immigrants and visitors. And that’s just a partial list.

Silverglate says our focus on the Patriot Act has distracted us from Bush's parallel move--taking away our "threshold rights" --

fair elections, open and publicly accountable government, judicial review of executive action, the right of the accused to a public jury trial, separation of powers among the three branches of government, and the rights to free expression and free association —

Silverglate argues that the Patriot Act provisions can be repealed or sunsetted. Threshold rights are more permanent.

The Guardian writes now the piece it intends to write after Bush announces that Osama bin Laden has been captured:

The capture of Osama bin Laden, while warmly welcomed around the world, raises several questions about the interface between the war on terror and the US election cycle. The most worrying of these is the suspicion that Mr Bin Laden had already been in custody for a considerable period. George Bush's official spokesman has vehemently denied charges that the al-Qaida leader was actually apprehended in December 2001. But there is more than a hint of a "non-denial denial" about the White House's rejection of claims that news of Mr Bin Laden's capture was timed to coincide with the climax of the Democratic party convention. It is not just die-hard cynics who found the White House spokesman Scott McClellan's "Where'd you get a crazy idea like that?" less than frank.

Further, it is hard to be convinced by the explanation that Mr Bin Laden's tanned and robust appearance was because "he worked out a lot", given that Mr Bin Laden is said to have been living in caves for almost three years. Similarly, Mr McClellan's description of the site of Mr Bin Laden's capture as "Pakistan, Afghanistan ... around there" was dangerously vague and left the White House vulnerable to troubling suspicions.