Wesley Clark says Howard Dean offered him the VP slot on his ticket if Dean got the nomination. Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, denies it.

Speaking in a taped interview on ABC's "This Week," Clark said Dean had asked him to be his running mate should Dean win the Democratic nomination in a conversation before Clark entered the race.

After the interview was broadcast, Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi said on the same program that such a conversation never happened. And after that, Clark's communications director disputed Trippi's response. "Joe Trippi may want to check in with his candidate before talking," Matt Bennett said in a statement from Clark headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. "Howard Dean did in fact offer Wes Clark a place on the ticket in a one-on-one meeting that Trippi did not attend."

What does Dean say?

Update: The LA Times reports Clark's campaign is advancing after early missteps.

Update 12/22: Dean denies it:

"No, I did not," Dean told Reuters in a telephone interview. "I think Wes is a good guy. I think he'd be a good running mate, but I think it would be highly foolish of me to offer anybody the running mate spot."

We have no idea if this is true or not, but it sounds plausible. A British paper is reporting that Saddam was held by the Kurds, drugged and left for US troops to capture.

Saddam Hussein was captured by US troops only after he had been taken prisoner by Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for American soldiers to recover him, a British Sunday newspaper said.

Saddam came into the hands of the Kurdish Patriotic Front after being betrayed to the group by a member of the al-Jabour tribe, whose daughter had been raped by Saddam's son Uday, leading to a blood feud, reported the Sunday Express, which quoted an unnamed senior British military intelligence officer.

The newspaper said the full story of events leading up to the ousted Iraqi president's capture on December 13 near his hometown of Tikrit in northern Iraq, "exposes the version peddled by American spin doctors as incomplete".

Update: DEBKAfile says Saddam Hussein was not in hiding, he was a prisoner. The Sydney Morning Herald has more on the Kurds' claim.

Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) have teamed up to sponsor a terrible bill--one that panders to irrational fear but resonates politically. It is the "Gang Prevention and Effective Deterrence Act."

The legislation seeks $450 million to aid law enforcement and prosecutors. It is rife with new categories of crimes, added punishments for having a gun or being a gang member and myriad "think twice" measures — hoping gang members will reconsider before committing a crime.

Anyone who knows gangs knows that lawmakers cannot conceive of a law that would lead a hard-core gang member to "think twice." We already have enough gang- and gun-related sentencing "enhancements" to send a 17-year-old who has never been in trouble with the law to prison for 35 years to life. And that's without his ever touching a gun or ever being an actual member of a gang. We need to overhaul these enhancements, not add to them.

Gangs are not all that mysterious. Reformers know what works with them and what doesn't. "Gang experts, intervention practitioners, social scientists, researchers and enlightened law enforcement officials all agree." What works is prevention, intervention and enforcement.

Al Gore's son was arrested and charged with misdemeanor possession of marijuana following a traffic stop in Maryland. His two companions were also arrested.

Albert A. Gore III, 21, was arrested Friday night after he was stopped for driving a vehicle without its headlights on....A Montgomery County, Md., police officer stopped the car, a dark-colored Cadillac, in Bethesda, a Washington suburb, around 11:30 p.m. Friday.

The officer noticed the car's windows and sunroof were open, despite cold temperatures Friday night. There was also a smell of marijuana coming from the vehicle, according to a news release from the police department.

A search of the vehicle turned up a partial marijuana cigarette, a cigarette box containing suspected marijuana, and a soft drink can that also smelled of marijuana.

We wonder if his name wasn't Al Gore III, whether he wouldn't have just been issued a summons. What a waste of law enforcement resources.

On Monday, a Brooklyn jury will deliberate on life or death for a convicted crack dealer and killer-- and on John Ashcroft:

There is no seat for John Ashcroft in the Brooklyn courtroom where Emile Dixon, a convicted killer and crack dealer, is fighting for his life. But as the jurors heard arguments last week about whether to impose capital punishment, Mr. Ashcroft, the United States attorney general, was mentioned so often that he might as well have pulled up a chair.

"This death penalty prosecution was ordered by John Ashcroft," Richard W. Levitt, one of Mr. Dixon's lawyers, said in his summation on Friday. "You don't have to listen to John Ashcroft."

Jack Smith, one of the federal prosecutors pressing for execution, mentioned Mr. Ashcroft, too. He told jurors that he had to answer Mr. Levitt. "He's hoping one of you doesn't like John Ashcroft," Mr. Smith said, adding, "Politics have no place here. None."

Here's hoping one juror doesn't like John Ashcroft. For more on how Ashcroft has been pandering the death penalty--even over the objections of his prosecutors--go here and here and here and here.

An ABC News poll shows that most people support a life over death sentence for John Lee Malvo, who was a juvenile at the time of the sniper attacks.

Given a choice, 52 percent say they'd prefer a sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for Malvo, while 37 percent prefer the death penalty. (Support for execution is higher, 56 percent, when no other option is offered).

The results reflect broader concerns about executing juveniles. With no alternative offered, a quarter of Americans support the death penalty for juvenile killers in general, a quarter say it depends on the circumstances and half oppose it. But given an alternative, 62 percent prefer mandatory life; just 21 percent favor capital punishment.

The Judge presiding over the cases of the Miami anti-free trade protesters issued some harsh comments this week, among them, that he saw police committing felonies with his own eyes:

A judge presiding over the cases of free trade protesters said in court that he saw ''no less than 20 felonies committed by police officers'' during the November demonstrations, adding to a chorus of complaints about police conduct.

Judge Richard Margolius, 60, made the remarks in open court last week, saying he was taken aback by what he witnessed while attending the protests. ''Pretty disgraceful what I saw with my own eyes. And I have always supported the police during my entire career,'' he said, according to a court transcript. ``This was a real eye-opener. A disgrace for the community.''

The Judge said he may remove himself from new cases regarding the arrests--and that:

''I probably would have been arrested myself if it had not been for a police officer who recognized me,'' said the judge, who wears his hair in a graying ponytail.

Move On is sponsoring a political advertisng contest called Bush in 30 Seconds. It is seeking home-grown amateur anti-Bush commericials. The winning ad will be televised during the week of the President's State of the Union Address next month.

The top 15 finalists will be sent out to our panel of celebrity judges which includes Michael Moore, Donna Brazile, Jack Black, Janeane Garofalo, Margaret Cho and Gus Van Sant.

Go here to register to vote. The first round of voting is now open.

The D.C. Court of Appeals has handed a victory to those who share music files on the Internet. While it did not legalize the practice, it ruled that internet service providers do not have to turn over the names of its customers.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, basically says an Internet service doesn't have to reveal the name of a subscriber who is trading files illegally if the online service didn't store the information on its own network.

The ruling overturns a lower court decision that ordered Verizon Communications to reveal the name of a subscriber through a simple subpoena. The customer was trading files directly with other users on a peer-to-peer network, and the online service was ''acting merely as a conduit,'' the judges wrote.

The opinion is here (pdf). EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has more.

Beautiful Horizons, Randy Paul's excellent blog on Latin America, has its first blogiversary.

Jay Caruso of Classless Warfare writes about a victim of the drug war. Don't forget to update your bookmarks for what used to be the Daily Rant. Jay and Jane are still together, just under the new name.

Mark Kleiman writes about the fake Dallas drug story. He's surprised at the lack of media coverage. We've written about it a few times--here

Pacific Views on Joe Lieberman: "A sanctimonious whiner who perpetually carries himself as though he's smelled something unpleasant doesn't stand a chance."

Lisa English of Ruminate This is back today with some good stuff on Bush and compassionate conservatism.

Via Bush Wars, we read about Mahmoud Abu Rideh, who has been held for two years in Great Britain under anti-terror legislation that prevents him from knowing the evidence against him. He has not been charged or tried for any crime. He is one of 14 such detainees. He tells his story of despair in a letter that reached The Guardian.

"The British security services arrested me at 5.30 in the morning. They broke the door while I am sleeping and scared my children - I have five children between the ages of three years and nine years." He was taken straight to Belmarsh prison in south-east London, with no access to a lawyer.

"At 7 o'clock in the morning they told me that you are going to stay all your life in Belmarsh. There is a unit inside it, it is like a prison in the prison. They put me alone in a small room where you face bad treatment and racism and humiliation and biting and swearing.

"They prevented us from going to Friday prayers and every 24 hours there is only one hour walk in front of the cells and half an hour walking inside a cage. You do not see sun. You cannot tell whether it is night or day. Every thing is dark."

Call us cynical, but we're putting two and two together and coming up with a plan by the Administration to spin support for Sen. Hatch's much criticized "Victory Act" (pdf) which seeks to reclassify many drug offenses as crimes of "narco-terrorism" carrying even more draconian penalties than those currently in place.

Yesterday there was the news that a boatload of hash was seized in the Persian Gulf. Of ten or twelve people on board, depending on which news report you read, three or four were reported to have unspecified "links" or unspecified "clear ties" to Al Qaeda. The Administration spin is that the load belongs to Al Qaeda, is worth ten million, and the money would have been used to finance Al Qaeda's activities.

Today, a boat with meth and heroin aboard was intercepted. Watch, this will be linked to Al Qaeda as well--and then the Administration will tell us that drug trafficking is funding Al Qaeda, and if we're patriotic, we'll support the Victory Act, which likely will be introduced in January.

Once again, the Administration is becoming a master at using the media to condition us to their next power grab. But the last thing we need are more anti-terror laws that allow the Justice Department to bypass the Fourth Amendment and its required judicial oversight.