Texas Congressman Sheila Jackson Lee stands firm in her opposition to the war despite Saddam's capture.

"I believe we should have had a congressional vote before declaring war, and we should have allowed U.N. inspectors time to finish their work," Jackson Lee said during a news conference at Bush Intercontinental Airport. "As to WMDs (weapons of mass destruction), the fact they have not been found I believe shows I was right."

In other Saddam news, he remains sarcastic and defiant during interrogation attempts.

As to his trial before the Iraqi Governing Council, the likelihood of international acceptance seems slim:

General Kofi Annan expressed hope Monday that Saddam Hussein's capture will accelerate reconciliation among Iraqis, but he said the United Nations could not support bringing Saddam Hussein before a tribunal that might sentence him to death.

....Annan stressed that any trial for Saddam must meet international norms and standards and he reiterated the United Nations' longstanding opposition to the death penalty in any U.N.-sanctioned tribunal. ''As secretary-general, as the U.N., as an organization, we are not going to now turn around and support the death penalty,'' he said.

The police pull you over for a traffic stop. Drugs are found in the car. No one claims them. The Supreme Court decided today that the cops can then arrest all occupants of the vehicle.

Some criminal justice experts say the court's ruling, a short, unanimous opinion penned by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, gives the nod to police dragnets that could snare innocent people with the guilty.

"People get into cars all the time and have no idea what the driver or someone else may have put in the vehicle," said Tracey Maclin, a Boston University law professor who wrote a brief for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in the case. "This will apply to people like the coed who's at a party late at night and accepts a ride home from a group of friends. If that car is stopped and police find drugs, 10 out of 10 police officers will now arrest everyone to find out whose they are."

John Wesley Hall of FourthAmendment.com has the details. The case is Maryland v. Pringle and you can read the decision here.

Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh filed a court petition today seeking to keep his medical records private:

The conservative radio host cannot be treated for his medical conditions because the state seized his charts and files last month and intimidated his doctors, the court petition said.

"No citizen would want these highly personal details to be held by minions of the state to finger through at their leisure. Nor would any sane person wish his medical diagnosis and medical prescriptions to be widely published on television shows, tabloid newspapers, Web sites and the like," the petition says.

Limbaugh's attorney, Roy Black, has accused the State Attorney's Office of having political motives for its investigation.

Mr. Limbaugh is being investigated for illegally purchasing prescription pain medication and possibly for money laundering.

Kevin at Calpundit went to a blogger meet last night and they discussed all kinds of things, including lefty bloggers:

Most lefty bloggers are actually pretty moderate liberals: me, Josh Marshall, Atrios, Matt Yglesias, Jeralyn Merritt, Brad DeLong, etc. (Atrios is a hardnosed partisan, but his politics are actually fairly centrist liberal. Surprise!) Most righty bloggers are actually libertarians, not conservatives.

Wampum is still accepting nominations for the 2003 Lefty Blog Awards, called the Koufax Awards. We won the award last year for best single issue blog. We hope to get nominated again this year. Lots of worthy competition, go over and check out the multitude of submissions and plug some of your own favorites.

Walter in Denver has the first Rocky Mountain Blog Roundup today. Nice.

Say hello to A Burst of Light. We found him in our comments section and like his style.

In recognition of Saddam's capture, Buzzflash is re-running it's March editorial on the real reasons Bush went to war.

New article at the Independent Institute: Uncle Sam's Guantanamo Prison: Outside the Rule of Law by Brigid O'Neil.

Howard Dean's blog has the full text of his foreign policy speech. Dave Cullen of Conclusive Evidence has thoughts on speculation that Dean is "toast." (He's not.) Skippy too has some thoughts on the demise of Dean (not) subject.

Also say hello to Battlegrounds Ballotboxes, internet political activist Kevin Thurman's new blog.

Avena and Other Mexican Nationals (Mexico v. USA) is being argued this week in the International Court of Justice in the Hague. This is the lawsuit that Mexico has brought against the US over its failure to advise 52 Mexican nationals on death rows in the U.S. of their Vienna Convention rights, specifically, their right to consular help after arrest.

The case is the result of a long-running dispute between the United States and its southern neighbor and underlines deep concern among some of Washington's closest allies over its capital punishment laws.

"We are asking the court to tell the United States to retry these nationals, but this time with the consular assistance they are entitled to," said Juan Manuel Gomez Robledo, chief legal representative for Mexico. "Consular help could have meant the difference between life and death," lawyer Sandra Babcock told the judges as the Mexican side made its opening arguments.

Mexico accuses U.S. authorities of breaching the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by failing to tell the Mexicans -- subsequently sentenced to death in 10 U.S. states -- of their right to assistance from their national representatives.....Mexico went to The Hague-based International Court of Justice or World Court because all other legal and diplomatic efforts to solve the issue had been exhausted, an official said.

According to Amnesty International statistics, a total of 71 prisoners were executed in the United States last year, bringing to 820 the total number of prisoners put to death since the resumption of capital punishment there in 1977. The death penalty has not been applied in Mexico for at least four decades.

The court's history of the case is here. The oral arguments started today and will continue on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Transcripts can be accessed here.

Kobe Bryant filed his pre-trial motions today. He is seeking to introduce evidence of his accuser's two purported suicide attempts and of her being prescribed anti-psychotic medication (pdf format). He is also challenging the constitutionality of the rape shield law(pdf format)--on it's face--because the standard for admitting prior bad acts of the accuser is higher than that provided for admitting prior bad acts of the defendant. You can access and read the motions at the court's website here. Note that all pleadings are in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format.

The defense motion characterizes her as an extreme attention seeker and says her suicide attempts were done to gain the attention of her former boyfriend.

"The purported suicide attempts are extreme attention-seeking behavior that illustrate the accuser's ulteriour motives, scheme and plan to engage in dramatic acts in order to draw attention to herself--even when these acts are extremely harmful to herself and others.

We think the issue of anti-psychotic medication is very relevant to the accuser's credibility. Was she on the medication at the time of the incident with Kobe? Had she abruptedly stopped taking it? Did it skew her perceptions? Did it cause her to distort reality? Did it render her in denial?

Kobe is facing life in prison over this charge. We think he has the right to bring out information that shows the accuser has a motive, history or propensity for lying or that her emotional instablility may have resulted in her fabricating the rape charge.

Update: The AP reports on the motions. Kobe's lawyers are moving to keep his t-shirt (which reportedly had some of the accuser's blood on it) out of evidence:

The defense said the T-shirt should not have been taken as evidence because Bryant was wearing it during the search, and the warrant authorized them to take only items from the room, not his person.

Aaron Patterson, a wrongfully convicted inmate released from death row and pardoned by former Illinois Governor George Ryan is running for Congress.

Patterson was one of four men pardoned in January as part of then-Gov. George Ryan's historic clearing of death row in his final days in office. Patterson, who was convicted of killing an elderly Chicago couple in 1986, spent 17 years on death row, despite his claims police tortured him into confessing to the crime.

"I feel like the very laws that put me on death row, I want to go down there and change them," Patterson said in a telephone interview. He received a $161,500 settlement from the state for his faulty conviction and has filed a $30 million federal lawsuit against police officers and others involved in his case.

Patterson's congressional platform includes,:

...abolishing the death penalty, cracking down on police misconduct and investigating the cases of other inmates who claim they were wrongfully convicted.

We recently wrote about Mr. Patterson here, following a long profile, Live from Death Row, that appeared last month in the Chicago Tribune.

Update: Patterson's candidacy has been cleared by the Ill. State Board of Elections.

Mark Geragos, attorney for Scott Peterson, accused of killing his wife, Laci Peterson, and the couple's unborn child, filed a change of venue motion today. Geragos wants the trial moved to LA. His motion cites studies showing that 98% of the people in Modesto have heard of the case (no suprise there) and that 75% have formed an opinion. That's a problem, in our view. The trial clearly needs to be moved.

"The lynch-mob mentality that has been created in this case has become so poisonous that the nature of the news coverage has in many instances been reduced to nothing more than vilification," Geragos wrote. "The widespread, pervasive and negative nature of the police reports surrounding this case have made it impossible to seat a fair and unbiased jury in Stanislaus County."

The AP reports:

Saddam Hussein could be tried "in the next few weeks" and could be executed if convicted, an Iraqi Governing Council member said Monday. Other council members said the televised trial would likely begin later, perhaps by summer.

The trial will begin "very soon, in the next few weeks," Mouwafak al-Rabii, a Shiite Muslim council member, told The Associated Press.

President Bush said Monday it was up to the Iraqis to determine Saddam's fate but said the United States will "work with the Iraqis to develop a way to try him that withstands international scrutiny."

Juan R. Cole, a Middle East expert and professor of history at the University of Michigan, who has an excellent weblog, says:

The commentators on cable news shows on Sunday seemed to think that Saddam's capture guarantees Bush's reelection in November of 2004. Well, incumbents have great advantages, and most often do get reelected. But Saddam won't do it for Bush. In a way, the capture came too early for those purposes. It will be a very dim memory in October, 2004.

The Sunni Arab insurgency will continue at least for a while (see below), and the possibility that the Shiites will make more and more trouble cannot be ruled out. The US military is stuck in the country for the foreseeable future at something approaching current troop levels. The move to give civil authority to a transitional Iraqi government may not go smoothly. The administration will have to ask Congress for another big appropriation for Iraq sometime before the '04 election, and that won't help Bush's popularity. The Iraqi economy is still a basket case, the oil pipelines are still being sabotaged or looted, and a whole host of everyday problems remain that having Saddam in custody will not resolve. If Iraq is still going this badly in October of 2004, it would be a real drag on the Bush campaign. Yes, I said "this badly." One arrest doesn't turn it around, except in the fantasy world of political theater in which pundits seem to live.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case in which Vice President Dick Cheney has refused to turn over documents pertaining to secret contacts with energy officials.

The court agreed to hear an appeal from the administration, which is fighting a lawsuit brought by watchdog and environmental groups over the energy task force Cheney assembled. The panel met for several months in 2001 and issued a report that favored opening more public lands to oil and gas drilling and proposed a range of other steps supported by industry.

The lawsuit seeks to force the administration to provide details about the panel's records and inner workings. The groups allege the industry representatives in effect functioned as members of the government panel, which included Cabinet secretaries and lower-level administration employees.

The watchdog group Judicial Watch and an environmental organization, the Sierra Club, had won permission from a lower court to gather records related to the energy task force.

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The Red Cross has asked to see Saddam Hussein and check on the conditions under which he is being held:

A Red Cross spokesman, Florian Westphal, would not comment directly on Rumsfeld's comments. But he said Saddam "was the commander in chief of the Iraqi army, which seems to indicate that he should at least be presumed a POW." "We expect any state bound by the Geneva Conventions to live up to its commitments," he told The Associated Press.

....Westphal said while the Geneva Conventions allow captors to interrogate POWs, the prisoners do not have to answer questions. They are only obliged to give the information familiar from movies - name, rank and serial number.

Westphal said nothing in the Geneva Conventions stops POWs from being tried for war crimes or regular offenses, although they cannot be charged simply for taking up arms against the enemy.

Westphal would not comment on whether the U.S. authorities had violated the Geneva Conventions in transmitting video images of an unshaven Saddam being examined by a doctor shortly after his capture.

Article 13 of the 1949 Conventions, which set basic standards in armed conflict, says that prisoners should be treated humanely and should "at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity."