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A two-year-old letter by Vice President Dick Cheney that pushed a controversial Alaska natural-gas pipeline bill is getting renewed scrutiny because of recently disclosed evidence in the Justice Department’s corruption case against Sen. Ted Stevens. In a conversation secretly tape-recorded by the FBI on June 25, 2006, Stevens discussed ways to get a pipeline bill through the Alaska Legislature with Bill Allen, an oil-services executive accused of providing the senator with about $250,000 in undisclosed financial benefits. According to a Justice motion, Stevens told Allen, “I’m gonna try to see if I can get some bigwigs from back here and say, ‘Look … you gotta get this done’.” Two days later, Cheney wrote a letter to the Alaska Legislature urging members to “promptly enact” a bill to build the pipeline.

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By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s Technology Voters’ Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.

[..]

After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became been a staunch ally of Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. Biden’s bill was backed by content companies including News Corp. but eventually died after Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo lobbied against it.

A few months later, Biden signed a letter that urged the Justice Department “to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks.” Critics of this approach said that the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, and not taxpayers, should pay for their own lawsuits.

Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA-backed bill called the Perform Act aimed at restricting Americans’ ability to record and play back individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services. (The RIAA sued XM Satellite Radio over precisely this point.)

All of which meant that nobody in Washington was surprised when Biden was one of only four U.S. senators invited to a champagne reception in celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA’s Jack Valenti, the RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance.

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Local first-grader Connor Bolduc, 6, experienced the first inkling of a coming lifetime of existential dread Monday upon recognizing his cruel destiny to participate in compulsory education for the better part of the next two decades, sources reported.

“I don’t want to go to school,” Bolduc told his parents, the crushing reality of his situation having yet to fully dawn on his naïve consciousness. “I want to play outside with my friends.”

While Bolduc stood waiting for the bus to pick him up on his first day of elementary school, his parents reportedly were able to “see the wheels turning in his little brain” as the child, for the first time in his life, began to understand how dire and hopeless his situation had actually become.

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The 9th bank of 2008 has just been shut down by the FDIC. 9 down, at least 991 to go.

For some historical perspective, 9,000 failed during the Great Depression and almost 3,000 during the S&L crisis. Anyone think the number won’t reach at least 1,000, given that between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in loses are expected? Total loses during the S&L crisis totaled only $0.16 trillion!

We have only scratched the surface of the current crisis, and the general public has no idea. Most of the capital of the U.S. financial system could be wiped out (sources: here and here).

The Columbian Bank and Trust Company, Topeka, Kansas, was closed today by the Kansas Bank Commissioner J. Thomas Thull, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was named receiver. To protect the depositors, the FDIC entered into a purchase and assumption agreement with Citizens Bank and Trust, Chillicothe, Missouri, to assume the insured deposits of The Columbian Bank and Trust Company.

The nine branches of The Columbian Bank and Trust Company will reopen on Monday as branches of Citizens Bank and Trust. Depositors of the failed bank will automatically become depositors of Citizens Bank and Trust. Deposits will continue to be insured by the FDIC, so there is no need for customers to change their banking relationship to retain their deposit insurance coverage.

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Senator Barack Obama has chosen Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware to be his running mate, turning to a leading authority on foreign policy and a longtime Washington hand to fill out the Democratic ticket, Mr. Obama announced in text and e-mail messages early Saturday.

[More on Biden on electoral-vote.com:]

Biden has an unusual biography as well as pros and cons. A brief rundown follows. He was born in Scranton, PA, to a working-class Irish Catholic family. They moved to Delaware whe he was 10. His father was a car salesman. He went to college in Delaware and then got a law degree from Syracuse University. Lawyers are drawn to politics like bees are to honey and at 27 was elected to the local county council. At 29 he ran for the Senate and won, despite being constitutionally ineligible. Fortunately, he hit 30 before being inaugurated so they let him him. He has been in the Senate ever since and is now in his sixth term and running for reelection this year.

A few months after his election to the Senate, his wife and baby daughter were killed in a car accident and his two young sons almost killed. He wanted to resign from the Senate to care for his boys but the Democrats convinced him to stay on. He decided to commute an hour and a half every day from his home near Wilmington, DE, to the Senate to maximize his time with them. Thirty-five years later, he is still doing it. In 1977, he married his current wife, Jill. In February 1988 he suffered a brain aneurysm but survived well enough to run for President that year but dropped out after he was caught plagiarizing part of a speech from a British politician, Neil Kinnock.

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There is apparently no limit to the Bush administration’s desire to invade Americans’ privacy in the name of national security. According to members of Congress, Attorney General Michael Mukasey is preparing to give the F.B.I. broad new authority to investigate Americans — without any clear basis for suspicion that they are committing a crime.

Why this urge to imitate STASI?

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For example, Detroit, whose mayor has been indicted on felony charges, hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1961. Buffalo has been even more stubborn. It started putting a Democrat in office back in 1954, and it hasn’t stopped since.

Unfortunately, those two cities may be alone at the top of the poverty rate list, but they’re not alone in their love for Democrats. Cincinnati, Ohio (third on the poverty rate list), hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1984. Cleveland, Ohio (fourth on the list), has been led by a Democrat since 1989. St. Louis, Missouri (sixth), hasn’t had a Republican since 1949, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (eighth), since 1908, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (ninth), since 1952 and Newark, New Jersey (10th), since 1907.

The only two cities in the top 10 that I didn’t mention (Miami, Florida, and El Paso, Texas) haven’t had Republicans in office either — just Democrats, independents or nonpartisans.

[..]

I consider myself a conservative, but I consider myself an American and a human being first. When people whom I normally agree with screw things up, I call them on it. Yet the people in these cities apparently don’t. Newark keeps drinking the Kool-Aid, electing the same people with the same ideas, slipping down the poverty list (along with the “Places Never to Visit Unless it’s the Airport” list) and wondering why.

We’ve talked a lot about “change” in this country recently, but there’s a much more important catchphrase that we’ve neglected: “All politics is local.” Maybe instead of focusing so much on who we put in charge of our country, we should focus more on who we put in charge of our cities.

Take a look at Forbes‘ 2005 list of the ten U.S. cities with the highest median incomes, and then checked out the political affiliation of the mayor of each:

1. San Jose, Calif. - Chuck Reed (D)

2. Anchorage, Alaska - Mark Begich (D)

3. San Francisco, Calif. - Gavin Newsom (D)

4. Virginia Beach, Va. - Meyera E. Oberndorf (a quick search didn’t reveal her affiliation, but she donated to the Virginia Democratic Party)

5. San Diego, Calif. - Jerry Sanders (R)

6. Anaheim, Calif. - Curt Pringle (R)

7. Raleigh, N.C. - Charles Meeker (D)

8. Seattle, Wash. - Greg Nickels (D)

9. Washington, D.C. - Adrian Fenty (D)

10. Honolulu, Hawaii - Mufi Hannemann (D)

So Democrats are mayors of the poorest cities. And the richest cities. I guess Glenn Beck is just a douche-bag, then.

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Does the world really need another port of Myst? Maybe not, but get ready to play it on the iPhone sometime soon.

Cyan — the developer behind the puzzle-based series — has covertly announced on its forums that a small team is working on bringing the game over to the touch-friendly device. How small? Three members strong.

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A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.

The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold.

The flawed software is on both touch screen and optical scan voting machines made by Premier and the problem with vote counts is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that feed many memory cards to a central counting database rapidly.

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The McCain campaign is road-testing a new argument in responding to Obama’s criticism of his number-of-houses gaffe, an approach the McCain camp has never tried before: The houses gaffe doesn’t matter because … he was a POW!

“This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison,” spokesman Brian Rogers told the Washington Post.

They must have taken a hint from the Rudy “9/11″ Giuliani playbook. Let’s try this:

McCain Accused Of Taking Bribes From Abramoff
: “This is a guy who didn’t touch hard currency for five and a half years — in prison,” spokesman Brian Rogers told the Washington Post.

2003 McCain Arrest for DWI Uncovered: “This is a guy who didn’t have a sip of booze for five and a half years — in prison,” spokesman Brian Rogers told the Washington Post.

McCain Caught Cheating With 22 Year-Old ASU Intern: “This is a guy who didn’t get laid at all for five and a half years — in prison,” spokesman Brian Rogers told the Washington Post.

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But he took more questions, including a pointed one on his immigration plan.

McCain responded by saying immigrants were taking jobs nobody else wanted. He offered anybody in the crowd $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Arizona.

Shouts of protest rose from the crowd, with some accepting McCain’s job offer.

“I’ll take it!” one man shouted.

McCain insisted none of them would do such menial labor for a complete season. “You can’t do it, my friends.”

Some in the crowd said they didn’t appreciate McCain questioning their work ethic.

$400 a day x 20 days in a month = $8,000 a month. Call it three months of work in a summer, that’s $24,000 for three months work.

A lot of college students would LOVE to be paid $24,000 each summer since that would be enough to pay their college costs each year. What a great idea! Is McCain going to fund the program personally?

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This is so simple you’ll puke.

1. Get yourself a key ring and 7 or 10 old housekeys.

2. Go to the nearest John McCain event.

3. Hold them up and jingle them. Loud. Extra points if you can do this when the man himself is speaking.

4. When somebody asks you what you’re doing, tell them you’re just helping Johnny Boy remember how many houses he and his super-fantabulously wealthy wife own.

And for bonus points:

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McCain has himself described having an adverse reaction to the sound of jangling keys, which reminds him of his Vietnam jailers.

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Two Republicans close to the situation say McCain has apparently settled on Mitt Romney as his running mate.

Two additional GOP sources say McCain had not offered the slot to anyone as of Thursday night, and that he could still change his mind.

If McCain did decide on Multiple-Choice Mitt, himself a millionaire and owner of a bunch of homes, you can understand more clearly why they are now completely freaking out over the first real punch Obama has thrown at them despite their having been running attack ads for months. This hurts.

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In this Raw Intel we find some Turkish journalists caught in a war zone while on the job. One reporter was shot in the head but somehow has returned to stable condition. The Turkish team was in between the town of Gori and breakaway South Ossetia where Georgian and Russian forces have collided.

The Frequency of Body Parts in Songs, by genre.

Heat maps of where people liked touch/be touched.
Locations by size where people like to touch/be touched.

via

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Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview Wednesday that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, own.

“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

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Jowie Chen, a doctoral student in political science at Stanford, obtained the records of 2.6 million applications for FEMA disaster assistance in Florida in 2004. (This happened not because the Bush administration made them available voluntarily, but because four Florida newspapers won a Freedom of Information Act suit.) Chen then mapped these applications and the subsequent FEMA grants into counties and precincts, added data on actual weather conditions in these locations, their demographic characteristics, and finally local voting patterns in recent Federal elections. The paper can be found here. The following map shows part of his results.

The above map shows the 26 Florida counties whose residents were eligible to apply for individual FEMA aid after Hurricane Charley. Dixie and Levy counties were declared eligible by Bush, even though both counties were far away from the storm and had calm weather.