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Republican Babara Donno’s faltering campaign has hit a new low.

Port Washington Police Thursday night arrested one of Barbara Donno’s paid campaign consultants, Vincent Jeffrey, 22, of Manhasset, and charged him with the theft of Senator Johnson’s re-election signs.

A Johnson campaign volunteer caught a person matching Jeffrey’s description attempting to take a sign from Port Washington Blvd., just north of Wakefield Avenue, during Thursday’s morning rush hour. The campaign later discovered that 70 to 100 Senator Johnson signs, many along Port Washington Blvd. and Searingtown Road, turned up missing within that same time period. Nearly all of them were replaced by Donno signs.

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Here’s why you don’t piss off Letterman:

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A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye.

Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.

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John Freshwater, the creationist teacher in Mt. Vernon, Ohio who burned a cross in a student’s arm, is demanding that the identity of the student and his parents be made public as the appeal of his termination begins.

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After a recess in the 3-hour hearing today, Hamilton said he has heard no evidence that the family is in danger. He believes the school district is using the issue of protecting the student’s identity as a “delay tactic.”

“People have a right to confront their accusers,” Hamilton said.

And of course, Freshwater does have that right and this hearing includes that right. That does not mean he has the right to expose his accuser’s identity to the rest of the world. You want evidence for this? How about the fact that there have already been reports of harassment and bullying at the school, including one student pushed into a locker and called a “stupid atheist bitch” for not supporting Freshwater?

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Whenever Christian hegemony is challenged in this country, a subset of those who enjoy that hegemony and want it to continue react violently. It has always been that way. Hamilton is ignoring history. And frankly, I think he’s doing so because he wants this kid to be bullied and he wants the parents to be harassed. That might make them decide to drop their case. And that, folks, is shameful.

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Credit: STEREO Project, NASA

On September 29, this magnificent eruptive solar prominence lifted away from the Sun’s surface, unfurling into space over the course of several hours. Suspended in twisted magnetic fields, the hot plasma structure is many times the size of planet Earth and was captured in this view by the Sun-watching STEREO (Ahead) spacecraft.

The image was recorded in extreme ultraviolet light emitted by ionized Helium, an element originally identified in the solar spectrum. Seen against the brilliant solar surface in visible light, such prominences appear as dark filaments because they are relatively cool. But they are bright themselves when viewed against the blackness of space, arcing above the Sun’s edge. A video of the eruption (a 2.6MB .mov file) is available here.

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“In Arista v. Does 1-17, the RIAA’s case targeting students at the University of Oregon, the Oregon Attorney General’s motion to quash the RIAA’s subpoena — pending for about a year — has reached a perplexing conclusion. The Court agreed with the University that the subpoena, as worded, imposed an undue burden on the University by requiring it to produce ‘sufficient information to identify alleged infringers,’ which would have required the University to ‘conduct an investigation,’ but then allowed the RIAA to subpoena the identities of ‘persons associated by dorm room occupancy or username with the 17 IP addresses listed’ even though those people may be completely innocent. In his 8-page decision (PDF), the Judge also ‘presumed’ the RIAA lawyers’ misrepresentations were an ‘honest mistake,’ made no reference at all to the fact, pointed out by the Attorney General, that the RIAA investigators (Safenet, formerly MediaSentry) were not licensed, rejected all of the AG’s privacy arguments under both state and federal law, and rejected the AG’s request for discovery into the RIAA’s investigative tactics.”

It makes you wonder how much the judge got paid to do this..

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While the Wall Street financial crisis gripped the world Icelanders woke up one day to find that the Icelandic state had forcibly taken over the country’s 3rd biggest bank, Glitnir. The worry is now that one of the two larger banks could also fail and the state wouldn’t have the resources to do anything as the two remaining of the big 3 have assets totaling 10 times the GDP of Iceland. While the Central Bank claims it was the only option in a bad situation, prior bad blood between one of the Central Bank’s directors, a former Prime Minister, and the main owner of Glitnir have some wondering if Icelanders have just been witness to “the biggest bank robbery in Icelandic history.”

[written in 1719:]

Every now and then the world is visited by one of these delusive seasons, when “the credit system,” as it is called, expands to full luxuriance, everybody trusts everybody; a bad debt is a thing unheard of; the broad way to certain and sudden wealth lies plain and open; and men are tempted to dash forward boldly, from the facility of borrowing.

Promissory notes, interchanged between scheming individuals, are liberally discounted at the banks, which become so many mints to coin words into cash; and as the supply of words is inexhaustible, it may readily be supposed what a vast amount of promissory capital is soon in circulation. Every one now talks in thousands; nothing is heard but gigantic operations in trade; great purchases and sales of real property, and immense sums made at every transfer. All, to be sure, as yet exists in promise; but the believer in promises calculates the aggregate as solid capital, and falls back in amazement at the amount of public wealth, the “unexampled state of public prosperity.”

Now is the time for speculative and dreaming or designing men. They relate their dreams and projects to the ignorant and credulous, dazzle them with golden visions, and set them madding after shadows. The example of one stimulates another; speculation rises on speculation; bubble rises on bubble; every one helps with his breath to swell the windy superstructure, and admires and wonders at the magnitude of the inflation he has contributed to produce.

Speculation is the romance of trade, and casts contempt upon all its sober realities. It renders the stock-jobber a magician, and the exchange a region of enchantment. It elevates the merchant into a kind of knight-errant, or rather a commercial Quixote. The slow but sure gains of snug percentage become despicable in his eyes; no “operation” is thought worthy of attention that does not double or treble the investment. No business is worth following that does not promise an immediate fortune. As he sits musing over his ledger, with pen behind his ear, he is like La Mancha’s hero in his study, dreaming over his books of chivalry. His dusty counting-house fades before his eyes, or changes into a Spanish mine; he gropes after diamonds, or dives after pearls. The subterranean garden of Aladdin is nothing to the realms of wealth that break upon his imagination.

Could this delusion always last, the life of a merchant would indeed be a golden dream; but it is as short as it is brilliant. Let but a doubt enter, and the “season of unexampled prosperity” is at end. The coinage of words is suddenly curtailed; the promissory capital begins to vanish into smoke; a panic succeeds, and the whole superstructure, built upon credit and reared by speculation, crumbles to the ground, leaving scarce a wreck behind:

“It is such stuff as dreams are made of.”

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A Republican official in Michigan has filed a defamation suit against an independent news site, over a story in which he is quoted as stating his party plans to challenge voters whose names and addresses appear on foreclosure lists.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” James Carabelli, the chairman of the Macomb County Republican Party is quoted as saying in the Michigan Messenger in an article published September 10.

Just a few days after the article was published, Carabelli back-tracked on his statement, telling the Macomb Daily that the party has “no plans to do anything.” Later, he issued a full-throated denial, calling the original article “not true.”

The first step to fighting cockroaches: expose them to light.

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There are hundreds of thousands of people in the United States who filed registration applications but were not put on the voter rolls because of actual or alleged defects in their applications.

Unless these people have already fixed the problem or filed another application which was accepted, they will not be able to vote in November.

If you plan to vote, please check this site!

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Today’s blog stupidity was only matched by the gullibility of traders who acted on the rumor. And with electronic trading and a few traders capable of wielding so much power, individual investors are essentially helpless.

It’s not true. The rumor is not true. But the reaction to it just goes to show the enormous insecurity some traders suffer toward Apple and its shares. And how easy it is to manipulate this stock. That in itself is an unfortunate risk factor investors have to accept if they’re going to put their hard-earned cash into this company.

How unfortunate. But such is the ridiculous climate on Wall Street right now. I hope they find this guy who wrote this post. But all the traders who dumped Apple shares based on that garbage have some searching of their own to do. Soul-searching. Selling first and asking questions later is the work of amateurs.

I saw the rumor yesterday, and it took me all of 10 seconds to find out it wasn’t true. I think “amateur” is too friendly a description.