FCC Swear Word Censorship Policy Tossed By Federal Court

["By prohibiting all `patently offensive' references to sex, sexual organs and excretion without giving adequate guidance as to what `patently offensive' means, the FCC effectively chills speech, because broadcasters have no way of knowing what the FCC will find offensive," the appeals court wrote.

Victims of the crimes Harris-Moore is accused of were happy to see him in custody.

"These people that support him, they've never been violated by having him break into their homes or businesses," said Joni Fowler, manager of a cafe on Orcas Island north of Seattle where Harris-Moore is accused of taking as much as $1,500.

"Just knowing he has a huge network of supporters makes me really worry about the state of this country."

Fowler said she hopes Harris-Moore's arrest and upcoming court appearances will pop his mystique and fame -- "once everybody figures out he's no God."

Actually it IS a big story. As the comparisons make clear, this isn't just a slip or few slips of the tongue trying to capture a phrase(s) in someone else's speech. What you have here are pages of reproduced words, structure, and thought. To emphasize, the Post interviewed a reputed expert on the subject of plagiarism, who said that plagiarism can be based on words or ideas...and, she found that in the McInnis instance, the material plagiarized met both criteria (theft of words and ideas.)

Should Republican McInnis go on to win his gubernatorial primary on August 10th, well...you can imagine the Democratic references all the way to November. But wait! His Republican opponent--whats-his-name Maes from the further right reaches (who has a story about himself today on the second section's front page) has some $$$ issues of his own, having just agreed to pay a reduced penalty for violations of campaign financing law. With those two ethically challenged candidates...maybe Colorado citizens will be spared the usual "Republican values" campaign this time around.

For more potential Republican implosion in Colorado, see the internecine ideological battle in the Republican Senatorial primary. There, Jane Norton and Ken Buck are vying for who can move to the purist right. Maybe soon-to-be-outgoing Utah Senator Bob Bennett got it "right" when he observed recently that there is trouble in that Republican paradise due to purity positioning and other infighting. (He cited Nevada, Colorado, and Kentucky as examples.)

on another mind bending subject I was talking to a friend today about the whole "universe as hologram" thing I was reading about and googling I found this:

The Holographic Universe

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.
Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

We must preserve our racial identity

I am running as a candidate for state representative in Grafton County District 8. I am running as a Republican, but I have been endorsed by the American Third Position. I am also the American Third Position state chairman of New Hampshire. The American Third Position is a political party that stands for the interests of white Americans.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul says the poor in America are "enormously better off than the rest of the world," citing an old Cold War film that showed even impoverished homes had color
televisions.

By August 1987, Biden's campaign, whose messaging was confused due to staff rivalries,[124] had begun to lag behind those of Michael Dukakis and Dick Gephardt,[121] although he had still raised more funds than all candidates but Dukakis, and was seeing an upturn in Iowa polls.[122][125] In September 1987, the campaign ran into trouble when he was accused of plagiarizing a speech that had been made by Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labour Party.[126]

Howard Wolfson, the Clinton campaign's communications director, today accused Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) of committing "plagiarism" in a speech in Milwaukee on Saturday night.

[...]

Obama closely echoed a passage from a speech that Deval Patrick, now the Massachusetts governor, used at a campaign rally when he was running for that office in 2006.

Six officers with the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) were charged today in connection with the federal investigation of a police-involved shooting on the Danziger Bridge in the days after Hurricane Katrina, the Justice Department announced today.

h/t Huff Po (sorry, no link)

Fox News contributor and host of Fox Business' new libertarian show Judge Andrew Napolitano said over the weekend that President Bush and Vice President Cheney should have been indicted over their administration's conduct around Guantánamo Bay.

In an interview with Ralph Nader on C-SPAN, Napolitano blasted the former administration for suspending habeas corpus.

"What President Bush did with the suspension of habeas corpus, with the whole concept of Guantánamo Bay, with the whole idea that he could avoid and evade federal laws, treaties, federal judges and the constitution was blatantly unconstitutional -- and in some cases criminal," Napolitano said. "They should have been indicted. They absolutely should have been indicted. For torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrants. I'd like to say they should be indicted for lying but believe it or not, unless you're under oath, lying is not a crime."

Napolitano added that "the evidence...is overwhelming...that George W. Bush as President and Dick Cheney as Vice President participated in criminal conspiracies to violate the federal law and the guaranteed civil liberties of hundreds, maybe thousands, of human beings."

As someone who has never had a smartphone before I find the Droid to be really intuitive and responsive.  Haven't gotten everything figured out yet, but it does what I want it to do pretty quickly.  The keyboard was weird at first but in the first day of use I am already finding it much easier than it was in the beginning.

Who's Afraid of Federalism?
Gay marriage and the 10th Amendment

Last week a federal judge confounded both sides of the political spectrum by ruling that the 10th Amendment requires the federal government to recognize state-approved gay marriages. Progressives worried that U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro's reasoning cast doubt on the constitutionality of many existing federal programs, while conservatives worried that it required equal treatment of same-sex unions.

Since I am one of the few Americans who welcome both of these outcomes, perhaps you should take my opinion with a grain of salt. But it seems to me that conservatives are engaging in the sort of result-oriented constitutional analysis they so often decry when they shrink from a consistent application of federalism because it lends support to a social trend they fear.