In a Daily Standard exclusive interview, John McCain explains that he could choose a pro-choice running mate but not one who is pro-gay: “I think it’s a fundamental tenet of our party to be pro-life but that does not mean we exclude people from our party that are pro-choice. We just have a–albeit strong–but just it’s a disagreement. And I think [Tom] Ridge is a great example of that. Far moreso than Bloomberg, because Bloomberg is pro-gay rights, pro, you know, a number...

Police have a new secret weapon: Across the country, police are using GPS devices to snare thieves, drug dealers, sexual predators and killers, often without a warrant or court order. Privacy advocates said tracking suspects electronically constitutes illegal search and seizure, violating Fourth Amendment rights of protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and is another step toward George Orwell’s Big Brother society. Law enforcement officials, when they discuss the issue at all,...

Yesterday afternoon Ars Technica’s Joel Hruska reported: …several security experts have spoken up, and raised the question of whether or not the Russian government is actually involved. According to Gadi Evron, former Chief information security officer (CISO) for the Israeli government’s ISP, there’s compelling historical evidence to suggest that the Russian military is not involved. He confirms that Georgian websites are under botnet attack, and that yes, these attacks are...

Happenstance has it that as the WaPo’s Alec MacGillis explores Obama’s “age problem” he’s out visiting places I’m intimately familiar with. On Monday he reported from Lancaster, PA., my childhood stomping ground, to illustrate the “resistance from voters over 65.” Those born between 1930 and 1945 are squarely “in McCain’s age cohort.” Obama’s having no luck with them. The boomers who follow right behind, they’re a different...

The Chronicle tells us that A Professor Is in the Hot Seat After Mooning Debate Judges: A debate coach for Fort Hays State University, in Kansas, is under review by the institution after he swore at officials and mooned judges at a tournament earlier this year, in an incident that was recorded and uploaded to YouTube. The coach, William Shanahan III, a professor of communication, got into a shouting match with a judge—and at one point briefly dropped his pants—during the national tournament of...

I have to admit being gullible enough to have accepted John Edwards story as I watched the first telling. That didn’t last long. But what about Elizabeth? Mickey Kaus notes that both the People Magazine cover story and the National Enquirer agree that she is the victim. Not Kaus: Elizabeth Edwards, rather than being its victim, is in on it up to her eyeballs! Why do I think this is a real possibility? First, Elizabeth was in on the first coverup, allowing her husband to go out and deny the...

In a much noticed article today, the NYTimes notes that, weeks before the gunfire, cyberattacks hit Georgia: Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in Lexington noticed a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites containing the message: “win+love+in+Rusia.” Other Internet experts in the United States said the attacks against Georgia’s Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests — known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S.,...

CNet headlines a Leichtman Research Group report, Broadband growth plummets in Q2: Cable operators and phone companies signed up about half the number of subscribers in the second quarter of 2008 that they signed up during the same quarter in 2007. Phone companies are hardest hit. Om Malik says its easily explained: Cable companies added phone service and offered triple-play service, stealing voice customers from the phone companies. Phone companies are responding to the triple-play threat by rolling...

Karin Klein takes us behind the scenes at the LATimes editorial board meetings they had with opponents and supporters (separately) of Proposition 8 as they came up with last week’s editorial. She tells us supporters were “careful to avoid appearing anti-gay.” Still: At one point, the conversation turned to the “activist judges” whose May ruling opened the door to same-sex marriage, and how similar this case was to the 1948 case that declared bans on interracial marriage...

Kevin Drum points to McClatchy today: 11,000 couples later, gay marriage largely a nonevent in Mass. Says Kevin, “Good.” Ampersand quotes from the California court ruling (pdf) that proposition 8 can be officially described as “Changes California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry” (opponents and advocates both recognized that the change of description worked in favor of those who oppose the initiative): There is nothing inherently argumentative or prejudicial...

Paul Roberts’ first book, The End of Oil, was called by Bill McKibben “perhaps the best single book ever produced about our energy economy and its environmental implications.” Having anticipated the energy crisis, Roberts has turned his attention to what we eat. His new book, The End of Food, is reviewed by Tom Philpott in The Grist: By switching from oil to food, Roberts has boldly stepped into a crowded field. In the last decade, books by Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, Marion...

While vacationing, Navarro wrote: It appears that after eight years of touring and playing shows with my faux LV guitar straps (which were a gift), Louis Vuitton have decided that they have a problem with it and have made it clear that they will sue me if I continue to use them. I was shocked by the tone in their letter. So heavy and serious!!!! Lighten up guys! My favorite line in the letter is this: “We have no doubt that this copying has been willful and is intended to trade upon the fame...

Andrew Sullivan points to The Economist suggestion that Religious diversity may be caused by disease: SOME people, notably Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, regard religion as a disease. It spreads, they suggest, like a virus, except that the “viruses” are similar to those infecting computers—bits of cultural software that take over the hardware of the brain and make it do irrational things. Corey Fincher, of the University of New Mexico, has a different hypothesis...

The NYSun: Assembly Republicans who bucked party leaders and voted to legalize same-sex marriage in New York have been rewarded with an outpouring of donations from gay rights advocates across the nation. The lawmakers…have benefited from a fund-raising network stretching to at least nine other states. The money has flowed in at such a rapid pace that these Republicans have seen more than half of their individual contributions in the latest filing cycle come from donors with addresses outside...

I thought the story the photos would have broken into the big media by now. McClatchy says it’s “clearly getting ready to bust out.” And that there have been consequences even without big media attention: With two weeks to go before their national convention, a number of Democrats are saying that Edwards needs to publicly address National Enquirer stories that have alleged he had an affair with a campaign worker and fathered her baby.If Edwards fails to clear up the story in short...

Many wonder. Jonathan Rauch points to his 1996 article in The New Republic, Making the case for gay (and straight) marriage, and says ever since then he’s “been concerned that G&L people might demand marriage but then neglect it.” He finds in a study (pdf) from the Williams Institute at UCLA “welcome evidence” that we won’t: We analyze data from states that have extended legal recognition to same-sex couples. We show that same-sex couples want and use these...

From the sidebar of a WSJ article on pollsters trying to uncover the truth when voters lie: The findings from Project Implicit’s six million participants over a decade of testing reveal lingering suspicion of minority groups: Some 75% of whites, Hispanics and Asians show a bias for whites over African-Americans. Two-thirds of all respondents feel better toward heterosexuals than gays, Jews than Muslims and thin people over the obese. Minorities appear to carry some of the same biases. As many...

Georgia Republican Congressman Paul Broun will win reelection in November. In April he introduced a bill to prohibit the sale of pornography on military bases. He followed that up in May with a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Then last month he fought off his primary challenger by questioning his religious convictions. (His opponent was an active Christian who, among other church duties, served as chairman of the board of deacons.) That’s how you win in Georgia’s 10th Congressional...

On the topic of “flip-flops”, I’m with T-Steel! The other day I posted that noted copyright attorney William Patry has ended his blog. This is more of what he had to say: My late mother, aleha ha-shalom, told me repeatedly that I had a religious obligation to learn every day, and I have honored her memory by doing exactly that. Learning also involves changing how you think about things; it doesn’t only mean reinforcing the existing views you already have. In this respect,...

UPDATE: Yes. He was executed just before 10 p.m.: “I’m sorry my actions caused you pain,” he said to the witnesses present. “I hope this brings you the closure that you seek. Never harbor hate.” ***** Reuters says they’re about to: Texas is set to defy the World Court and anger Mexico on Tuesday by executing a Mexican national who was not informed of his right to consular services after his arrest. Texas, by far America’s most active death penalty state, condemned Jose Medellin...

Farhad Manjoo, now at Slate, reports on Microsoft’s “strange Mojave experiment”: In mid-July, representatives of Microsoft traveled to San Francisco in search of people who hated Windows Vista. The company recruited 140 Mac and PC users who thought Microsoft’s latest operating system was slow, that it crashed constantly, that it was incompatible with various devices, and that installing it would be a pain. None of these people had ever used Vista; they’d only heard from...

Michael Mehas says it’s too bad for Brandon McInerney that he wasn’t born 19 days later. “If he were 19 days younger, he would be legally unfit to be tried as an adult.” You will recall that Brandon is the Oxnard, CA, youth charged with first-degree murder and a hate crime in connection with the Feb. 12 killing of his classmate Larry King, 15, who sometimes wore makeup and told friends he was gay. Brandon is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday. He will be tried as an adult...

Mattathias Schwartz’ Sunday Magazine piece, The Trolls Among Us, covers the Craigslist “str8 brutal dom muscular male” “experiment”, the Epilepsy Foundation web forum flashing images hack, the Megan Meier MySpace suicide, and the Kathy Sierra harassment, all from the troll’s perspective. Schwartz concludes that, “To say that trolls pose a threat to the Internet at this point is like saying that crows pose a threat to farming.” He wonders: [E]ven if we had...

William Patry, who has been a full-time copyright lawyer for 26 years, is Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel. For a long time before he held that position he had a personal blog, The Patry Copyright Blog. His personal blog was “devoted to the geekery of copyright; meaning a blog where people who loved copyright could come and discuss copyright issues in a non-partisan way.” Friday he decided to end the blog. He put forward two reasons. The first: The Inability or Refusal to Accept...

The NYTimes’ Adam Cohen outlines the issue in an editorial opinion piece Thursday: The 2002 Georgia Senate and Governor Races — Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was defeated for re-election and Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, was unseated. Polls had suggested that both men would win. The votes were cast on Diebold A.T.M.-style machines. A whistle-blower who helped prepare the machines reported that secret “patches” — software intended to fix glitches — were installed...