AJC: The high court ordered a federal judge to “receive testimony and findings of fact as to whether evidence that could not have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes [Davis’s] innocence.” Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, issued a dissent, saying the federal judge assigned to hear the case will not be able to grant Davis relief. “It becomes stranger still when one realizes that the allegedly new evidence we shunt off to be examined by the district...

Jeff Ely at Cheap Talk: At Legoland, admission is discounted for two-year-olds. But a child must be at least three for most of the fun attractions. At the ticket window the parents are asked how old the child is. But at the ride entrance the attendants ask the children directly. The parents lie. The children tell the truth.

Literally as I was posting the excerpt from Bruce Bartlett on The GOP’s Misplaced Rage, Steve Benen quoted Bartlett from an email conversation: I believe that political parties should do penance for their mistakes and just losing power is not enough. Part of that involves understanding why those mistakes were made and how to prevent them from happening again. Republicans, however, have done no penance. They just pretend that they did nothing wrong. But until they do penance they don’t deserve...

Reality is stranger than fiction: The world of Mexican midget wrestling is in mourning after two of its most famous stars were apparently poisoned by fake prostitutes. Brothers in armlocks Alberto and Alejandro Pérez Jiménez were found dead in a hotel room after being drugged and robbed. The women who spiked the twins’ drinks are thought to be members of an organised crime gang who pose as prostitutes to attract victims. They normally just knock out their victims but the dose proved too much...

What do we think of Bruce Bartlett? The iconic supply-side domestic policy adviser to President Reagan and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at Treasury under President George H.W. Bush, he began his career working for Ron Paul. He went on to become an outspoken critic of President George W. Bush. In The Daily Beast this week he says the Obama-hating town-hall mobs have it wrong: I think conservative anger is misplaced. To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by...

That in the libel case by Howard K. Stern, Anna Nicole Smith’s former lawyer, against Rita Crosby. Crosby claimed in a book that Stern is gay. The judge ruled that the gay sex claims could not be libelous because homosexuality is no longer viewed as contemptible: Stern claimed the book, which was published six months after Smith’s death, contained 19 libelous statements, including that he had engaged in oral sex at a Los Angeles party with Larry Birkhead, the father of Smith’s child,...

Over at Feminist Law Professors, David S. Cohen makes a pretty good point: [W]hat’s really getting me up in arms about this whole [healthcare bill] debate (if you want to call it that) is the argument the Republicans are making about health privacy. Let’s take Chuck Grassley (who voted for “death panels” in 2003!) and his recent comment: “You ought to plan these things out. And I don’t have any problem with things like living wills. But they ought to be done...

ESPN The Magazine, on newsstands today, includes the “College Football Confidential” survey of 85 current college players: In exchange for the truth, players were granted complete anonymity. Here is one poll where the athletes have the final say. Asked “Do you have any gay teammates?” Almost half of those surveyed (49.4%, to be exact) said yes, they believe they have at least one gay teammate. In the Pac-10, 70% of those surveyed said yes.” Via Andy Towle.

From The Daily Show last night, outrageously funny: “If only the ailing Glenn Beck 16 months ago (on CNN) had received the health care he’s raving about today (on Fox).” Here’s the full Beck from the Dead video.

I posted with the headline, Will Michael Vick Get The Real 60 Minutes Treatment? Not 5 minutes later: Quarterback Michael Vick has signed a two-year deal with the Philadelphia Eagles, his agent, Joel Segal, confirmed to ESPN.com. Vick arrived in Philadelphia Tuesday morning and remained there Wednesday evening. The Eagles will hold a news conference on Friday morning to announce his signing. The first year of the deal is for $1.6 million deal with an option for the second year at $5.2 million, FoxSports.com...

Fum kicks off his NewMajority piece with a look at the Right/Left food divide: Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney often joked during the primaries: “Being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts is a bit like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention.” Try that joke the other way around, and it doesn’t work, does it? Meat-eating is right-wing, everybody knows that! We even describe a rip-roaring conservative speech as “red-meat.” Crunchy granola is correspondingly left-wing....

Yesterday I said I believe internet porn is fueled by old guys who are addicted to the new plethora of pornographic options. What’s worse, I think, is our collective cultural guilt for all that porn — that and how we sexualize, fetishize, and ogle our young people in advertising, movies, and on television — has us criminalizing kids for those very same things we did when we were young. We blame them and want to lock them up for our own sins of desire. Kids don’t need us to leer at...

Google’s just released opt-out feature — it protects users’ privacy by moving them to a remote 22-acre village — is getting all the buzz but the real story is this item buried in the news crawl, “Obama to slip universal health care into iTunes user agreement.” Via @AmandaFrench.

The LATimes finds the porn industry in a tech-induced slump: Industry insiders estimate that since 2007, revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined 30% to 50% and the number of new films made has fallen sharply… At least five of the 100 top websites in the U.S. are portals for free pornography, referred to in the industry as “tube sites,” according to Internet traffic ranking service Alexa .com. Some of their content is amateur work uploaded by users...

If so, it’s not clear yet how they’ll be called to account for it. Forty years after Stonewall: Fort Worth cops raid a gay bar and put one customer in intensive care. Seven men were arrested. The police chief says that the violence of the cops was because – wait for it – the cops were hit on [link]: “You’re touched and advanced in certain ways by people inside the bar, that’s offensive,” he said. “I’m happy with the restraint used when they...

Here in Milledgeville, GA, our local Walgreens has a “Back to School Special” on At Home Marijuana Tests. The times sure are a-changin’. Meanwhile, AOL’s MomLogic — “Real Stories. Real Advice. Real Moms” — looks at parents who say smoking pot is better than drinking: “I want my children to grow up to believe that laws are just and rational, and if there’s injustice, they should fight it,” said Jessica Peck Corry, a Denver-based...

Stuck in customs was nearly stuck in jail for taking a photo with a tripod in Atlanta’s Olympic Park: I set up my tripod to take a photo of downtown and the Coke Museum was in the middle of the shot. A female cop of came over and told me I had to take down the tripod because I looked like a professional. Coke does not allow that, so she said. I said I’m a blogger with expensive toys and hardly a threat. Then she got quite huffy and agitated before telling me if I did not take down the tripod...

Rumors started early this morning and the sale has now been confirmed. Bret Taylor on the Friendfeed blog: FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop — keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates. The Facebook press release. Michael Arrington has the first post-sale interview with Friendfeed cofounder...

In Puberty on the Scale of a Planet, Dot Earth’s Andrew C. Revkin posits we are a teenage species at this moment. He asks, what do we want to be when we grow up? 9 Billion People + 1 Planet = ? At a quickening pace, humanity is etching its signature across the Earth, diverting waterways and downing forests, spreading pythons to the Everglades and American bullfrogs to Bordeaux, extracting minerals used in cellphones from a last patch of gorilla habitat, altering the atmosphere, knitting the...

On Weekend Edition Saturday, New Yorkers get a taste of Doug Quint’s Big Gay Ice Cream Truck: “If I weren’t gay, I wouldn’t call it the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. And if I weren’t happy, I wouldn’t have the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. It would just be the big crabby ice cream truck,” Quint says. Quint, who is a classically trained bassoonist, has only been in the ice cream business for a few months. The ice cream truck is just a summer gig while most orchestras...

Silicon Alley Insider: One of Microsoft’s biggest challenges with Windows 7 is an easy upgrade path for consumers and corporations. As this chart illustrates, it’s a mess: Only a few upgrade paths qualify for an “in-place upgrade,” which means you can keep “files, settings, and programs intact from your current Windows version.” Most will require a “custom install,” which WSJ gadget guru Walt Mossberg describes as “a tedious, painful process”...

And the target was a single user who vocally supports the Republic of Georgia. So says one researcher in a story getting lots of traction: According to Bill Woodcock, research director at the non-profit Packet Clearing House, the torrent of traffic that brought the site to its knees wasn’t the result of a traditional DDoS, or distributed denial of service attack, but rather people who clicked on a link in spam messages that referenced a well-known blogger called Cyxymu. As spam goes, the emails...

In Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, Michael Pollan asks, What is wrong with this picture? Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great...

NYTimes Bits Blog: Twitter, the popular microblogging service, was crippled Thursday morning by a denial-of-service attack. The extended silence in a normally noisy Twitterworld began around 9 a.m. Twitter later posted a note to its status update page saying the site had been slowed to a standstill by an attack. [...] Other sites reported that they were targets of denial-of-service attacks as well. The social-networking site Facebook said access to its site was impaired for some users for a short...

Chris Albrecht, cross-posting on Business Week, wonders Will Viral Video Kill the Music Video? Historically, music videos were promotional vehicles that ran on outlets such as MTV. Big budgets were spent on lavish productions meant to captivate watchers, prodding them into buying the single or album the song was on. But while music videos have proven enormously popular on YouTube, earlier this year the video-sharing giant got embroiled in skirmishes with the record labels and rights holders over...