A conflict that has been going on between local Arizona Republicans came to an end in the wake of the shooting in Tucson on Saturday when Arizona's Republican District 20 Chairman Anthony Miller and several others chose to resign.

The Arizona Republic reports that Miller, 43, a former campaign worker for Sen.John McCain who was re-elected to a second one-year term last month, has been concerned for his family's safety by constant verbal attacks and blog posts from some local committee members with tea party movement ties.

44 - Some Arizona Republican party officials resign after Tucson shooting

Seasonal flooding across eastern Australia has been widespread and devastating this spring - their wettest on record. Cyclone Tasha came along two weeks ago, and dumped even more water on Queensland. Hundreds of thousands of people in an area the size of France and Germany combined are now affected.

Australian flooding - The Big Picture - Boston.com

For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher -- a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.

The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society -- a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities -- and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them.

Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code - WSJ.com

Baring new information, the youtube videos associated with the Arizona shooter have the hallmark of someone who is simply mentally ill.

It has become normal for conservatives to hint that they will take up arms if they don't get their way politically -- a violation of the cultural norm of respecting democratic outcomes that forms the basis for the stability of our political system.

This is, I think, a serious problem. But it's also a problem that has nothing, or almost nothing, to do with the tragedy in Arizona. This was not a right-wing militia member taking apocalyptic right-wing rhetoric about watering the tree of liberty too seriously. It was a random act.

There may be legitimate reasons to pillory conservatives over their rhetoric. This isn't one of them. If you are willing to pillory conservatives for this reason you must also accept attacks on violent video games, music, and other popular culture that sometimes factors into the paranoid delusions of the mentally ill.

I am not interested in living in a society that is rubber padded to be safe for people suffering from the most extreme mental illnesses.

As gratifying as it must be to be presented with an opportunity to attack your political opponents, it is wrong to use this moment to do so.

The Arizona Shooting Is Not A Product Of Right-Wing Rage | The New Republic

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YouTube - You Should Work for Symantec

Requested content of direct messages with no showing of probable cause or individualized suspicion!

That could allow the account holders to claim that the 2703(d) order is unconstitutional. (One federal appeals court recently ruled that under the Fourth Amendment, a 2703(d) order is insufficient for the contents of communications and search warrant is needed, although that decision is not binding in Virginia or San Francisco.)

I think there will be a binding precedent in those circuits forthwith.

A Twitter representative declined to comment on any specific legal requests, but told CNET: "To help users protect their rights, it's our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so."

Buchanan's original order from last month directed Twitter not to disclose "the existence of the investigation" to anyone, but that gag order was lifted this week.

It's unclear why Buchanan changed her mind. Twitter didn't immediately respond to questions, but the most likely scenario is that its attorneys objected to the 2703(d) order on grounds that the law required that account holders be notified, and that the broad gag order was not contemplated by Congress when creating (d) orders in 1986 and could run afoul of the First Amendment.

The gag order also appears to have violated DOJ policies.

DOJ sends order to Twitter for Wikileaks-related account info | Privacy Inc. - CNET News

In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city's painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city – and hint at the wider story of post-industrial America

Detroit in ruins: the photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre | feature | Art and design | The Observer

Greenwald just threw down at Poulson regarding the Manning - Lamo chat logs.

For more than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed -- but refuses to publish -- the key evidence in one of the year's most significant political stories:  the arrest of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source. In late May, Adrian Lamo -- at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning -- gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video that WikiLeaks released throughout this year. In interviews with me in June, both Poulsen and Lamo confirmed that Lamo placed no substantive restrictions on Poulsen with regard to the chat logs:  Wired was and remains free to publish the logs in their entirety.

The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

The way to win at manipulating people is to provide a simple, incorrect assumption for people to jump to, and then make sure that the truth is so complicated and convoluted that people either won't be able to put all the threads together and understand it or they will simply gravitate toward the lie out of sheer intellectual laziness. This works because the truth is usually complicated and people who are interested in the truth are unlikely to fight back with simple narratives that are untrue. I say this as someone who is interested in the truth and has observed that in the public eye bullshit almost always seems to win. Bullshit wins because the truth is challenging to comprehend and the liars are offering you easy answers.

And what about the name, octothorpe?

It was born somewhere in the Bell system in the 1970s, when touchtone became established.

What we have here is one of the great comeback stories in the history of competitive punctuation