Palindrom posted this site a long time ago and kept reminding me to look at it. I skipped it initially because its intended for children, but its useful. Its a more manageable subset of the information on Project Vote Smart, with a focus on where the politician's money comes from. At least these guys know whats important, right? Look up your Senator and read the list of PACs...

She writes:

I was doing some digging around for sites to use with my students and stumbled upon this. This is a site designed for kids but I think it is extremely interesting for adults too. You can click on a congress person and get a link to their website, information on how to contact them, and all kinds of other useful information like where they went to school, what degrees they have and how long they have been in office. You can also click on an election cycle and see who contributed to their campaign. This site also boasts break downs in the congress members demographically. The other cool thing is that you can click on a committee and see members, last meeting, jurisdiction, and staff members complete with phone numbers. Browse the site. I found it informative.

Information About Members of Congress

Rudy Giuliani TV Ad "Ready"

I know better than to take political advertisements seriously, but DAMN.... You know what they say about Rudy, "He'll make the trains run on time."

YouTube - Rudy Giuliani TV Ad "Ready"

An American law school student and former beauty queen who has posed for a racy calendar while brandishing a weapon has been accused of kidnapping, biting and threatening a former boyfriend with a handgun.

I'm in love... Of course, her mug shot is slightly less flattering. Note how hypocritical this post is given the previous one. But you clicked on it anyway, didn't you?

Beauty queen accused of kidnapping, torturing ex-boyfriend - World - smh.com.au

The most memorable reporting I've encountered on the conflict in Iraq was delivered in the form of confetti exploding out of a cardboard tube. I had just begun working at the MIT Media Lab in March 2006 when Alyssa Wright, a lab student, got me to participate in a project called "Cherry Blossoms." I strapped on a backpack with a pair of vertical tubes sticking out of the top; they were connected to a detonation device linked to a Global Positioning System receiver. A microprocessor in the backpack contained a program that mapped the coördinates of the city of Baghdad onto those for the city of Cambridge; it also held a database of the locations of all the civilian deaths of 2005. If I went into a part of Cambridge that corresponded to a place in Iraq where civilians had died in a bombing, the detonator was triggered.

This story was worth posting for that paragraph alone. The article... rant perhaps... is very, very good. The themes should be familiar to a lot of you, but perhaps the value of this comes from the stark reality that the people that control public opinion are really just as inane as you think they are. There is a lot of overt generationalism in it that seems to misplace the problem with the media as not being under the control of GenXers... thats not quite right, but this is a generational fault line. Ironically the author is a Boomer. He probably doesn't even realise that we came of age as the target of the system he is complaining about.

Technology Review: 'You Don't Understand Our Audience'

I've posted two updates to the site tonight that Acidus wrote a few weeks ago. I'm sorry they didn't make it out sooner but I've been busy with the Christmas holidays and the like.

The first is an updated set of MemeStreams Bookmarklets. You do not have to upgrade to these if you don't want to, but good testers who report problems are always valuable to us. They should work a bit better than the old ones, particularly when selecting text on a page with a bunch of iframes, and we're now back to one peice of cross browser javascript code, which is nice.

The second is that if you're running IE or Safari you might notice your search bar is glowing. You can install MemeStreams as a search provider with one click now in both those browsers.

Of course, those of you who regularly search MemeStreams may have a complaint or two about the performance. We're fixing that soon. Its entirely a disk I/O problem and we'll be buying a new server with better storage performance in a few weeks. Unfortunately I am going out of the country for two weeks so I won't be able to get that done until I return, but the new machine should be online sometime in February.

Thanks Acidus for the nice bits of code!

Spork wrote:
Hopefully the number of users here will grow.

How do we get that to happen?

RE: Is a Digg rebellion in the works?

In a rare Fortune interview several years ago Warren Buffett warned that America was "selling the farm" to live "high on the hog." Forget the hog: that dream's gone, and the farm may not be far behind.

Ten resolutions that will help you survive the coming bear market - MarketWatch

In the "spirit" of the California Assault Weapon Ban I decided to do my best to alleviate the fears of my fellow citizens and gun-banning legislators when I put together a new AR-15 for my wife. Below is the result of my painstaking work to transform an Evil Black Rifle (EBR) into a Cute Pink RIfle (CPR). Introducing the Hello Kitty AR-15!

When I started working with Dave Maynor a few years ago he told me that if I was going to be working with him, I had to buy a gun. I told him the only gun I would buy was a hot pink AK-47. That put an end to the discussion, but I was partially serious. It seemed the sort of weapon a William Gibson character would carry, or perhaps a weapon popular in Africa, the cultural juxtaposition making it all the more wicked. Like the wigged warriors of Liberia. Well, finally someone has obliged, almost...

Hello Kitty AR-15 - evil black rifle meets cute and cuddly

Giving a defendant limited immunity in terms of forcing them to turn over the passphrase can lead to a conviction. That's because the fellow technically isn't being convicted based on his passphrase; he's being convicted for what it unlocks. Isn't the law grand?

This is the sort of sophistry that kills civil liberties... The idea that the government can compell you to divulge an encryption key without violating your 5th amendment rights by immunizing you from prosecution due to the contents of the encryption key, but not the contents of files encrypted with that key.

Judge: Man can't be forced to divulge encryption passphrase | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.com

Bartlett argues that the FairTax is deeply flawed and has been systematically misrepresented by its supporters. Quite apart from the fact that there is zero chance that Congress would ever enact it, it is clear, writes Bartlett, that the FairTax simply would not work at all if it were tried, which is why no country has ever attempted to collect all its revenue from a retail sales tax.

Every once in a while I find myself talking to a fair tax advocate. Always advocates. I never hear anyone who is considering whether or not they like the idea and wondering what others think. Only people who are absolutely positive that this is the answer and quickly emotional at the slightest criticism. The criticisms offered here are more than slight.

TaxProf Blog: Bartlett on Why the FairTax Won't Work