Vista is at best mildly annoying and at worst makes you want to rush to Redmond, Wash. and rip somebody’s liver out.

Go to original by Stephen Manes

Terrorists will destroy the Bush library and take out most of the Park Cities at the same time. The question isn’t if but when, says Sam Boyd, a Park Cities lawyer.
A number of Park Cities residents say they fear that building the presidential library in University Park would be like painting a big, red target on their community. Read more »

Joseph McCarthy
The biggest national issue at the time was the suspicion of communist infiltration of the United States government following a series of investigations and espionage trials. McCarthy engaged this issue on February 9, 1950, in a speech before a Republican women’s group in Wheeling, West Virginia. In his address, McCarthy charged that U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson knew of 205 communists in the State Department.
Go to original. Go to Appleton, Wisconsin Public Library History page

Troubled by irregularities, they say it’s urgent to enact federal laws requiring voter-verifiable records of ballots cast.

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Reporters Without Borders today condemned a Swiss military court’s announcement yesterday that it has indicted three Swiss journalists working for the weekly SonntagsBlick for publishing a leaked document on 8 January 2006 “dealing with supposed places of detention and interrogation methods used by the US foreign intelligence service (CIA).” Read more »

A radical proposal by two Yale professors goes far beyond any reform envisaged by Feingold or McCain.

The current system of public matching funds is paid for by taxpayers who check off a box on their tax forms directing $3 to candidates. In the 1970s, more than a third of taxpayers checked off the box. Now, only 1 in 10 do, and the number is dropping. If the people aren’t willing to direct $3 to candidates, how can we expect them to go for anything more? Read more »

PARIS AP — Nearly 60 countries signed a treaty on Tuesday that bans governments from holding people in secret detention, but the United States and some of its key European allies were not among them. Read more »

EFF–Debbie Foster, a single mom who was improperly sued by the RIAA back in 2004 for file sharing, has won back her attorneys’ fees. The decision today is one of the first in the country to award attorneys fees to a defendant in an RIAA case over music sharing on the Internet.

Last year, Judge Lee R. West dismissed the case against her with prejudice after it became clear that Ms. Foster was simply the Internet access account holder in her home and had no knowledge or experience with file sharing software. EFF, Public Citizen, the ACLU, and the American Association of Law Libraries filed an amicus brief in the case, supporting Ms. Foster’s motion for fees. Go to original

US News & World Report reports: The day after Senate Republicans effectively blocked debate on an anti-”surge” resolution, some in the caucus are growing increasingly alarmed over indications that they are losing the public relations battle to the Democrats. The Los Angeles Times says that although Republicans continue “to insist…that they simply want a fair debate,” by yesterday some Republicans were concerned “the public would misunderstand their stance.” Read more »

As with so much else in the blood-soaked annals of the Bush Administration’s disastrous Babylonian Conquest, it appears this neat story masks a far grimmer, grubbier truth: a mass slaughter of civilians, caught in the toxic fog of hair-trigger tension, sectarian hatred and violent political ambition unleashed by the U.S. invasion.

Go to original by Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque

55 world journalists killed in 2006
in USA, 34,000 lost jobs during 2001-2006

It’s not been a good time to be a journalist. Outside the United States, reporters literally take their lives into their own hands to cover dangerous stories. Read more »

Bill for Iraq conflict will soon overtake Vietnam
$78bn squeeze on medical care for elderly and poor

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