Privacy

In late January, allegations were leveled that former Sen. Norm Coleman’s campaign faked the crash of its website, claiming droves of disenfranchised voters brought down the server seeking info on whether their votes were counted. While that charge hasn’t been definitively proven, the scrutiny by web enthusiasts exposed a bigger problem for the campaign: an unprotected database that contained information on campaign donors, including names, email and home addresses, credit card numbers and the three-digit security codes. On Tuesday, donors received an email from the website Wikileaks alerting them that the site has revealed some of the database information.

Listeners waiting to hear the reasoned arguments of “angry gay-rights activists” during an extended National Public Radio (NPR) report this morning on California’s new ban on same-sex marriage … are … still … waiting.

Recent goings at the Capitol: Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Republican Rep. Erik Paulsen introduce a bipartisan bill to hinder copper thieves; Rep. Betty McCollum urges the president to enforce the ban on assault weapon imports; and CNN notes that Al Franken has taken to calling himself “Senator-elect.”

For two years of the Bush era beginning with Hurricane Katrina, the Star Tribune published a weekly comic strip on its opinion page that was unlike anything else in American newspapers, sending up current events in a serial format with heaping doses of dark humor and giddy gore. “Banana Republic” dispensed satire so bruising and brutal it made you want to die of shame — but also so funny and true it gave you reason to live. Now cartoonist Kirk Anderson’s new book compiles every episode of “Banana Republic,” letting readers re-live tortuous times and die of embarassment all over again.

A reproductive health bill being considered in the Minnesota Legislature this year states that the government has no business interfering with the constitutionally protected privacy rights set forth in Roe v. Wade. While presumptive gubernatorial candidates Sens. John Marty and Tom Bakk are among the bill’s co-authors, staunchly pro-life Gov. Tim Pawlenty is unlikely to sign the bill should it get to his desk.

Sorry, but it turns out that, just as you can’t buy Barack Obama’s seat in the U.S. Senate, you can’t buy the bathroom stall where U.S. Sen. Larry Craig sat or stood and tapped his foot in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The agency that runs the airport refused an apparently serious offer to buy the men’s room stall made famous by Craig’s 2007 conviction for disorderly conduct in a sex-solicitation sting operation by the airport police.

Not only has Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich stolen the political moment from Barack Obama, he’s taken a crowbar to the president-elect’s mantle as wordsmith-in-chief and orator for our times. Once Blago’s cussed, illegal schemes got taken down by the FBI and disseminated by the Justice Department, the nation took notice of a new literary lion rumbling from its midsection. Blagojevich’s words have also inspired Americans to take up their pens to compose a new musical (or fragment thereof) and a flattering Daily Beast quiz that compares lines from “The Sopranos,” a show that won six Emmys for the best writing on a television, to lines from the FBI affadavit.

U.S. Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) cannot withdraw his guilty plea in the infamous 2007 Minneapolis-St. Paul airport bathroom sex case, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled today in an unpublished opinion. That means Craig is stuck with having copped in District Court to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct for allegedly signaling an interest in engaging in sex via foot taps from one restroom stall to another in which a undercover police officer was staked out. The decision’s “unpublished” status means the court doesn’t want their ruling used as precedent in future cases — interesting, in view of charges that Craig sought special treatment or was being singled out for preferential or especially harsh treatment because of his status as a U.S. Senator.

When the University of Minnesota Board of Regents meets Dec. 12 to decide whether to allow wine and beer sales at TCF Bank Stadium, they’ll have a piece of news to consider: the alcohol-enabled public sex act in a Metrodome bathroom stall that drew a crowd during the Minnesota Gophers 55-0 football loss to the Iowa Hawkeyes last weekend.
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The story has itself gone viral: A new Google tool tracks the spread of actual influenza by monitoring Web searches for terms like “flu.” By aggregating such virtual searches, Google can also anticipate flu outbreaks in the real world by a week to 10 days. Even if Google were to amend its motto to “First, do no evil,” can we trust national health policy to the same search engine trend-spotting tool that puts a wrinkled comedian and a airbrushed model at an equal level of “Hotness”?