From the "You Have No Privacy, Get Over It" file, the Times reports a Federal web site with 30,000 social security numbers has been on the Internet, wide open. Here's how the "hacker" got through:

“I was bored, and typed the name of my farm into Google to see what was out there,” said Marsha Bergmeier, president of Mohr Family Farms in Fairmount, Ill.

You see, hackers today can use extremely sophisticated techniques to crack these databases. So it really is understandable the government has trouble securing all our personal data, when faced with computer tech masterminds, like this Bergmeier character.

I mean, the government can hardly keep up.

Is anyone else tired of looking at Cho Seung-Hui's face?

He wanted to be martyred, and the news media has now martyred him.

Well done.

From today's SCOTUS Dissent:

More important, Congress claimed there was a medical consensus that the banned procedure is never necessary. ...But the evidence "very clearly demonstrate[d] the opposite." ...("[T]here was no evident consensus in the record that Congress compiled. There was, however, a substantial body of medical opinion presented to Congress in opposition. If anything ... the congressional record establishes that there was a 'consensus' in favor of the banned procedure.");...("The congressional record itself undermines [Congress'] finding" that there is a medical consensus that intact D&E "is never medically necessary and should be prohibited." (internal quotation marks omitted)).

Similarly, Congress found that "[t]here is no credible medical evidence that partial-birth abortions are safe or are safer than other abortion procedures." ...But the congressional record includes letters from numerous individual physicians stating that pregnant women's health would be jeopardized under the Act, as well as statements from nine professional associations, including ACOG, the American Public Health Association, and the California Medical Association, attesting that intact D&E carries meaningful safety advantages over other methods. ...("Congress in its findings . . . chose to disregard the statements by ACOG and other medical organizations."). No comparable medical groups supported the ban. In fact, "all of the government's own witnesses disagreed with many of the specific congressional findings."

 

He just can't get his story straight, with all that pesky email around:

That e-mail said that Gonzales supported firing one federal prosecutor six months before she was asked to leave...The e-mail, which came from Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson, appeared to contradict the prepared written testimony Gonzales submitted to Congress over the weekend in advance of his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday.

That's too bad...

Atrios:

Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are not the only black people in America, and more than that they do not have the ability to force themselves onto your news shows. There's a pattern here:

1) Bigot eruption somewhere
2) Lots of people condemn it
3) Al Sharpton goes on every teevee program
4) The media people turn around and use Sharpton's past as a distraction/excuse for the current bigot eruption

This not only happens with "the media," but it happens here in our Cafe, and with many "liberal" callers I've heard on liberal talk radio (always prefacing their statements with, "I'm not a racist, but...").