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GOP cyber-security expert suggests Diebold tampered with 2002 Georgia election — “The first red flag went up when the computer patch was installed in person by Diebold CEO Bob Urosevich, who flew in from Texas and applied it in just two counties, DeKalb and Fulton, both Democratic strongholds [...] The whistleblower said another flag went up when it became apparent that the patch installed by Urosevich had failed to fix a problem with the computer clock, which employees from Diebold and the Georgia Secretary of State’s office had been told the patch was designed specifically to address.”

Father-of-three branded a ‘pervert’ – for photographing his own children in public park — “What is the world coming to when anybody seen with a camera is assumed to be doing things that they should not? This parental paranoia is getting completely out of hand. I was so shocked. One of the police officers told me that it was just the way society is these days. He agreed with me that it was madness.”

Laugh Factory owner: Jackson should pay for N-word — “Unfortunately, Jesse Jackson has broken his own principles. Jesse embraced the notion of fining talent for using such a word and he should be held to his own standards.” Michael “Kramer” Richards is probably living in a cardboard box somewhere because of saying it, so, yeah, why shouldn’t Jesse catch hell for it, too?

Vernon Jones used Obama’s image without asking — “I do not endorse him; I have not endorsed him. He put my picture on his literature, without asking me [...] I think he may have come to an event of ours a while back. The reason I think I may have met him is I know somebody told me as I was shaking his hand that he had taken pride in voting for George Bush twice.” Ouch!

Firefox 3 Proves The Existence Of The Colbert Bump — As previously twittered, “earlier today the demand knocked their servers on their rump, so bumping may not be welcome.” Tangentially: I rarely remember my dreams, but I had one the other night that Stephen announced he was retiring from the show. I awoke with a tiny tear in my eye, and less laughter in my heart. Or somewhere.

What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try firsthand experience — Christopher Hitchens gets waterboarded, and comes out a changed man: “One used to be told — and surely with truth — that the lethal fanatics of al-Qaeda were schooled to lie, and instructed to claim that they had been tortured and maltreated whether they had been tortured and maltreated or not. Did we notice what a frontier we had crossed when we admitted and even proclaimed that their stories might in fact be true?”

Amid Policy Disputes, Qaeda Grows in Pakistan — Infuriating. Seven years later, it’s September 10th all over again: “The story of how Al Qaeda, whose name is Arabic for ‘the base,’ has gained a new haven is in part a story of American accommodation to President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, whose advisers played down the terrorist threat. It is also a story of how the White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq. Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terrorist camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States.”

TV viewers’ average age hits 50 — Hmmm, I just so happen to be hitting 50 myself in a couple of months. The median age in US households is 38, so this is a significant shift in how we “entertain” ourselves in our spare time. And the most aged network? Fox News, with a median viewer age of 65!!!

George Carlin’s Last Interview “It’s like nested boxes, like the Russian dolls — it’s just folders within folders within folders. But I know how to navigate it very well, and I’m a Macintosh a guy and so Spotlight helps me a lot. I just get on Spotlight and say, let’s see, if I say ‘asshole’ and ‘minister,’ I then can find what I want find.”

Jon Hicks on Expression Engine vs Textpattern — Obviously one big difference is the $199 license EE requires, versus the open source goodness of Textpattern. But for me, it comes down to the capability of having members and member groups. If you need it, EE is the way to go. If you don’t need those, there is very little Textpattern can’t do.

Article tags as containers, Tags as attributes, and Context sensitivity, Oh My! — Robert Wetzlmayr lays down the smack on new features in the upcoming Textpattern 4.0.7 that have all us TXP-Geeks giggling like little girls.

Dying Is Hard. Comedy Is Harder — Jerry Seinfeld on George Carlin: “He worked over an idea like a diamond cutter with facets and angles and refractions of light. He made you sorry you ever thought you wanted to be a comedian. He was like a train hobo with a chicken bone. When he was done there was nothing left for anybody.”

One Election Outcome Certain: A Lefty Will Win White House — A very interesting article, said the left-handed blogger: “Though left-handers comprise just 10% of the population, they are dominating presidential politics. Their recent success transcends ideology. Since 1974, presidents Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton have all favored their left hands, while President Carter and the current President Bush are righties [...] Studies have shown that whereas righties favor the left hemisphere of their brain, which controls language, left-handers are more likely to have bilateral brain function, which could allow them to visualize problems more broadly and with more complexity. A higher percentage of mathematicians and scientists are left-handed, and the same is true for artists.”

Interview with Alan Taylor, Creator of Boston Globe’s The Big Picture — Here’s the power of wonderful photography presented wonderfully: “The blog really launched on June 1st (I had a few earlier posts, but hadn’t opened it up yet). In its first 20 days of existence, it’s almost reached 1.5 million pageviews and over 1,500 comments for just 20 entries.” See for yourself: The Big Picture.

Grief in the Rubble – Chinese Are Left to Ask Why Schools Crumbled — “There is no official figure on how many children died at Xinjian Primary School, nor on how many died at scores of other schools that collapsed in the powerful May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province. But the number of student deaths seems likely to exceed 10,000, and possibly go much higher, a staggering figure that has become a simmering controversy in China as grieving parents say their children might have lived had the schools been better built.”

Obama vs. McCain: Taxing and Spending — “The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center [...] took a look at the various tax proposals put forth by the two candidates and estimated that Obama’s plan would lead to a boost in aftertax income for all but the highest earners, while taking a smaller bite out of government tax revenues than would McCain’s plans.”

Campbell claimed he was a Champagne-aholic to shave 4 months from his sentence — “But in December 2006, a few months after beginning his prison term, Campbell wrote prison officials that he was a champagne alcoholic whose drinking problems were ‘painful and embarrassing to recount.’ He also alleged that government witnesses at his trial testified ‘without contradiction that I was consuming bottles of champagne on a regular basis,’ court records say. There was no such testimony in Campbell’s trial, prosecutors said. In fact, witnesses testified that Campbell didn’t drink, although he would make sure champagne was waiting in a hotel room for his longtime mistress, Marion Brooks, when she arrived in Atlanta. Prosecutors also disclosed a memo summarizing an interview Brooks gave federal authorities, in which she said Campbell ‘does not drink alcohol.’”

Corn Fed Venison – It Looked Good On Paper! — “As it jerked me off my feet and started dragging me across the ground, it occurred to me that having a deer on a rope was not nearly as good an idea as I had originally imagined. The only upside is that they do not have as much stamina as many other animals. A brief 10 minutes later, it was tired and not nearly as quick to jerk me off my feet and drag me when I managed to get up. It took me a few minutes to realize this, since I was mostly blinded by the blood flowing out of the big gash in my head.”

Exposed — “The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn’t realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear.”

Trashing the Greatest Generation — Veteran of WWII gets trashed on a right wing blog simply because he didn’t want to play their reindeer games and give them the partisan answer they insisted they had the right to get. Very nice, guys, I’m sure your mother would be proud of the way you treated a veteran who did far more for his country in a real war than you ever will in some silly blog war.