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Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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...he could wind up in jail. Here's what those wacky Minnesota Republicans have been up to (bold original):
This week the Minnesota Republican Party is distributing a new CD about a proposed state marriage amendment. Along with flashy graphics, the CD asks people their views on controversial issues such as abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, and so on.
The problem – the CD sends your answers back to headquarters, filed by name, address, and political views. No mention of that in the terms of use. No privacy policy at all. The story concludes: “So if you run the CD in your personal computer, by the end of it, the Minnesota GOP will not only know what you think on particular issues, but also who you are.”
Without a privacy policy, the state party can tell your views to anyone at all. If you give the “wrong” answers on abortion or other issues, they can tell your boss, members of your church, or anyone else. In fact, these answers could get distributed to campaigns in your town during get-out-the-vote efforts – precisely the place where “wrong” answers can be most damaging. The right answer here is simple. If you are collecting data and keeping it in identified form, then you should tell people. If you are selling your lists or sending them to other groups, you should tell that as well. That goes for all political parties.
If a federally funded researcher ever collected personal information that could be traced back to the person who gave that information without that person's knowledge and informed consent, that researcher could go to jail and would be ineligible for future federal funds. But, hey, it's ok if you're a Republican....
(Via Mike the Mad Biologist.)
8:33:59 PM 
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Whew, what a relief. The American "Thinker" tells us it's not a civil war, but merely the evolution of burgeoning democracy.
Do not fear a civil war in Iraq. The strife on display is the unfortunate evolution of a burgeoning democracy. These are the last gasps from a segment of the populace reluctant to accept its diminished political clout as the country's ethnic minority.
Last gasps or final throes?
8:18:39 PM
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Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man's domination of woman, the Islamists' domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.
Read the whole thing.
8:09:28 PM
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If Horowitz had recognized
the Sign of the Cuckold
flashed
by his female companions,
he wouldn't be smiling.
(Via Bildungblog.)
I once stood nearly as close to this guy as these two women did. I tell you, they felt like taking a shower afterward.
8:03:52 PM
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Zogby polls the troops in Iraq. Very interesting.
An overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and nearly one in four say the troops should leave immediately, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows.
(Via .)
7:58:16 PM
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They're reviving a 17th Century recipe for a super-strong whisky in Scotland. Money quote: "The US Secret Service admitted in 2003 that it had been monitoring the distillery because the difference between distilling a fine whisky and making chemical weapons was 'just a small tweak'."
The alcohol content is 92 percent. And we have to wait for ten years to drink it? No fair. 
(Via Daily Dish.)
7:47:34 PM
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Iraq, the fuck up!
Now with three times more carnage:
Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.
Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday -- blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound -- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr...
...The disclosure of the death tolls followed accusations by the U.S. military and later Iraqi officials that the news media had exaggerated the violence between Shiites and Sunnis over the past few days.
Meanwhile, not much mention of this at "Moron Junction" or the "The Cryptic Musings of Ernest T. Bass, ESQ." At the former, I kid you not, they are going on and on about whether Andrew Sullivan and Masturbation.
(Via Rising Hegemon.)
8:15:55 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Steve Michel.
Last update: 3/15/2006; 3:38:50 PM.
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