This story got some coverage a little over a year ago when Ian Frazier quoted this passage from Jerry Falwell’s autobiography in a humor piece in The New Yorker and Jonathan Schwarz covered it in his blog. I found it so twisted that I had to validate its reality by purchasing a used copy of Falwell’s book on Amazon.com Marketplace (for about $0.50). I think it’s worth bringing up again now that Sen. John McCain has agreed to give a commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty University ("crazy base world"), since it shows Falwell’s lack of empathy–I think the attribute “bordered on” here is not cruelty but sociopathy. From Strength for the Journey: An Autobiography by Jerry Falwell (1987, Simon and Schuster), pp. 49-50: There were times that Dad’s pranks bordered on cruelty. One of his oil company workers, a one-legged man he nicknamed “Crip” Smith, complained about everything. Dad and Crip’s co-workers got tired of the old man’s bellyaching and decided to take revenge. One morning Crip called in sick and Dad volunteered to send by lunch to his grateful but suspicious employee. Dad and his chums caught Crip’s old black tomcat, killed it, skinned it, and cooked it in the kitchen of one of Dad’s little restaurants. They called it squirrel meat and delivered it to Crip on a linen-covered tray. When Crip returned to work the next morning, Dad and his co-conspirators asked him how he liked his meal. They knew he would complain even about a free home-cooked lunch, and when Crip called it “the toughest squirrel meat” he had ever eaten, they were glad to tell him why.This story immediately follows another story in which Falwell invites his young friend William from the neighborhood, who is afraid of his father, into the house for milk and cookies, after telling his father that William is afraid (p. 49): William hesitated at the door. He knew my father carried a gun, and there were too many stories circulating about that gun to leave William feeling easy about entering our home. Quickly I pushed my friend inside and closed the door behind us. Dad was sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper. Suddenly he looked directly at us and shouted. “Both of you, stop!” William froze in his tracks, and I leaned forward eagerly to see what Dad was up to. William’s eyes opened wide as Dad drew his gun and pointed it at the floor just in front of my friend’s trembling legs. “Don’t move,” he said quietly. Then he took careful aim and pulled the trigger. The shot from the .38 Remington pistol blew a fairly impressive hole in the kitchen floor. Calmly, Dad blew smoke from the barrel and placed the pistol back on the table. “I’ve been trying to get that fly all day,” he said, looking back down at his paper. “And finally I got it." There was a moment of silence. Then, with a gasp, William bolted out the door. I never got him back inside our house again, and the legend about my father continued to spread throughout the neighborhood. Later Dad and I laughed ourselves hoarse just remembering William’s startled look and sudden exit.For additional context, Falwell reports that his father killed his own brother with a shotgun (in self-defense, pp. 22-24), and attributes part of his father’s problem to the fact that “After all, Dad grew up in the home of an atheist” (p. 17), even though he had a Christian mother. His book says that his father had a deathbed conversion to Christianity (p. 83). ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has teamed up with Verified Voting to try to get members of the U.S. House of Representatives to sign up as co-sponsors of HR 550, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005, which was re-introduced in the House in February. This bill would require that electronic voting include a paper receipt and the capacity for manual recounts, ensure that disabled and those who don’t speak English as their native tongue are capable of voting, and enhances security requirements for electronic voting systems. The latter requirements include disclosure and certification of source code, prohibition of the use of wireless connections, and a number of other provisions which appear to me to be reasonable requirements for security. The bill authorizes expenditure of $150M for fiscal year 2006 to enable states to meet these requirements. Arizona Reps. Grijalva and Pastor have already signed on as co-sponsors. Hayworth, Flake, Kolbe, Renzi, Shadegg, and Franks have not. To send a request to your Representative to support his bill, you can use the EFF’s support site.

Pharyngula has a nice, simple explanation of how Plan B emergency contraception works, and how it can’t remotely be construed as a form of abortion (unlike the use of RU-486, which is an abortifacient). The use of Plan B prevents ovulation–it doesn’t do anything to an already fertilized egg. It thereby prevents the need for abortions when it’s used effectively. Yet this timeline of events shows how the Republicans have been preventing it from being made available as an over-the-counter medicine.

At the New York Sun: A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded “National Intelligence Estimate” on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case. The court papers from the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, do not suggest that Mr. Bush violated any law or rule. However, the new disclosure could be awkward for the president because it places him, for the first time, directly in a chain of events that led to a meeting where prosecutors contend the identity of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame, was provided to a reporter.Via Talking Points Memo.

From BLDGBLOG–I would have thought I’d see this first somewhere like Catallarchy–is a report of a San Diego-based company called SeaCode. The company has the idea of mooring a cruise ship in international waters off the coast of L.A. to host offshore computer programmers from Russia and India, paying them about $1,800 a month in take-home pay, with a four-months-on, two-months-off work cycle. That compares to $500 a month for a programmer in India. The idea’s been condemned by right (“an outrageous affront to U.S. labor laws”) and left (calling it an idea for “sweat ships”), which is a sign of either a really good or really bad idea–I think it could be a good one. Since this was reported originally back in April of 2005, it doesn’t look like it’s gotten anywhere. ...

Now the Discovery Institute is claiming (via Michael Francisco, on the DI’s EvolutionNews blog, reporting on an American Enterprise Institute article co-authored by former DI policy analyst, attorney Seth Cooper) that the newly elected Dover Area School Board intentionally cost the school district $1 million in legal fees by refusing to rescind the illegal policy in December, after the trial was over and before Judge Jones had issued his ruling. This is at odds with the fact that their rescinding the policy would not have changed the outcome of the trial or the awarding of legal fees, which is why they didn’t do it until after the ruling came. What’s worse, they have attributed malice and conflict of interest (now retracted, to the original source’s partial credit) to one of the new board members who was also a plaintiff in the lawsuit regarding this decision, even though he was not yet on the board at the time of the December discussion (there was no vote) on changing the policy due to a runoff election. And further worse–on William Dembski’s blog, someone who pointed out the facts had their comment deleted. There’s nowhere to place the blame for the $1 million in legal fees except on the original board who put the policy in place over the warnings and objections at the time that their action was unconstitutional–and perhaps to some extent on the Discovery Institute advisor who they initially spoke with about what policy to adopt, Seth Cooper. UPDATE (April 5, 2006): Michael Francisco has revised the wording of his blog post, probably to make it less actionable under defamation laws. Ed Brayton points out the specifics of his revisions.

This is really cool, I hope the Quicktime videos come back soon. (Via BLDGBLOG.) UPDATE (September 18, 2007): Julius Popp’s website (the first link) appears to be undergoing renovations… the BLDGBLOG link still has Bitfall pictures and description. Historical Comments Einzige (2006-12-09): That has got to be the coolest thing I've seen in a long time.Mind-numbingly awesome.

A hidden-camera investigation earlier this year that showed South Florida police departments engaging in aggressive tactics to prevent people from filing complaints against police officers has resulted in retaliation by the grossly misnamed Broward County Police Benevolent Association. WFOR CBS-4 investigative reporter Mike Kirsch’s personal information–his address, birthdate, and driver’s license number–was posted by Broward County PBA president Dick Brickman on the police union’s website as a “BOLO”–“be on the lookout.” Also posted was information about Gregory Slate of The Police Complaint Center, which assisted with Kirsch’s report. Alan Rosenthal, attorney for CBS-4, demanded that the union remove the “BOLO” as a violation of laws prohibiting disclosure of “personal identifying information contained in motor vehicle records.” (Via Declan McCullagh’s Politech mailing list.) Kirsch’s address and date of birth was apparently removed from the BCPBA website on March 17, but Slate’s address, cell phone, and date of birth are still there. The “BOLO” focuses not on the complaint report investigation, but a related racial profiling investigation, where either a white man (Kirsch or Slate) or a black man (identified on the “BOLO” as Dorian Gibson, age 21) would be driving a red Mustang convertible (its information is also given in the document). In the investigation results, the white driver was never pulled over but the black driver was. According the BCPBA description, the white driver would first drive around, then the black driver in the same car. For a proper study, they should reverse the ordering so that the issue isn’t that the police first see one driver, then a completely different driver for the same car, which could produce an inference of a stolen vehicle regardless of the race of the respective drivers.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has filed a suit against Direct Revenue for secretly installing spyware on users’ computers, seeking a restraining order to prevent it. Direct Revenue was recently chastised by researcher Ben Edelman, who pointed out many large or well-known companies that have been paying them for their services–companies like Citibank, Netflix, Sprint, United Airlines, Blockbuster, Chase, Travelocity, and more.

Coyote Carnival #2, devoted to Arizona blogs, is up. Apparently my submission got lost.