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Military recruiters lying to recruits is not a new problem, but this is pretty extreme. ABC News sent students with hidden cameras to 10 Army recruiting offices in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The students were told that no one is going over to Iraq any more, that the soldiers are being brought back. One recruiter told students that if they didn’t like the Army, they could just quit. Historical Comments oop_master (2011-06-02): Yeah, you can quit if you authentically worry your superiors that you may commit suicide, or kiss a same gendered sergeant on the lips. Sometimes you go to jail instead, but not always. ...

The Republicans have been hitting voters over the last week or so with repeated pre-recorded political calls beginning with the phrase, “Hi, I’m calling with information about ,” which have fooled many recipients into thinking that they are being harassed by the campaign of that Democratic candidate. Some recipients have received dozens of repeated calls or more. These campaigns are paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and have occurred in at least Illinois, New York, and New Hampshire. They’ve been partially stopped in New Hampshire after intervention by the state Attorney General–but only by discontinuing calls to voters on the national Do Not Call list. One of the New York calls can be heard here (WAV file). UPDATE: Here’s a list of the twenty districts where these calls are occurring and which Democrats they are attacking. They’re in California, Illinois, Florida, New York, Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, Connecticut, Kansas, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. UPDATE: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has sent the National Republican Congressional Committee a cease and desist letter. UPDATE (November 7, 2006): The New York Times and the Washington Post have covered the story. Michigan Representatives Conyers and Dingell have asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to investigate the issue.

SAIC was commissioned to perform a study on security issues in Diebold voting machines by the State of Maryland. One of the conditions Diebold set on the report in return for allowing access to their machines for the study was the right to redact whatever they wanted from the public version of the report. The public version of the report (PDF) was 38 pages. The unredacted version was 152 pages plus 41 pages of appendices. The private version of the report has now been leaked, and Rebecca Abrahams writes about the differences.

Adrienne Shelly, an actress who starred in Hal Hartley’s films The Unbelievable Trust and Truth, was found dead in her NYC office by her husband. She was 40. Shelly, an agnostic, was a writer and director of independent films as well as an actress. UPDATE (November 7, 2006): A 19-year-old worker, Diego Pillco, who was helping renovate the Manhattan apartment that was Shelly’s office, has confessed to killing her and hanging her from the shower rod in the apartment bathroom. Very sad. UPDATE (February 18, 2007): Adrienne Shelly’s murder has now been fictionalized into an episode of Law & Order that aired last week, titled “Melting Pot.” The episode is really a mix of Adrienne Shelly’s murder and Theo van Gogh’s murder after making the film “Submission” with Ayaan Hirsi Ali–the character Erin Garrett is a combination of Shelly and Hirsi Ali. She is found hanged in her film office, and to have recently made a documentary film called “Fire Under the Veil.” (Shelly and Hirsi Ali are both known for being atheists, but atheism doesn’t factor in the Law & Order episode.) This may be the first time when the murder of someone who appeared on Law & Order was fictionalized in an episode of the show. She appeared in the episode “High & Low” in 2000. ...

Amway president and creationist Dick DeVos told a story about his high school football coach giving him an inspiring talk as he started him as quarterback. The football coach says it never happened, DeVos was never a starting quarterback on the varsity squad, and that he wasn’t a star on the field. Disclosure: It’s my opinion that Amway is a sleazy company run by dishonest and paranoid people. I was served with a subpoena in a lawsuit Amway filed against Proctor & Gamble which was trying to claim that P&G was involved in a conspiracy against Amway’s business by paying people to post Amway-critical information on the Internet. That subpoena was part of a fishing expedition and intimidation campaign; Amway tried to get access to the complete contents of my computer hard drives. The case was eventually thrown out of court. I spent a few thousand dollars to protect my rights; Amway spent a whole lot more. UPDATE (November 8, 2006): Incumbent Governor Jennifer Granholm defeated DeVos in yesterday’s election. ...

ID advocates Tim McGrew and Sal Cordova have accused P.Z. Myers of misrepresenting Jonathan Wells when he pointed out that Wells had selectively edited a quote from a paper by William Ballard in BioScience. McGrew wrote that “Myers is lying through his teeth” about the quotation appearing on p. 35 of Wells’ Politically Incorrect Guide to Intelligent Design. Myers points out that McGrew and Cordova have failed to see what’s right in front of them, and adds some red arrows to a scan of the page to help them see. Will either of them apologize for their IDiocy? UPDATE: They’ve admitted they were wrong about the quotation on p. 35, but argue that the text on the earlier pages is not guilty of the misrepresentation that Myers claimed with regard to the p. 35 quote.

I received an email from the ACLU yesterday, informing me that they’ve jumped in on the net neutrality debate. Unfortunately, they badly misrepresent the facts: FREE THE NET: WHY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT NET NEUTRALITY The keys to the Internet have always been safely in public hands - until last year, when the FCC suddenly repealed longstanding Internet principles of “neutrality” and non-discrimination.The ACLU is going to make the erroneous claim that I’ve debunked repeatedly on my blog (see the Net Neutrality Index)–that the common carriage requirements on telcos constitute “net neutrality.” They will ignore the fact that cable companies–the main providers of consumer broadband Internet access in the U.S.–have never been common carriers and have never been bound by these requirements. With the blessing of the Supreme Court, a handful of profit-driven telecoms and cable companies now could effectively shut down the 21st Century marketplace of ideas by screening Internet e-mail traffic, blocking what they deem to be undesirable content, or pricing users out of the marketplace. The ACLU is going to argue that we need to create a new bureaucratic regulatory apparatus, giving sweeping new powers to the FCC to interfere with freedom of Internet providers to enter into voluntary contracts with each other and manage their own networks, and specifically prohibiting differential pricing on tiered levels of service and the ability for providers to enter into arrangements with content providers to subsidize consumer bandwidth. Historically, Net Neutrality protections filled the free speech gap. Since those protections were removed last year, nothing prevents network providers from discriminating against Internet users and application and service providers in terms of content, quality of access, and choice of equipment.This is doubly false–the common carriage requirements applied only to the last-mile consumer network connections, not to the ability of ISPs to filter; and it is false that “nothing prevents” ISPs from taking actions which would cause them to lose customers. If you’re like many people using the Internet, you don’t think about whether your Internet Service Provider is intentionally slowing down or speeding up your access to Yahoo! versus Google. Without Net Neutrality, your ISP could do just that. Imagine if your phone company was allowed to own restaurants and then provided good service and clear signals to customers who called Dominos and static and frequent busy signals for those calling Pizza Hut. It sounds outrageous, but it would be entirely possible if the telephone system wasn’t regulated under the “common carrier” framework. The telecoms and cable companies that provide Internet network services, including AT&T, BellSouth, Comcast, Qwest, Sprint, Time-Warner/AOL, and Verizon, have spent over $100 million lobbying Congress and the FCC to eliminate established Net Neutrality protections.Remember, cable companies have never been common carriers, yet this hasn’t been a problem. Why create new regulations and give more power to a government agency that has a history of not only working on behalf of the big incumbents (rather than promoting competition, which is what is needed) but of engaging in actions designed to cause discrimination against certain forms of content through censorship? It makes no sense. The assault on Internet freedom will only get worse. The FCC imposed Net Neutrality protections in merger agreements for certain network providers such as SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI, but those protections expire in 2007. And in July 2006, the FCC declined to include any Net Neutrality protections in Comcast and Time-Warner’s acquisition of Adelphia Cable. The pattern of the FCC opposing Net Neutrality is expected to continue, as network providers continue to consolidate into an even smaller pool of Internet gatekeepers. Without the vigorous non-discrimination principles in place before 2005, a few corporate conglomerates will control everything that you can say or do on the Internet. Net Neutrality is needed, and it is needed now.The above argument is a mish-mash of fear-mongering about things that haven’t been an issue, misrepresentation of what regulations have been in place, wild unsubstantiated claims (“a few corporate conglomerates will control everything that you can say or do on the Internet”?), and a failure to look at the actual substantive issues in the network neutrality debate. Their website contains further misinformation: ...

Ted Haggard, head of the New Life megachurch in Colorado Springs, has resigned as leader of the National Association of Evangelicals over accusations that he paid for gay sex and methamphetamines. He denies the allegations, but says he is stepping aside to maintain the integrity of the organization while an investigation occurs. Ross Parsley, the acting senior pastor at New Life Church, says that Haggard has admitted that some of the allegations are true. “I just know that there has been some admission of indiscretion, not admission to all of the material that has been discussed but there is an admission of some guilt,” Parsley told KKTV-TV of Colorado Springs. Haggard and his church have been outspoken in opposition to gay marriage. As Radley Balko points out, this provides further evidence for the thesis that the loudest of the anti-gay crowd are fighting their own urges. UPDATE: It appears that he has confessed to buying methamphetamine, but not the gay sex. UPDATE (November 3, 2006): The accuser has failed a polygraph test (not that that actually means much more than if he had failed a tea-leaf reading or astrological horoscope). Haggard has admitted to buying, but not using meth. Which raises the question–who was he buying meth for, if not for his own use? UPDATE: Haggard is clearly lying about not using the meth he bought (his voice message says he’s buying more), and his claim that he only bought a massage rather than engaged in sex is implausible based on the ad he answered. He claims he bought the meth for his own use out of curiosity, but threw it away. UPDATE (November 4, 2006): Haggard has been dismissed from his church for “sexual immorality." Looks like either his church’s leaders don’t buy his denials of gay sex or consider a massage to be sexual immorality. UPDATE (November 5, 2006): Haggard has admitted that he’s a liar and a deceiver, though still claims that “not all” of the accusations against him are true, “but enough of them are that I was appropriately removed from [his] church leadership position.” He admitted to being “guilty of sexual immorality." UPDATE (December 28, 2006): Haggard’s dope dealer and masseuse, Mike Jones, has signed a book deal. It will be published by Seven Stories Press.

Sen. Jon Kyl, a strong supporter of banning Internet gambling, is a target of online poker players upset at the sleazy way the recent law prohibiting banks from engaging in financial transactions with online gaming sites was passed. That law was snuck into a port security bill in the night by Bill Frist, with no opportunity to vote on the amendment. The effect of that law has been to cause all of the largest legitimate online gaming sites (such as those publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange) to decline to permit Americans to use their sites, while those that are on the shadier side continue to take American business. In other words, the effect has been to make online gaming more dangerous for Americans, and to have less accountability about where the profits go. Kyl has seen his lead in the polls over Jim Pederson decline, though he is still, unfortunately, likely to win. ...

Creationist huckster Kent Hovind and his wife Jo have been found guilty of tax fraud in Florida, and each face over 200 years in prison. For more reactions to the verdict: Dispatches from the Culture Wars Pharyngula The Panda’s Thumb More on the trial may be found here. Hovind’s appearance on the Ali G Show may be found here.