Probably not, but still…

Did Martha break house arrest?

The U.S. Probation Department is investigating whether Martha Stewart violated the terms of her house arrest when she attended a Time magazine dinner last week, The New York Post reported Sunday.

“We’re going to do some investigating to see if this event was directly related to her employment,” Chris Stanton, chief federal probation officer for the Southern District of New York, told the Post.

Stanton’s office, the Post said, had originally approved Stewart’s request to go to the event, which celebrated Time’s 100 Most Influential People issue, a list that included Stewart.

Investigators, the Post said, will want to review the nature of the event and the program and compare it to Stewart’s written request to attend.

The affair included a 90-minute cocktail party; many celebrities were in attendance. Stanton told the Post that Stewart’s attendance must have a “specific and concrete” link to her employment and added that going to a high-profile party simply for publicity or to be seen is “not good enough” justification.

Virginia House of Delegates 2005 Elections is a new blog focusing on, well, the 2005 House of Delegates elections. (Via Commonwealth Watch)

Sony uses PowerBook in invites for Vaio launch event

Video shows police handcuffing 5-year-old

Videotape was rolling March 14 when the 5-year-old girl swung again and again, her bantam punches landing on the outstretched palms of Nicole Dibenedetto, the new assistant principal at Fairmount Park Elementary.

She tore papers off Dibenedetto’s bulletin board and desk. She climbed on a table four times. About an hour had passed since she refused to participate in a kindergarten math lesson, which escalated into a series of defiant and destructive acts.

Dibenedetto had used tactics from a Pinellas school district training called Crisis Prevention Intervention:

Let the child know her actions have consequences but also try to “de-escalate.”

Give her opportunities to end the conflict.

Try not to touch her, defend yourself and make sure no one else gets hurt.

As St. Petersburg police officers arrived shortly after 3 p.m., the girl suddenly sat quietly at Dibenedetto’s table. And, just as suddenly, the tactics used by educators gave way to the more direct approach of law enforcement.

An officer sternly said the girl’s name. Then: “You need to calm down. You need to do it now. OK?”

Seconds later, three officers approached and placed their hands on the girl’s wrists and upper arms. They stood her up, put her arms behind her back and put on handcuffs. She bent over the table and let out a terrified scream.

Miller’s Marriage Act Passes, Marriage Fails

Senate Republican Caucus Chairman Jeff Miller is currently going through a divorce with his wife over allegations that he had an affair with a Senate staffer. Ironically, Miller is the sponsor of the state’s Marriage Protection Act aimed at preventing gay marriages or unions from happening in Tennessee. In the debate on that bill, Miller helped defeat an amendment which would have also added criticisms of adultry to the bill. The Nashville City paper, who reported on this story, also reports that Miller’s brother is openly gay. The act passed and now will be voted on by the electorate in the general midterm elections of 2006.

Over One Million Withdrawals, Calls for Dismissing the Chinese Communist Party

On March 27, the total number of withdrawals from the Communist Party, Youth League and Young Pioneers exceeded half a million. In less than one month, another half a million have now withdrawn from the CCP. By April 21, the total number of people who have declared their withdrawals from the CCP, China Youth League and Young Pioneers on the Epoch Times website (http://tuidang.dajiyuan.com/) had exceeded one million. The Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party published by The Epoch Times last November has directly caused this wave of withdrawals.

Police Payoff Probe

Two NYPD veterans are being investigated by Internal Affairs for allegedly accepting payoffs from the motion-picture industry to arrest vendors of pirated DVDs, law-enforcement sources told The Post.
One officer, a sergeant on the force since 1992, has been transferred from the Staten Island Task Force to the 122nd Precinct pending the internal investigation.

The other, a cop for five years, still works on the task force.

As members of the unit, the officers, ages 36 and 32, would arrest the sellers of illegal DVDs and confiscate their stock.

Often they would act on tips from investigators with the Motion Picture Association of America, many of whom are former cops, sources said.

There is nothing improper about that practice. But on at least four occasions in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Staten Island, the task force officers arrested the vendors, confiscated the illegal movies and then allegedly received gratuities of several hundred dollars from the MPAA itself or its investigators, the source said.

The MPAA strongly denied that the payoffs came from the trade organization.

Pissing in Strange Places: A Starter’s Manual to Pissing in Your Car

Email destroys the mind faster than marijuana - study

Modern technology depletes human cognitive abilities more rapidly than drugs, according to a psychiatric study conducted at King’s College, London. And the curse of ‘messaging’ is to blame.

Email users suffered a 10 per cent drop in IQ scores, more than twice the fall recorded by marijuana users, in a clinical trial of over a thousand participants. Doziness, lethargy and an inability to focus are classic characteristics of a spliffhead, but email users exhibited these particular symptoms to a “startling” degree, according to Dr Glenn Wilson.

The deterioration in mental capacity was the direct result of the trialists’ addiction to technology, researchers discovered.

Duuuhhhh….. *drool*

…is tomorrow.

Carnegie Study: Young Adults Are ‘Abandoning’ Papers

A new generation of technology-savvy young people are getting their news in ways that threaten the very viability of newspapers and other traditional news media, according to a study commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

“Abandoning the News,” the study written by MSNBC.com’s founding editor-in-chief, Merrill Brown, adds more grim statistics to growing literature documenting the newspaper industry’s losing effort to appeal to a young audience.

The survey of 18-to-34-year-old finds, for instance, that just 19% read a newspaper daily, 17% read it once a month or less — and 12% said they “never” read a paper to get their news.

By contrast, 44% of the young people visited a Web news portal every day, and 37% watch local TV news daily.

Only 14% of respondents called the newspaper their “most important” source of news. Local TV newscasts were called the most important source for news by 31% of the young adults, while another 25% cited the Internet.

There’s a little bit of good news for newspapers in the report, which has not yet been officially released but is available on Carnegie’s Web site. For one thing, more than half of the respondents told the survey they trust newspapers “a lot.”

But stop the presses: The 25-to-34-year-olds in the surveyed group said the Internet is as trustworthy as newspapers. And more than half of the heaviest newspaper users among young adults predicted that in the next three years they will be accessing the Web more for news.

via The Beat

RedState has some good info on HR 1606 and S 678 that’ll keep the FEC out of bugging blogging.

Instapundit points to the new Business Week cover story on blogging:

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)

There’s a little problem, though. Many of you don’t visit blogs — or haven’t since blogs became a sensation in last year’s Presidential race. According to a Pew Research Center Survey, only 27% of Internet users in America now bother to read them. So we’re going to take you into the world of blogs by delivering this story — call it Blogs 101 for businesses — in the style of a blog. We’re even sprinkling it with links. These are underlined words that, when clicked, carry readers of this story’s online version to another Web page. This all may make for a strange experience, but it’s the closest we can come to reaching out from the page, grabbing you by the collar, and shaking you into action.

Check out Business Week’s blog, Blogspotting.

Rep. Hyde: Clinton impeachment trial in part retaliation

Congressman Henry Hyde made some surprising comments Thursday on the impeachment hearings of President Bill Clinton. He now says Republicans may have gone after Clinton to retaliate for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Hyde is stepping down after this term.

Not sure what to say to that.

The Virginia State Board of Electors now has the financial reports for the 54th District Primary candidates up. Let’s take a look:

Shaun Kenney
1. Cash Over $100 - $25,725.00 from 23 contributors
2. In-Kind Over $100 - $10,983.55 from 4 contributors
3. Cash Under $100 - $2,057 from 31 contributors
TOTAL CONTRIBUTIONS - $38,765.55 from 59 contributors
TOTAL EXPENDITURES - $12,196.11

ENDING FIRST QUARTER FUNDRAISING BALANCE - $26,569.44

Bobby Orrock
1. Cash Over $100 - $26,900.00 from 34 contributors
2. In-Kind Over $100 - $10,557.32 from 3 contributors
3. Cash Under $100 - $8,860 from 41 contributors
TOTAL CONTRIBUTIONS - $40,317.32 from 78 contributors
TOTAL EXPENDITURES - $27,781.15

ENDING FIRST QUARTER FUNDRAISING BALANCE - $12,536.17

Ah, but here’s the intersting thing about those “Cash over $100″ contributions.

Bobby Orrock received a total of THREE contributions from INDIVIDUALS. The rest are from PAC’s, Businesses and Law Firms.

And guess what: not a single donation for over $100 came from within the 54th District.

Not-A-One.

Shaun Kenney received EIGHTEEN contributions over $100 from individuals and groups actually living in the 54th District. AND FOURTEEN contributions from individuals. With names that you can put to faces.

Orrock has the backing of the PACs. Kenney has the backing of the District.

Toss in the endorsements of the chairmen of the Fredericksburg and Caroline party committees, the Executive Committee of the Spotsylvania committee, MORE in-kind pledges as well as more individual pledges and a HUGE Letter to the Editor victory margin to date and you’ve got yourselves a grassroots operations that is on FIRE.

White smoke, bells signal selection of new pope

Announcement coming soon, it seems.

Cardinal Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict XVI.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64195-2005Apr18.html

Zacarias Moussaoui has notified the government that he intends to plead guilty to his alleged role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and could enter the plea as early as this week if a judge finds him mentally competent, sources familiar with the case said yesterday.

Moussaoui’s plan to plead guilty comes over his attorneys’ objections and still has several obstacles — including Moussaoui’s own whim. The French citizen, the only person charged in the United States in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, tried to plead guilty in 2002, claiming an intimate knowledge of the plane hijackings. But he rescinded his plea a week later. His mental state has been an issue in the case ever since, and U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in Alexandria is scheduled to meet with Moussaoui this week to determine if he has the mental capacity to enter a plea now, the sources said.

And, really, if competent, what choice does he really have? Honestly, the deck seems stacked against him. Even if he’s guilty as sin, for him to be unable to directly question the testimony that will be used against him, well, that’s just tossing the Constitution out the window. If you’re going to use the regular judicial system you have to play by the rules. If you want to tweak those rules, well, that’s why you have those military tribunals, right?

SW Virginia Law Blog links to a new poll on the Virginia Governor’s race:

Kilgore: 44%
Kaine: 36%
Margin of error: +/- 4.5%

Compare to Survey USA’s March 10th poll that put Kilgore at 46% and had Kaine still at 36%.

Using the stats currently available on the Virginia State Board of Elections site, here’s a quick comparison of cash on hand for the five VCAP endorsed challengers versus tax-increase incumbents for June 14th Primary:

30th District:
Jarvis - $14,810.25
vs.
Scott (i) - $45,658.11

33rd District:
Oprison - $49,664.17
vs.
May (i) - $201,456.16

41st District:
Golden - No Figures
vs.
Finerfrock - No Figures

50th District:
Chapman - $9,371.35
vs.
Parrish (i) - $71,505.21

54th District:
Kenney - No Figures
vs.
Orrock (i) - $116,703.66

67th District:
Craddock - $35,226.00
vs.
Reese (i) - $78,029.61