Article by O'Keefe May Explain Senate Stunt
On Jan. 25, James O'Keefe and three other conservative activists were arrested after a weird incident in which they entered Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-La.) office in New Orleans dressed as telephone repairmen and attempted to gain access to the closet where the phone system was serviced. They were charged with "entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony," according to an FBI press release.
There's been a lot of speculation about the motives of O'Keefe, who led an attempted sting of ACORN offices last fall that was widely publicized and helped spur Congress to drop millions in funding for the voter registration and lower income charity. Messing with the telephones in a federal government official's office is a serious felony, whether O'Keefe and his associates were planning to bug the phones, vandalize them or achieve some other purpose. If they are convicted, the four men face up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
On a web site published by Andrew Breitbart, who has O'Keefe on his payroll but denies involvement in the Landrieu incident, O'Keefe issued a statement after the arrest claiming that "[n]o one tried to wiretap or bug Senator Landrieu's office. Nor did we try to cut or shut down her phone lines."
This statement doesn't explain why some of them were dressed as repairmen and tried to access the telephone closet, as the FBI alleges.
An article that O'Keefe wrote in November 2008 for the online conservative magazine New Guard may shed some light on his actions. In the article, O'Keefe describes a past sting project where he and a young anti-abortion activist named Lila Rose contacted Planned Parenthood offices seeking to donate money to fund abortions and reduce the number of black babies in the United States.
We were able to donate money to the organization for the explicit purpose of reducing the number of black babies born in the United States -- in line with the intentions of Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger.
We carefully chose a dozen or so "one party consent" states, where it is legal to audio record someone without their consent. Not a single Planned Parenthood employee we spoke to was disinterested in the prospect of a donation for our stated purposes.
As he did later at ACORN offices, O'Keefe targeted low-level employees of liberal leaning groups and tried to get them to say something damning while he was taping the interactions. Although he says that the Planned Parenthood taping was legal, he also writes this in the article:
Leaders taking on power structures need to be raw, confident, fearless and impermeable. Lila received a letter threatening to prosecute the group for violating wiretapping laws, but it did not stop her from continuing the investigation. After the investigation aired nationally on Fox News, Planned Parenthood could no longer press charges, as Lila would appear the victim.
O'Keefe believed that even if he and Rose were putting themselves in legal jeopardy, the fear of bad publicity would make it impossible for charges to be pressed against them.
I don't know what O'Keefe and his fake telephone repairmen were planning to do at Landrieu's office, but he seems to believe that when you break laws in pursuit of a media stunt, the coverage will shield you from prosecution. That hasn't worked out for him this time around.
Creating a Closest Store Locator in PHP
Over the past year, one of my side projects has been the development of shopping directory sites for categories such as wargames, sports cards, videogames and farmers markets, the last of which I launched over the weekend. The sites are running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) using my own code and the Smarty template language, which keeps me from cluttering up my web pages with PHP.
As I prepared the newest site, I decided to implement a feature that takes a user-submitted address and finds the closest stores. This functionality was the original impetus for the project -- I thought it would be cool if Wargames.Com had a store locator that could find the closest wargame store when I'm out of town.
To accomplish this, I needed to split latitude and longitude into their own fields in the MySQL database and use the following SQL query to find the closest stores to a user-submitted latitude and longitude:
SELECT *, (3959 * acos(cos(radians({$user_latitude})) * cos(radians(latitude)) * cos(radians(longitude) - radians({$user_longitude})) + sin( radians({$user_latitude})) * sin(radians(latitude)))) AS distance FROM stores HAVING distance < 250 ORDER BY distance LIMIT 0, 10
This query, which I found in a PHP/MySQL tutorial by a Google Maps engineer, employs the Haversine formula to compute distances between two pairs of coordinates on a sphere. The fields latitude and longitude are from the MySQL database. The PHP variables $user_latitude and $user_longitude contain the coordinates of the user address.
An address can be specified many different ways, but most people don't know the latitude and longitude of their location. Fortunately, Google Maps offers a web service that can take an address in a wide variety of formats and attempt to determine its latitude and longitude. The web service, which is a simple URL request, returns the information in either XML or JSON format. It requires a Google MAPS API key:
http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=ADDRESS&output=json&oe=utf8&sensor=false&key=YOUR+API+KEY
Plug the address and your API key into the request, changing "json" to "xml" if you want XML data. Here's example output for Disney World in JSON and XML.
I chose JSON over XML because it's easier to work with in PHP. PHP 5 has built-in support for JSON, but my sites are on a server running PHP 4, so I installed the Services_JSON library. After a brutal hour of trial and error that made me question programming as a lifestyle choice, I figured out that the following four lines of PHP code will pull a latitude and longitude out of Google's JSON address data:
$json = new Services_JSON();
$json_data = $json->decode($this->get_web_page($url));
$addr_latitude = $json_data->Placemark[0]->Point->coordinates[1];
$addr_longitude = $json_data->Placemark[0]->Point->coordinates[0];
The get_web_page() function returns the contents of a web page as a string.
I've added the closest-store search to all four sites, which you can try on the home page of Sportscard-Stores.Com. The next project will be to create mobile versions of the shopping sites so users can hunt stores with their phones.
News Alert Banana Losing Appeal After Brown Victory
Last night on the Drudge Retort, I honored the request of a few Republican members of the site to bring back News Alert Banana when the Massachusetts Senate race was called for Scott Brown. The Banana is the Retort's version of Matt Drudge's siren.
The banana has never celebrated a dramatic Republican upset victory with so much glee before. I don't know how he lives with himself.
There are a lot of reasons being batted around today for how the Democrats managed to lose a Senate election in Massachusetts. My favorite is the idea that voters in a liberal state that has universal health care voted for Brown, a candidate who supports the state's health care plan, in order to send a strong message in rejection of health care reform. That's like buying a Red Sox jersey to indicate how much you love the Yankees.
One reason for the ass-kicking ought to be getting more attention today, in my opinion: The Democrat-led Massachusetts legislature changed the Senate succession rules twice in the last six years to benefit their own party.
In 2004, when Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts was the party's presidential nominee, the legislature faced the prospect that if Kerry won, the state's Republican governor Mitt Romney would be able to appoint his successor. They changed the rules at the urging of Sen. Ted Kennedy so that a special election would fill the seat instead.
Last year, when it appeared that Kennedy would die and leave the Senate Democrats one short of a filibuster-proof majority of 60 members, the rules were changed again with his involvement. The state's Democratic governor Deval Patrick would be able to appoint an interim successor to serve until the special election.
So when a little-known Republican state senator faced off Tuesday against the Democratic attorney general, who was supported by the Kennedys and the state's political establishment, this was the first time that voters had a chance to have their say in the choice of a replacement senator.
Message received.
The American public is sick and tired of insiders rigging the system for their own benefit, whether the system is politics, banking or Wall Street. Kennedy's gamesmanship with Senate seats helped elect the first Republican senator in Massachusetts in 38 years.
Human Target's Opening Credits Hit the Mark
The new Fox series Human Target has amazing opening credits:
I caught the pilot during a special preview Sunday night sandwiched between episodes of 24. Regular airings begin Wednesday. The show, based on a DC comic book from the '70s, was a light escapist romp. Mark Valley, who was great a few years ago in a similar role as Keen Eddie, plays an out-of-his-mind bodyguard for hire who manages to get shot, stabbed, blown up and trapped on a runaway bullet train in a single episode. The great Jackie Earle Haley, Rorschach from Watchmen and Kelly Leak from Bad News Bears, plays his unscrupulous henchman Guerrero.
And Now You Want to Be My Friend on Facebook?
I was poking around Google Reader when I found a recommended six-month-old blog post by Google engineer Mark Chu-Carroll on why he will not be attending his high school reunion:
... it's twenty five years since I got out of that miserable ------- hell-hole. And people from my high school class are suddenly getting in touch, sending me email, trying to friend me on Facebook, and trying to convince me to bring my family to the reunion. (It's a picnic reunion, full family invited.) Even some of the people who used to beat the crap out of me on a regular basis are getting in touch as if we're old friends. ...
Stay the ---- away from me. I don't want to hear about your lives. I don't want to know how you've changed since high school. I don't want to hear about your jobs, your spouses, your children. I've got a good life now, and I cannot imagine a reason in the world why I would pollute that world with contact with any of you.
Chu-Carroll describes in his post and subsequent comments how his fingers were broken by a bully and a swastika was once burned into his lawn while he attended a suburban New Jersey high school in the '80s. He received hundreds of responses to his post, including one that recommended an appropriate song by the Australian singer Kate Miller-Heidke:
You can hear a better audio version on her iLike page. I think my favorite genre of music is antisocial piano rock. Last fall, Miller-Heidke toured the U.S. as the opening act for the master of the form, Ben Folds.
Why Leslie Harpold's Sites Disappeared
Leslie had a special kind of magic. But today there's no trace of her sites.
As long as those sites were up, her brand of humanity was alive, pure, unedited and quenching. The availability of her writing made her slightly less absent. Sad isn't really an appropriate construct for missing Leslie. And sappy sentimentality wouldn't please her at all.
But that writing should remain on the Internet. Those sites should never come down. They belong here like Leslie belonged here. Immortal.
-- a comment by Liria Mersini
A little over three years ago, the web designer and online essayist Leslie Harpold died at age 40. Leslie was a friend of mine, part of a circle of early web creators who discovered the medium as it was blossoming in the mid-'90s. We hung out together on a private mailing list for a decade watching the web (and ourselves) grow up. Leslie left behind a vast body of online work in the form of essays, web sites, weblog entries and photos.
Since that time, almost all of it has disappeared.
Leslie's family allowed her domains smug.com, harpold.com and others to expire and politely turned down all requests to mirror her sites. Several of her friends, including me, had offered after her death to pay the costs required to keep them online.
The recent death of Brad Graham, another early web publisher, has renewed interest in the fate of Leslie's work. I sent an email yesterday to Leslie's niece, asking if it would be possible for some of her friends to reprint her work as a book and web site. Today I heard back. They will not allow anything to be republished. Because I've been told that some of her writings might be a sensitive issue for her family, I replied to her niece that if this is indeed the case, those particular works could be excluded from reprint.
This did not go over well.
I was told that it's none of my business why her family doesn't want her work republished, which is absolutely true, and that her legacy "is not dependent on websites or books; her legacy is with every person who knew her and loved her." This is only partially true. Leslie was an early pioneer in the creation of autobiographical content and experimental web design. She left behind thousands of web pages, many of which are as memorable as Possible Scenarios for Heaven from 2003.
Leslie's family appears to have decided to let her entire body of work disappear and be forgotten completely. The only things that are left online are articles she wrote for other sites, such as The Morning News.
This raises an important question for those of us who create work on the web that we publish ourselves. When heirs decide to bury a web creator's body of work by shuttering sites and rejecting all republication requests, can anything be done to save the material?
If the heirs of Charles Dickens had decided that his novels were not his legacy, they could have spurned all publishers and let the books fall out of print, but the existing copies would not have vanished entirely. There still would be physical copies of the books to read and some would've survived long enough to fall into the public domain.
For works created on the web, however, the only thing keeping them around is an active publisher or a copyright license that permits others to reprint the material. A copyright holder who wanted a web site to disappear completely could take it offline, demand its removal from all archives and never allow republication. Leslie's work will not begin passing into the public domain until 2065.
Perhaps this is the way it should be. No one has found an email or web page where Leslie stipulated her desires for her work in the event of her death, leaving the decision to her heirs.
But everything I learned about Leslie over the years tells me that she'd want this part of her to survive.
Danish Cartoonist Left Child Outside Panic Room
Last week, the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard was confronted at home by an axe-wielding intruder enraged by his depiction of Muhammad. Initial media reports indicated that the 74-year-old and his five-year-old granddaughter Stephanie fled to the safety of a "panic room" in his home and alerted police, who arrived within minutes and shot the intruder.
Yesterday, news reports revealed that Westergaard fled to the panic room without his granddaughter:
At the time, Westergaard was looking after his five-year-old granddaughter, Stephanie. He was confronted with a terrible choice: risk being killed in front of his granddaughter, or trust that the PET, Denmark's security and intelligence service, knew what they were talking about when they had told him terrorists usually don't harm family members but stick to their target.
Westergaard chose to escape into his bathroom, which had been specially fortified as a "panic room", while Stephanie was left sitting in the living room. From the bathroom he alerted the police as his assailant reportedly battered the reinforced door with the axe, shouting, "We will get our revenge!"
"Those minutes were horrible," Westergaard recalled yesterday. "But I think I have got through this fairly well -- and so, it seems, did my grandchild.
Westergaard has given several different explanations for his decision to hide without the child. He told the Copenhagen Post that he was trying to draw the intruder away from the child and said to another paper that he didn't have time to get her.
Regardless of his rationale, I can't think of a any reason I'd lock myself in a secure room while leaving a young child outside with an intruder. She could've been kidnapped, attacked or threatened as a means to get him out.
We're having a lively debate about this on the Drudge Retort, where the only thing we can agree on is this: If your dad requires constant security because of death threats, he's a poor choice for babysitter.
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