Auto-tUuUne (shortee!)

I know Auto-Tune in the News has been around the net now for a few months but this one is one of the best. Featuring the climate change bill, Sarah Palin's resignation and Michael Jackson "waking up dead."

Here's Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining how Auto-Tune works, and I'd also highly recommend the excellent music documentary Before The Music Dies featuring a segment on the use of Auto-Tune in pop stardom.

(via ManBabies)

Judge Sonia Sotomayor~r~r~r

NYT: "President Obama will nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as his first appointment to the court, officials said Tuesday, and has scheduled an announcement for 10:15 a.m. at the White House."

She'd be the third woman on the bench and the first Latina. As of late she was involved in the Connecticut case over reverse discrimination when no blacks made it past New Haven's firefighter promotion test and the department scrapped the test. Check out her Wikipedia page. As of right now there are nine citations about her possible nomination to the Court.

"Hey! I'm tired of Gibbs screwing this thing up."

President Obama making an impromptu appearance at the daily White House press briefing last Friday to detail the announcement of Justice David Souter's retirement. This is how you make an entrance:

Obama could nominate Souter's replacement as early as the end of this week according to Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, member of the Judiciary Committee. Signs point to the selection of a woman justice since Ruth Bader Ginsburg was left the lone female on the Supreme Court when Sandra Day O'Connor retired in 2006. You might recall two weeks ago during a case about the strip search of a 13-year old girl. Ginsburg let loose on Justice Breyer for suggesting that girls, like boys, shouldn't have an issue being naked in front of an adult of the same sex because of the similarity to a locker room:

According to NPR's Nina Totenberg, who was in the room, Ginsburg's eyes "flashed with anger" at Justice Breyer's question. "She seemed to all but shout, "Boys may like to preen in the locker room, but girls, particularly teen-aged girls, do not."

Souter will retire in June and his replacement should assume office when the court reconvenes in October.

"Low-flying planes cause scare in NYC"

Adm. Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence

On the CIA "enhanced interrogation techniques" scandal:
"The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

(via First Read)

Hey, 1999. What the fuck?

Back in the late 1990s Citicorp and Travelers Insurance merged to form Citigroup, currently known as Citi. Citycorp was the successor of the long line of banks started by City Bank of New York in 1812, and Travelers a consortium of insurers and creditors. The merger was unprecedented in its time because those two financial animals—bankers and creditors—were prohibited from sharing assets by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. That act separated bankers and brokers in order to prevent the wild speculation that inflated the stock markets leading to the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

The act was repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, in large part to allow for mergers such as Citigroup to stand. Well guess what:

The repeal enabled commercial lenders such as Citigroup, which was in 1999 then the largest U.S. bank by assets, to underwrite and trade instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations and establish so-called structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, that bought those securities. It is believed that the repeal of this act contributed to the Global financial crisis of 2008–2009.

You can actually go back and read the coverage from the New York Times, including former Treasury Secretary and current White House National Economic Council director Larry Summers's pronouncement that "this historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy." But the most significant part of the report is this small prognostication:

"I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010," said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. "I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness."

Now here we are.

An interview with one of the victims of Bernie Madoff. Ronnie Sue Ambrosino had all of her retirement funds invested with Madoff. Now, all she and her husband have to their names is a mortgaged motorhome.

Madoff has plead guilty and faces up to 150 years in prison.

Olympus's little 'carrot camera' official, and other PMA news

Late last year Olympus revealed this impressive little concept camera that uses a system developed with Panasonic called Micro Four Thirds. The MFT system blurs the lines between small point-and-shoot consumer cameras and big honking professional/prosumer DSLR cameras by combining a large image sensor and interchangeable lenses with pocketability and video recording. It's a magical concoction that promises the world, though the only MFT camera on the market is still bulky, expensive and doesn't record video. While the Olympus concept lacks a lot of specifics it may still prove to be a blowout in form and function.

Last week at the Photo Marketing Association trade show Olympus made the concept official and said it would be out some time this summer. No further details were announced, though a Russian photography site posted a rumor (translated) that this model will be named the M-100 and come with a 14-70mm kit lens (28-140mm 35mm-eqiv.). The kooky Russians also rumored there will be a larger version dubbed the M-1 that will have HD video recording capabilities. An interview with an Olympus official confirms that the M-100 will have image stabilization as well as a high speed electronic view finder (read a Japanese person's interpretation of the interview here). He notes the design is not final–the unit on display is the same mockup from last year–but the final package will stay true to the dimensions of the concept camera. If you look closely at this picture you can even see the mockup is getting a little dusty.

Anyway, keep your eye on it. Other notable announcements from PMA:

• Samsung will release a Micro Four Thirds camera series dubbed NX. It looks almost as appealing as the M-100 and seriously small compared to a regular DSLR. Few details and no price or release date were announced but Photography Bay put together as many facts as they could here.
  
  
• Epson announced the R-D1xG, a rangefinder camera that improves on their first model released five years ago. A rangefinder attached to a point and shoot camera allows for adjustable and clear focus on one's subject. This is great for photojournalists because the Epson and Leica digital rangefinder cameras are small enough for one-handed operation but still provide incredible quality. Unfortunately they're damned expensive.
  
  
• Panasonic showed off this little 'tough camera' that stands up to beatings and diving and keeps working while looking fine.

The Adam Carolla Podcast

Adam Carolla, longtime Loveline co-host, actor/comedian and recently-dethroned successor to Howard Stern's radio show is now producing a free daily podcast. You can grab the RSS feed here and the iTunes subscription link here. He launched the podcast just last week and it has already reached well over one million downloads.

Each show averages an hour long and covers any topic on the host's or guest's mind. I've listened to four shows so far and it's consistently funny and enjoyable. This week comedian extraordinaire David Alan Grier (aka DAG) and Leo Laporte (host of the This Week in Tech podcast) are scheduled to appear. So why not tune in, it's fucking FREE!

A few notes on the stimulus

So the 2009 stimulus bill (or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or the ARARARARARA) looks like it'll bounce its way out from between the House and Senate soon and actually pass. The Washington Post published this cool infographic showing the distribution of the bulk of those 819 billion little dollars.

The Republicans kept pressing for a 60/40 split in favor of tax cuts, but as you've heard in their fury and can see in that chart the Democrats plopped down big balls of financial distribution split almost 80/20 in favor of spending. Most of those gargantuan fiscal sacks relate to housing, energy, health care, education, food assistance and infrastructure (like highway and bridge repair). In other words, the majority is geared towards investment in programs neglected by the Bush Administration for eight years as it tried to fulfill Grover Norquist's dream of shrinking government "down to the size where [he could] drown it in the bathtub".

Even though most of the bill is stimulative some (relative) pork weaseled its way in as reported today by the Post. Some highlights include funding for clean coal, fish hatcheries and tax breaks for golf carts and electric motorcycles. Still:

Stimulus advocates say the GOP complaints are overheated and generally focus on projects that Republicans dislike for ideological reasons. Chad Stone, chief economist at the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, defended the bill. "The overwhelming bulk of what is in the package is effective and well-designed stimulus," he said.

Looking back at that infographic the gray ball all the way on the right ($82.1 billion for "Tax credit payments") constitutes the part of the stimulus people would most likely compare to the rebate checks distributed last year. Instead of a lump sum check that money gets spread out so that starting in June you'll see between $5 and $20 knocked off of your payroll taxes for about two years. So now instead of running out and buying that celebrity-narrated GPS even though you can't afford to put gas in your damn car maybe you'll be able to go out to dinner once every couple of weeks instead. I hear sushi's pretty good.

Boston's police get reckless, treat Shepard Fairey and arts community as pawns

Shepard Fairey (designer of the iconic Andre the Giant, OBEY and Obama Hope campaigns) was arrested in Boston last Friday night just outside of and moments before the opening of his career-spanning show "Supply and Demand" at the Institute for Contemporary Art. The cops nabbed him on two revived warrants for various bits of graffiti, but what's notable is the timing and method of arrest. As they pulled up to ICA:

The driver slowed down to attempt to make the turn but still missed the entrance by just a fraction of a second and we passed it by a short distance. The driver tried to back up or turn around but the unmarked SUV directly behind us was blocking our path. Police officers quickly surrounded the cab, and one of them pounded loudly on the driver's window. "Boston Police, stop the car! Turn off the car!" The officer exchanged words with the cab driver, and one of the officers flashed a badge and asked us each to identify ourselves. When Shepard calmly said, "I'm Shepard," one officer commanded, "Everybody out of the car, now!" We quickly decided to OBEY.

In this account given to Wooster Collective by friends traveling in the cab with Fairey and his wife, it appears as if the Boston Police planned to 'ambush' Fairey at the door of the show in order to stir up the crowd or even provoke a riot but scrapped the plan when the cab missed the turn. They make the case by noting the Boston P.D. had two weeks to arrest Fairey but waited until the show in order to cause a media shit storm for the Mayor, who had been promoting Fairey's visit and feuding with the P.D. on wages and residency requirements. Hell, the warrants were issued the day after the Mayor and the P.D. finished negotiations!

Never forget, and if you're in the arts you may want to avoid Boston like... forever.

JPG Magazine is No More (for Now)

On Friday JPG Magazine's parent company 8020 Media announced it will be shutting down in a few days due to financial stress. Just when I was considering a subscription too, damnit. There is a possibility the magazine could get picked up by a third party.

JPG always displayed exceptional content from its subscribers and supporters and brilliant little pieces about photography advice and recommendations, such as this tribute to the Spinshot 35S 360° film camera.

The Big Picture's Best Photos of 2008

Boston.com's The Big Picture has posted a three part retrospective of 2008's best in photojournalism. Here are part one, part two and part three. Highly, highly recommended.

The Daily Show: The Mumbai Attacks

Kudos to Jon Stewart and John Oliver for having the balls to take on this massive act of douchebaggery.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mumbai Tragedy

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

RJD2: New Album in 2009

RJD2 aka Ramble John Krohn announced on his MySpace blog that it's a "virtual certainty" he will have a new album in 2009:

It's very near to completion. Once all the business is sorted, I should have an idea of exactly when in 2009. It's got some exciting guests from here and from there.

Not sure if he'll take it in the same direction as 2007's The Third Hand on which he played all the instruments and sang. Personally I hope he gets back on the Dead Ringer/The Horror/Since We Last Spoke route, though when explaining the motivation for Third Hand he said he doesn't like to repeat himself artistically.

David Gregory to host Meet The Press

Politico is reporting that MSNBC's David Gregory will be the new host for Meet The Press, replacing the late great Tim Russert. If you need your memory jogged Gregory is the gray-haired tall guy imbued the same engaging personality as CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

This choice isn't too surprising. Viewers came to expect Meet The Press to be provocative under Russert, but the only other NBC talent would have either been confrontational (with commentators like Olbermann, Scarborough and Maddow) or controversial (Matthews will most likely run for senator of Pennsylvania). At least Gregory has an air of levelheadedness. Maybe he won't be as milquetoast as I expect, prove me wrong!

Ladies and gentlemen I give you President Barack Obama.

YEEEEEAH!!!!

Trying like hell to vote in '08

You may be too young to remember the 60s, when the dead clawed their way out of Chicago cemeteries so they could vote for Mayor Daley then rampaged the countryside in search of fresh brain meat as depicted in the documentary Dawn of the Dead. Well it only took a few decades for more cadavers to pop up on voter rolls, as they did in Miami back in the 2000 presidential election. But those politically active corpses were just the edge of the unbearable nightmare of that election and the morass voting has become. I've been following the "process" since 2000 turned my state into a national joke and 2008 looks to be the most conflicted election yet.

I wanted to put together a comprehensive narrative of current voting issues but time is running short and fresh news accounts of voting problems are hitting hard and fast. So here's a more tidy run down of voting issues I've come across this season:

• For a great account of the voter disenfranchisement, loose data matching standards and abominable polling equipment used in the 2000 election the first thing to read is Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. It includes an interesting bit about optical scan machines that could be switched to accept incomplete ballots when it would normally alert the voter that they need to fix their ballot, I have no idea if that's been fixed. Palast is an investigative journalist with UK's Guardian newspaper and was one of the first people to really dig out the cause of the 2000 Florida election debacle. Also HBO's Recount aired back in May takes a dramatized look at all circumstances surrounding the eventual litigious battle for the presidency back then and it is a long (2 hours!) but highly recommended pick.
• In 2004 and onwards Palast and other have been warning about "voter caging", an illegal practice in which political operatives send a meaningless letter with a "do not forward" label to someone's home to check whether or not they live there and if it gets returned they take it to the polls and challenge the voter's eligibility. In 2007 Palast announced he had uncovered Karl Rove's e-mails detailing plans to do this in the 2006 and 2008 elections and he warned that 4.7 million votes could be stolen in the 2008 election.
• The high levels of foreclosures due to the popped housing bubble and the flailing economy is being taken advantage of in Michigan where the Republican Party is planing to use caging to challenge voters at the polls.
• AlterNet has reported that three states (Kansas, Michigan and Louisiana) are removing voters from their rolls by checking their personal information against the same kind of shitty databases used to send out junk mail. This was the same sort of data used to disenfranchise people with similar personal info as felons in Florida in 2000. This year in Florida we're doing something resembling 2000 with the "no match no vote" law where newly registered voters get their information checked against other state databases and if there's a conflict, even a clerical error they are removed from the voter rolls. It's been said that about 15,000 registrants will be denied a vote because of clerical errors alone.
  
• Sequoia touch screen voting machines can be broken into using hacked voting cards in just seven minutes. Sequoia was also part of the 2000 debacle as Dan Rather exposed in his Discovery HD series Dan Rather Reports. Back then the paper stock they used to print the cards used for punch card voting was lowered in quality meaning that some of the chads would hang because the paper was too thick. Hey Sequoia, stop sucking.
• Oh wait, I'm not done with Sequoia yet. They didn't supply Colorado with enough absentee ballots so 11,000 people won't be able to vote absentee in Denver. "Sequoia: Trust us to fuck up horribly."
• Back in 2006 there were electronic voting machines that would reset with the push of a yellow button on the back allowing someone to vote multiple times. The defense for the machines was that they would make a very loud beep when the button gets pressed. They were manufactured by Sequoia... wait HOW THE FUCK IS THIS COMPANY STILL IN BUSINESS?!
  
• The nonpartisan group Election Protection is sending lawyers all over the country to observe polling places. They're also running a hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE for any voting questions or issues to report. Both major political parties are making similar efforts.
• There are widespread reports of "vote flipping", where touchscreen voting machines mark the wrong candidate when a voter makes their selection. Here's a video of it happening in West Virginia, even after recalibrating the touchscreen the machine still selects the wrong candidate but the elections official brushes it off. The Simpsons parodied this problem in this week's Treehouse of Horrors episode.
• Meanwhile the regular racist/asshole tactics of passing out fliers, spreading rumors, etc. about false voting information (wrong days for voting, threats of police presence and arrests at polls and so on) are an even bigger problem this year. The reports are sporadic but some are really egregious. In California the state Republican Party (or an impostor) has been sending non-Republican voters fake registration cards identifying the recipients as Republicans. The fake cards were sent with "do not forward" marks meaning they could also be used for voter caging.
• In Georgia a newly registered voter was sent a letter from her election office giving her two weeks to prove her citizenship (even though she was born in the United States) and it didn't arrive until after those two weeks were up. "Elise Shore, regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said letters like those sent to Berry appear to violate two federal laws against voter purging within 90 days of the election." Way to go, Georgia.
• Democracy Now! did a comprehensive feature last week with two prominent bloggers who focus on voting issues.

If you want to follow voting problems in-depth two good sites are Black Box Voting and VotersUnite.Org, otherwise most major news outlets are trying to keep on top of voting issues that bubble to the surface (while hopefully not focusing on ACORN over and over) so keep and eye out. If you want to share anything related to anything I've written about go crazy in the comments. Good night, and good luck.