You may want to leave your laptop at home...

...if you're traveling overseas. Seems as though Homeland Security Customs and Border Control has been confiscating some laptops, cellphones, MP3 players, and other electronic devices, and subjecting others to invasive searches. That companies are changing their corporate policies as a result makes me think there's more than a couple ancedotal cases involved. If it were just confiscation I could chalk it up to some unethical screeners wanting to steal some hi-fi, but the searches lead me to believe there's some policy being enforced, without clarification as to what the policy is. Not good.

(summary here in case WashPost asks you to login to view the article)

UPDATE: OK, turns out it isn't TSA, but Customs and Border Control, that's responsible for this fiasco.

New Orleans update

Report from someone who went down to the Ninth Ward area to help with a cleanup project

Openly partisan blogs

I thought this from the MonkeyCage blog had a well-made point about why sites like Daily Kos and LGF are a different beast from "normal" blogs, and need to be taken as such:

...This lays out some of the reasons why we might expect sites like the Daily Kos (still the most important liberal blog community out there) not only to ban conservatives from commenting, but also not to want to engage in substantive, reasoned debate with conservative bloggers elsewhere. They perceive their role as building an organization, not as trying to create some kind of Habermasian ideal speech situation. And to the extent that this is true, their contact with people of opposing viewpoints is not intended to reach a mutually agreeable settlement, or to politely exchange views, but to win.

The quote from the dKospedia before that part is worth reading, as well: "...Conservative debaters are not welcome simply because the efforts here are to define and build a progressive infrastructure, and conservatives can’t help with that. There is, yes, the danger of the echo chamber, but a bigger danger is becoming simply a corner bar where everything is debated, nothing is decided, and the argument is considered the goal. The argument, however, is not the goal, here. This is an explicitly partisan site: the goal is an actual infrastructure, and actual results."