News, Etc.

Former president Dick Cheney received a new heart to replace the one that was missing. I know that's a bad joke, but I am not the first one who has made it.

Cheney has had a history of heart trouble. He was on the transplant list for 20 months. I am actually surprised anybody would allow him to even receive a transplant given his age. He is 71 years old.
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Some atheists decided to take their grievances to D.C. this weekend.

"We are here to deliver a message to America," David Silverman, president of American Atheists, one of the rally's sponsors, told the crowd. "We are here and we will never be silent again."

Indeed, thousands came out for what organizers dubbed The Reason Rally and billed as the largest-ever gathering of nonbelievers in one place. They stood in a steady and sometimes heavy rain as speakers, singers, writers, comedians and activists charged them with channeling their common rejection of God into a force for political change.

Given most people's prejudice against nonbelievers, they probably won't get very far.
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Good idea:

Two U.S. senators are asking Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate whether employers asking for Facebook passwords during job interviews are violating federal law, their offices announced Sunday.

Troubled by reports of the practice, Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said they are calling on the Department of Justice and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to launch investigations. The senators are sending letters to the heads of the agencies.

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As If Employers

don't already have an arsenal of techniques to screen potential candidates out.

There is so much employers pull that ought to be illegal. This is certainly one thing:

Ohm became interested in this problem in the course of researching the ease with which we can learn the identities of people from supposedly anonymous personal data like movie preferences and health information. When Netflix, for example, released 100 million purportedly anonymous records revealing how almost 500,000 users had rated movies from 1999 to 2005, researchers were able to identify people in the database by name with a high degree of accuracy if they knew even only a little bit about their movie-watching preferences, obtained from public data posted on other ratings sites.

Ohm says he worries that employers would be able to use social-network-aggregator services to identify people’s book and movie preferences and even Internet-search terms, and then fire or refuse to hire them on that basis. A handful of states — including New York, California, Colorado and North Dakota — broadly prohibit employers from discriminating against employees for legal off-duty conduct like smoking. Ohm suggests that these laws could be extended to prevent certain categories of employers from refusing to hire people based on Facebook pictures, status updates and other legal but embarrassing personal information. (In practice, these laws might be hard to enforce, since employers might not disclose the real reason for their hiring decisions, so employers, like credit-reporting agents, might also be required by law to disclose to job candidates the negative information in their digital files.)

For cryin' out loud. There won't anybody left to hire by the time these jerks get done "researching" their online history.

Democrats

certainly didn't appeal to their base in this situation.

Is their summer recess more important than privacy and constitutional rights?