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What the heck is vote caging, and why should we care? 

Vote caging is an illegal trick to suppress minority voters (who tend to vote Democrat) by getting them knocked off the voter rolls if they fail to answer registered mail sent to homes they aren’t living at (because they are, say, at college or at war). The Republican National Committee reportedly stopped the practice following a consent decree in a 1986 case. Google the term and you’ll quickly arrive at the Wizard of Oz of caging, Greg Palast, investigative reporter and author of the wickedly funny Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans—Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Palast started reporting allegations of Republican vote caging for the BBC’s Newsnight in 2004. He’s been almost alone on the story since then. Palast contends, both in Armed Madhouse and widely through the liberal blogosphere, that vote caging, an illegal voter-suppression scheme, happened in Florida in 2004 this way…

Hospitals Nationwide Combat Employee Camera-Phone Abuse 

 Another case, in Iowa City, Iowa, involved a May 18 newspaper article that police were investigating reports that someone took nude photos of nursing residents with a camera phone. Cell phones reportedly are now banned at the facility.

It’s unclear how many hospitals have policies regulating camera phones, but their numbers seem to be growing. Last year, the Southern California hospital chain Scripps Health added camera phones and PDAs to its policies restricting photography, although they are not officially banned.

Scripps Health, which runs five hospitals and 13 outpatient clinics, told Wired News it has fired employees in the last month for violating photography rules,

It has already been suggested that we all just live in glass houses and video everything we do and post it on YouTube, privacy is so 1990’s. Now you’re not even safe in what many people consider the last bastion of privacy, hospitals.

Iraq Is Korea?Bush’s latest appalling historical analogy. 

Is Fred Thompson too lazy to be president?