You know, the guys who whine constantly about how poor businesses are over-regulated...

THE NANNY STATE CHRONICLES....ChoicePoint, a credit reporting company, said yesterday that hackers had infiltrated its database and stolen personal information about thousands of consumers. California customers were urged to check their credit reports for suspicious activity.

Why only California customers? Because no one else is being told:

A ChoicePoint spokesman said the number of victims nationwide could total 100,000, but the company could not be sure of the extent of the fraud and had no plans to contact people outside California.

There are about 65,000 of you elsewhere in the country who are at high risk of identify theft but don't have a clue. Your state laws don't require ChoicePoint to notify you, so they're not going to.

Remember this the next time some corporate lobbying group whines about excessive regulation. If you don't regulate them, they won't act like nice guys all on their own.

(Stolen, in its entirety, from Kevin Drum.)

Oh, it pains me to see the acerbic wit aimed at the wrong target, this time at Amazon.com. Folks have been buying stuff for Tom from his wish list, but the purchasers have been getting them instead:

Buh bye, Amazon

Looks like they screwed up on at least one other wish list item, and sent it to the purchaser. Given that my address is the default, somebody at Amazon has to work at it to mess up like this. That's two out of 11, not a very good record. As soon as I get some time to redo the html, they're out of here.

What fuckups. If you take part in this misbegotten wish list system, beware. They send packages willy nilly to the wrong address, and then refuse to take responsibility.

Good thing George Soros didn't stop by and buy me that G-5...

Tom, your address is the default for you, not necessarily for people buying from your wish list. I went to a friend's wish list, added an item to the cart, and proceeded through checkout until I got to the address book. Lo and behold, the wish list owner was just one of about a dozen people listed as choices. None of them was the "default." In the two-column layout, my address was at the top of the left-hand column, and the recipient's at the top of the right-hand column. I tried this again with Ezra Klein's wish list (since he mentioned it recently) and got the same thing.

Buy from Amazon or don't buy from Amazon for whatever reasons you like, but I've done the wish-list thing for friends and colleagues a bunch of times over the years, and I've never had something for someone else sent to me. The E-mail receipt you get verifies the shipping address, and at that point, there's plenty of time to go change the order if there are problems - almost nothing ships in an hour. Barring some kind of hard evidence that Tom's supporters actually chose his address but it got shipped to them instead (like an E-mail receipt showing his shipping address and not theirs), I say it's user error.

(Memo to Ezra: TypePad offers Amazon wish lists as a default option because Six Apart embeds their affiliate code into the link, meaning they get a 5% to 15% kickback on anything ordered. It doesn't raise the price any, but if you want to become an affiliate yourself and change the code to yours, you'll get the quarterly love from Amazon instead of the Six Apart folks.)

Update: Tom backs off after realizing how purchases work, but still blames Amazon for, as best as I can tell, not reading customers' minds and fixing it before it happens. I doubt he'd remove the wish list solely because of bad customer service.

Panda poo excites experts (Reuters)

Insert your own Corner joke here.

The wingnutty right made the rules about "appropriate" White House conduct, and by God, they should have to live by them:

Imagine the media explosion if a male escort had been discovered operating as a correspondent in the Clinton White House. Imagine that he was paid by an outfit owned by Arkansas Democrats and had been trained in journalism by James Carville. Imagine that this gentleman had been cultivated and called upon by Mike McCurry or Joe Lockhart—or by President Clinton himself. Imagine that this "journalist" had smeared a Republican Presidential candidate and had previously claimed access to classified documents in a national-security scandal.

Then imagine the constant screaming on radio, on television, on Capitol Hill, in the Washington press corps—and listen to the placid mumbling of the "liberal" media now.

If all that would have been very bad and A Threat To The Survival Of The Republic and Who Will Think Of The Children? in 1998, it's damn sure the same thing today, especially for a president who ran twice against all of that immoral gay stuff.