All those CIA conspiracy theorists just got tons more ammo

From the New York Times, speaking of Afghani president Hamid Karzai's brother:

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

Good times. It's been going on for eight years, apparently.

Paper suing TX Gov Perry to get clemency report of possibly innocent man who was executed

The Houston Chronicle and Hearts Newspapers are suing Texas Governor Rick Perry, R-Texas, for the clemency report on Cameron Todd Willingham -- a man who was executed but may have, in fact, been innocent.

I first read about it nearly two months ago, and you can too with this 16,000 word article from the New Yorker. Worth reading every word.

The report is a summary and status of the case against Willingham that was given to Perry at 11:30 a.m. on the day of Willingham's 2004 execution in the fire deaths of his three daughters. Anti-death penalty advocates say modern fire forensics show the blaze cannot be proven as arson.

Perry's office has refused to release the report, claiming it is a privileged document. The clemency document was used by Perry in the process of deciding whether to give Willingham a 30-day stay of execution.

“When it comes to human life, there is no place the governor should be more transparent in his decision-making,” said Jonathan Donnellan, an attorney for Hearst and the Chronicle.

The war on vaccinations is a war on science

A great article from Wired magazine about how the anti-vaxxers out there are completely wrong -- and are actually making things much worse.

In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says.

I still don't know what kind of person would ignore all the scientific evidence and not vaccinate their children because some celebrity like Jenny McCarthy said so.

"Punch the monkey" ads relegated to the hinterlands of the internet

So says the Los Angeles Times:

But the monkey -- indeed, a whole class of flashy, shaky, maddening advertising collectively known as "punch the monkey" ads -- is going away, or at least slinking off to some forgotten cavern of the Internet where few will ever see it. Like MySpace.

Like, if there were ads on this site, this site.

Tennis great Agassi used meth

Andre Agassi, considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time, also used meth according to an upcoming autobiography.

"Those excerpts contain revelations about Andre's use of crystal meth when he was a tennis player," said Paul Bogaards, director of media relations at Knopf, a division of Random House.

As an aside, the use of meth has been linked to hair loss.

Tip o' the hat to @dcm.

Global cooling disproven (again)

Statisticians show that people (*cough*Matt Drudge*cough*) who try to claim there is a "global cooling" trend are being disingenuous.

From the Associated Press:

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

Saying there's a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers.

Identifying a downward trend is a case of "people coming at the data with preconceived notions," said Peterson, author of the book "Why Did They Do That? An Introduction to Forensic Decision Analysis."

Ball's in your court, climate change deniers.

Gallup polling: We're better than news outlets

There was an interesting blog post in Gallup's The Queue blog basically saying they're better than newspapers (whose circulation is down) and TV news (with CNN dropping to dead last among cable news networks).

These new realities reaffirm why we do what we do here at Gallup.com. Quite simply, we do what no one else can do -- which is to provide empirical, rather than anecdotal, insights on the news of the moment. Put more simply, we let our data drive our news. Data that no one else has. That's why at Gallup.com, every lead has a data point, and every story has a graph.

We don't want you to visit Gallup.com instead of visiting other news sources. We want you to visit Gallup.com in addition to your favorite news sources. It's perfectly fine with us if you turn somewhere else for context and background, and then come to us for the data or empirical evidence to complete the picture.

What do you think?