68. Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says she might be willing to garnish workers’ wages in order to ensure universal health care coverage. She might want to ask Mitt Romney, late of the Republican nomination race, how that has worked out.
69. President Bush sends a $3.1 trillion budget to Congress, looking for big cuts in health care spending but big increases for homeland security.
70. More wrongful convictions based on flimsy evidence overturned: a Greeley, Colorado man goes free after spending nearly a decade in prison for murder when DNA tests show he wasn’t the killer. The evidence police used against Tim Masters consisted of knives (but not the murder weapon), gory sketches and stories, and a psychologist’s testimony that Masters’ creative output indicated an obsession with rape and murder. And in Indiana, DNA testing also clears another man in the bludgeoning death of an 89-year-old Terre Haute woman, after he had already spent 25 years in prison for the murder. David Scott, who was 15 at the time and learning disabled, was convicted based on his own confession. The DNA testing technology which exonerated both of these men has been available for years.
71. The FBI embarks on a $1 billion odyssey to build the world’s largest biometrics database, incorporating facial scans, fingerprints, iris patterns and other identifying characteristics.
72. Because if you blah blah, the terrorists win again: some law students from the University of Denver find that the very rules they’re fighting at the Federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo. may also bar them from seeing the inmates they’re representing in civil-rights lawsuits against the government. The Justice Department’s argument: because they’re not yet lawyers, the students may be more likely to aid the terrorists in passing messages to the outside. Right, because lawyers always become less corruptible after they get their licenses.
73. The U. S. strikes a deal with the World Trade Organization to allow the Federal online gambling ban to remain in place, at a cost of billions of dollars in trade concessions. Blogger Ed Brayton files a Freedom of Information Act request to get a copy of the agreement with the WTO. The government denies the request, citing a matter of “national security”.
74. REAL ID roundup: a DHS official suggests that a national ID card could be required to purchase over-the-counter medication to combat meth. And CNET has a series of stories on the controversial initiative, covering the impact REAL ID will have on travel, visits to Federal facilities, privacy and more.
75. Concerned neighbors set fire to a trailer in front of a home where they found out a registered sex offender lives. Too bad it was the wrong house.
76. Cops in Virginia Beach charge an Abercrombie & Fitch store manager with obscenity and confiscate two of the store’s racy ad posters. (The obscenity charge was later dropped.) One of the posters depicted teenage boys running with their pants falling down, which led to police concerns that they would not be able to enforce city dress codes.
77. A Maryland lawmaker introduces a bill to require all driver license applicants under the age of 21 to submit to drug and alcohol testing. Because it will save lives, of course, at least during the driving test. Trevor Bothwell rips this one to shreds.
78. A story in LA Weekly digs deep into Los Angeles’ grilled bacon-wrapped hot dogs wars: they’re so good, they’re illegal.