And then you have to wonder, how long til Facebook and other communications behemoths decide there is just too much free speech in the land of the free? Would the Constitution even matter? Can the First Amendment survive the Internet?

From the Wall Street Journal:

“Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others,” Adam Conner, a Facebook lobbyist, told the Journal. “We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we’re allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven’t experienced it before,” he said.

From the Electronic Privacy Information Center:

The recently announced Facebook service Places makes user location data routinely available to others, including Facebook business partners, regardless of whether users wish to disclose their location. There is no single opt-out to avoid location tracking. The default settings of this new tool allow user data to be disclosed in a number of ways that are not immediately clear to users. Facebook has put a complicated set of new privacy settings in place to deal with the “Places” tool. Additionally, Facebook allows anyone to create a location on the system, which means anyone could add the location of a person’s home or business to the website without the person’s knowledge.

By default, Facebook has enabled Places for all users. If a user chooses to “check in” from a mobile device, that user’s location is published to that user’s news feed. If the option “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in” is selected, the user’s location also appears on the public page of the location, available to everyone. This setting is enabled by default for those who have previously set some of their other information available to everyone.

If a user checks in, that user can “tag” a number of friends as also being at the same location. The default behavior for users tagged by their friends is very confusing. Those users who have taken no action with respect to this setting will receive an email and a prompt with the options to “allow” or “not now.” Those who choose “allow” are automatically set to allow all future check-ins by friends. Those who choose “not now” are still tagged as being at the location, just not “checked in.” Users are also tagged immediately when the check-in takes place, although the tags may be removed once users become aware of them. A user who has ever used Places to check in is automatically set to allow check-ins by friends.

By default, check-in information is also available to the third-party developers of applications that a user has authorized, as well as to the third-party developers of applications that a user’s friends have authorized.

Additionally, At the Coca-Cola Village Amusement Park in Israel, visitors were recently issued bracelets with RFID chips that linked to their Facebook accounts. RFID readers scattered throughout the park updated the users’ Facebook pages when the bracelets were scanned and on-site photographers posted photos that were automatically tagged with the users’ identities.

For users who do not want location information revealed to others, EPIC recommends that Facebook users: (1) disable “Friends can check me in to Places,” (2) customize “Places I Check In,” (3) disable “People Here
Now,” and (4) uncheck “Places I check in to” from the list of settings accessible to applications through your friends.

EPIC, joined by many consumer and privacy organizations, has two complaints pending at the Federal Trade Commission concerning Facebook’s unfair and deceptive trade practices, which are frequently associated with new product announcements.

I followed EPIC’s recommendations. I don’t need to hide where I go, but it’s really not the business of marketers or the world.

Laura Schlessinger, the blunt-spoken, sometimes controversial radio talk-show host whose racially charged comments drew widespread condemnation last week, said Tuesday that she will end her radio career at the end of the year.

The announcement by the host of the “Dr. Laura” program was a stunning denouement after a week in which Schlessinger was widely criticized for describing an African American caller to her program as “hypersensitive” for taking offense at a neighbor’s racial taunting. To illustrate her claim of a racial double standard, she said that black comedians often use the N-word on TV without criticism, but the word is forbidden for white people. She used the racial epithet, unexpurgated, 11 times in five minutes, despite her caller’s protests.

Among the things not mentioned: the actual circulation figures of the papers in the top 50 markets (the JS is not in first place) or the change over the years in readership figures. Is the JS just bleeding to death slower than other papers are?

The paper’s second quarter financial reports, released in July, were not good. Revenue continues to slide – it was down $2 million, or $4.1%, as advertising continued its decline. Classified ad revenue was down 9.5% “largely due to decreases in the real estate, automotive and other advertising categories,” Journal Communications reported. Retail advertsing was down 5.6%.

Online advertising was up $300,000, but the real boost in the bottom line came from cutting costs, not by any big jump in advertising bucks:

Daily newspaper operating expenses decreased 8.3%, primarily due to the reduction in employee related costs, other cost reduction initiatives and reduced expenses related to revenue declines partially offset by a $0.2 million increase in newsprint and paper expense.

So is it OK to have felons visiting kids in classrooms, but not OK to have them visit grown-ups in offices?

Here’s the shorthand version: retail advertising, down $21.8 million, or 19.6%, from 2008; classified ads, down  $21.5 million, or 44%; and national advertising, down $2.7 million, or 35.1%.

Ouch. The “good” news is that the company cut staff enough to avoid a net loss.

In retail advertising, the report said, “the most significant decreases were in furniture and furnishings, dining and entertainment, finance/insurance, home improvement, health services, department stores, small retailers, automotive, food, business services, real estate, communications and airline and travel.”

What’s left? Livestock rentals?

It still has to be approved by the Senate, and we all need to remember that it ain’t over til the skinny guy signs. Still, for a major policy that pundits announced mostly dead just a few months ago, it’s remarkably alive and well.

There has been some remarkably shallow reporting on the topic, with not much about what is actually in the bill and a lot about the vitriol surrounding the bill. (Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post has a column on coverage today and he doesn’t think the press did such a bad job.) As he notes, though:

It was sooo much easier to write another story about the latest Tiger mistress to go public.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities published some highlights of the bill last week. They include:

–Expanding coverage. Under the legislation, 95 percent of non-elderly legal residents of the United States would have health insurance by 2019. The legislation would expand Medicaid and provide subsidies to help low- and moderate-income people purchase private health insurance. Relative to current law, the bills would reduce the number of uninsured by 32 million by 2019, according to CBO — 1 million more than under the Senate bill alone.

–Reforming health insurance markets. The legislation includes long overdue reforms that would improve access to health insurance for people at all income levels and for employers seeking to provide coverage to their employees. Shortly after enactment, the legislation would bar lifetime limits on benefits and begin reining in harmful insurance-industry practices such as rescissions, under which insurers revoke coverage when beneficiaries become ill. By 2014, the legislation would bar insurers from denying coverage or charging higher premiums to women and people with pre-existing health conditions, restrict insurers’ ability to charge higher premiums to older individuals, and prohibit insurers from setting annual limits on benefits.

–The legislation also would establish state-based health insurance exchanges to make a range of health coverage options available to individuals and small employers and foster competition among insurance companies based on the price and quality of their products. Plans would have to meet minimum standards regarding coverage and cost-sharing protections for enrollees.

Slowing health care cost growth. The legislation would take a number of steps, particularly within Medicare, to institute efficiencies to lower costs and to improve the quality of care by beginning to change the way health care is delivered. In addition, the legislation includes an excise tax on high-cost health plans, which would help slow the rate of health care cost growth over the long term. The legislation would also extend the solvency of the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund.

Reforms start to happen soon, under the legislation.

Some reforms would happen soon after the plan becomes law. Within months, insurers that offer coverage of policyholders’ children (including in existing plans) would be required to allow adult dependents younger than 26 to be added to such coverage. In addition, new insurance plans would be barred from excluding children’s pre-existing conditions from coverage and would have to cover certain preventive services at no charge to enrollees. The legislation temporarily increases funding for high-risk pools to provide near-term help to people with pre-existing health conditions, who otherwise face rejection or very high premiums in the current individual insurance market.

Under the legislation, consumers would gain significant protection from harmful insurer practices that are prevalent in the market today. Soon after enactment, both new and existing insurance plans would be barred from placing limits on the dollar value of benefits that an enrollee can receive during his or her lifetime. And insurers would face federal restrictions on their ability to impose annual limits on coverage of specific benefits in new insurance plans and existing group plans, before a broader ban on annual limits of “essential” health benefits takes effect in 2014.

Insurance companies would be required to spend a minimum portion of the premiums they collect on health care and quality efforts, rather than non-health costs such as advertising and administration. Insurers that fail to allocate sufficient resources to health care would be required to provide rebates to their customers to make up the difference.

Maybe my political radar is way, way off, but it’s hard to see how that will do much damage to the Democrats in the November election. Once the screaming from the Right dies down a little, and even if it doesn’t, people are going to begin to understand what this bill does for them, not to them. It will be a huge advantage to the Dems if they play it right.

But then again, it’s the Dems, so who knows whether that will happen.

That is not the case, however, when it comes to the state’s early prisoner release program. There’s a non-story there, and the JS was all over it. The state is letting some non-violent offenders out of prison a month or two early.

Some of them — surprise! — re-offend.

Police Chief Edward Flynn complained to the paper that the state is increasing the city’s costs. The JS, journalistic watchdog that it is, does nothing to verify or investigate Flynn’s assertion — does the chief seriously believe that if these folks are held an extra month they won’t re-offend? That the city won’t be spending time and money re-arresting them?

The early release program is pretty much of a non-issue (at least until just one of the released inmates commits some heinous crime two weeks before his original release date — then political hay will be made until the cows come home to Wisconsin Avenue) blown out of proportion to create a faux scandal. If I were in Democratic Gov. Doyle’s administration, I would suspect the paper of having a partisan agenda.

Fortunately, in its totally even-handed manner, the paper carried, on the very same day, a total non-story about two State Department of Justice press releases. Republican J. B. Van Hollen’s shop borrowed wording from other agencies’ press releases about cases they worked together.

Stop the presses! Nothing amiss here!

Gee, think the paper has ever taken a few paragraphs from press releases?

That’s it for now. I must go out and, like the paper, shovel it.

So where was the press before the debt crisis hit last week? Why are we again, playing catch-up on such a hugely important development?