I recently had the opportunity to catch up with election integrity hero, Steve Heller. Our last interview was back in August, 2007.

You achieved notoriety a few years back. You stole the Diebold documents in January of 2004, the search warrant was served on your house in August of 2004, you were indicted on three felony charges in February of 2006, and you pled guilty to one felony count of unauthorized access to a computer in November of that same year. [For more background and details, all of the press and many of the blog posts on Steve Heller's case can be found here .] So what's happened since then?

Well, in terms of my case, what's happened is that when I pled guilty, I had to pay $10,000 in restitution to the law firm from which I stole the Diebold documents, and I was put on felony probation for three years. After one year, we petitioned the court for a reduction of my sentence from a felony to a misdemeanor. That petition was granted, and as of now, I remain on misdemeanor probation.

Set phasors to Stimulus!

Liberal bloggers seem to be lining up in favor of the $1 trillion-plus stimulus bill to rescue Starship Free Enterpise by boldly going where no economy has gone before.

One guy at Huffpost, Jason Rosenbaum, in a column whose gist is chastising progressives for not supporting the stimulus package enough, believes the economy will never recover if the bill doesn't pass. Then he reminds that there goes health care and all our other cute pet causes with the bath

The President, meanwhile, assures us if the bill does not pass there will be catastrophe, no doubt about it. Both sides of the debate (Cut Taxes! Deficit Spend! Cut Taxes! Deficit Spend!) seem to concur that disaster is immiment if nothing is done.

Maybe not.

If we can move beyond torture, do we not have a responsibility also to think for a moment about the obvious fact that torture is not the cruelest thing we do? Torture offends us, in part, because the torturer is not at risk, but neither are most pilots dropping bombs. And how exactly does the risk taken by ground troops mitigate the suffering of those they wound, kill, and terrorize? Hanging someone by the wrists offends us, and yet we might rather have it done to us than be kept in 23-hours-a-day isolation for a decade, a practice that is part of our accepted justice system. Clearly our morality is a scrambled hodge-podge of reactions that could use some improvement.

One of the remaining Bush appointees in the Obama administration is the U.S. representative to the International Whaling Commission (IWC). And like the man who appointed him, William Hogarth is wreaking destruction on our planet and its inhabitants.

On February 2, Hogarth submitted a proposal that would lift the international moratorium on whale hunting. Tell President Obama you don't support U.S.-sanctioned killing of wales! >>

Hogarth brokered a proposed deal that would allow Japan to do new "coastal whaling" in exchange for ramping down so-called "scientific" whaling over the next five years.

But a slow decline in one type of whales being killed in exchange for opening a new group for slaughter is not a compromise that's acceptable! Hogarth's proposal puts the threatened coastal Japanese whales at even greater risk. The IWC needs to instead focus its attention on stopping whaling altogether.

AMY GOODMAN: A coalition of environmental groups are calling on senators to remove a controversial provision from the $900 billion stimulus bill that could lead to the construction of a new generation of nuclear power plants. We host a debate between independent journalist and longtime anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman and Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace co-founder and member of the pro-nuclear Clean and Safe Energy Coalition.

Guests:

Harvey Wasserman, Independent journalist and longtime anti-nuclear activist. In the early 1970s he helped found the grassroots movement against nuclear power in the United States.

Patrick Moore, co-chair of the pro-nuclear Clean and Safe Energy Coalition. He is founder of the organization Green Spirit. In the 1970s he was one of the founding members of Greenpeace.

Rush Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: As the Senate continues debate on President Obama’s $900 billion economic stimulus plan, a coalition of environmental groups are calling on senators to remove a controversial provision that could lead to the construction of a new generation of nuclear power plants.