Matthew Rossi’s book of ‘fantasies, lunacies and entertaining lies’, he of the inestimable “Once I Noticed I Was on Fire…”, will be out in August. And he will sign it for you if you send it to him with a ssae.

From Chuck Taggart I learn about “eMusic, an online MP3 subscription service that, in some ways, beats the living crap out of Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Not that I don’t love iTunes — in fact, I spent about $45 in there over the last few weeks, and there’ll probably always be stuff I want in there. But the kinds of music I’m really interested in — lots of roots, folk, trad, blues and indie rock/pop — are much more prevalent at eMusic than in iTunes.” I’m on it…

“Thousands of people serving in the military and American civilians living abroad will have that option next year in the nation’s most extensive Internet voting experiment, viewed by some as a step toward elections in cyberspace.” The key phrase is “thousands in the military”, as this system is run by the Pentagon. There’s a sidebar with a comment by someone from the Center for Public Integrity, a government watchdog group, which expresses concerns about the ability of the government to assure security in internet voting. “Security remains the top concern for the system’s coordinators and fodder for critics,” the article confirms. CBS News [via mousemusings]

But a more profound concern of mine is that this is a Republican use of Pentagon infrastructure to extend easy voting access preferentially to that segment of the absentee voters who would be most likely to vote Republican. [Or, a segment that BushCo thinks would vote for them, oblivious to the fact that he is demoralizing the military. CNN [via medley]] In any case, I agree with what Dennis Kucinich, also quoted on mousemusings, has to say on the matter:

Can we trust an administration which stole a presidential election, has attacked the bill of rights, and which deliberately misrepresented intelligence to lead this nation into an unjust war to faithfully protect the security of the 2004 election? I repeat my call on all Americans to join in a mighty protest so that we may protect the 2004 election from the kind of theft which deprived the American people of an honest election in the year 2000.

‘“The British are coming” — again. The launch of a U.S. edition of the unabashedly liberal Guardian may be just what the Bush-whacked U.S. press needs.’

McClellan debuts with dissembling about budget:

“In his first briefing as the President’s press secretary yesterday, Scott McClellan revealed an ability to spin just as ably as his predecessor, Ari Fleischer. Just as Fleischer and others in the administration have done, McClellan incorrectly suggested yesterday that tax cuts played no role or a small role in the the growing federal deficit, which the Office of Management and Budget said yesterday will be over $450 billion this year.

Asked about the new deficit figures, McClellan said the following: ‘Now, we had a recession. We also had declining revenues because of that. And we had a war on terrorism. That’s what led to the deficit that we are in today.'” Spinsanity [props to walker]