A nice way to end the week. Congratulations to Boing Boing pals Sean Bonner and Tara Brown. (Some related tales of love and photons in this cute WIRED item.)

In another setback for Ms. Palin, a judge on Friday ordered the state of Alaska to preserve any government-related e-mail messages that Gov. Sarah Palin sent from private accounts. The ruling, by Craig Stowers of Anchorage superior court, came as the result of a lawsuit brought by a resident, Andree McLeod, against Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Ms. Palin has occasionally used private e-mail accounts to conduct state business, and her Yahoo accounts were hacked last month. The judge ordered the attorney general to contact Yahoo and other private carriers to preserve any e-mail messages sent and received on those accounts. An assistant attorney general told the court that the governor was no longer using here private e-mail accounts to conduct state business.

Related: Wired reported earlier this week:

David Kernell, the student indicted this week for gaining unauthorized access to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo account, was allegedly involved in computer intrusion about eight years ago when he was in middle school. He and another student guessed the password of a school server while attending Eastern Hills Middle School in Texas, and gained access to some lesson plans, according to one of Kernell's former teachers.

The section of the law the girl, who is a foster child, was charged with allows parents or guardians to take photos of their unclothed children for a list of acceptable purposes but does not provide an exemption for the child themselves. Law didn't anticipate cell phone photo case

Esther Kaplan, Investigative Editor for The Nation Institute, says:

While the McCain camp continues to hammer home Barack Obama's ties to a former '60s radical, the press corps has yet to report on how far-reaching Sarah Palin's ties are to contemporary radicals -- specifically, the paranoid anti-government figures behind the Alaskan Independence Party. Reporters Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert found that AIP activists played a critical role in Palin's election as Wasilla mayor and that Palin in turn sought to reward them with plum political appointments and appearances, as recently as this year, at AIP conventions.

Their story, "Meet Sarah Palin's Radical Right-Wing Pals," below, was supported by a research grant from the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and appeared this morning at Salon.com.

Here is what Blogger Interrupted saw at a McCain-Palin rally in Strongsville, Ohio:

The fact that my videos of McCain-Palin supporters are blowing up online tells me a lot.

First, the media should be ashamed of themselves for not covering this until now. The McCain-Palin supporters in my videos are not new, they are not exceptional, they are not hiding. This is who they are. It has been brewing for months, and not one mainstream media outlet has taken the time to expose them. Not one. And that is dangerous. If America is about to decide on its president based on this level of hate and ignorance, without a single question being asked as to why, then America is in for a rude awakening.

There are some seriously ignorant people on display in these videos (and no, not just the governor of Alaska). These people are clearly SO DUMB that they'd believe any darn thing you told them! Be afraid, be very afraid... McCain-Palin Mob in Ohio (video) part 1 | McCain-Palin Mob in Ohio (video)part 2

Conservatives agree: Petraeus sounds like a pompous ass when he says Pock-i-stahn.

“When Petraeus says Pock-i-stahn I have an uncontrollable urge to read the New Yorker and find some Chardonnay. Fortunately I have an old copy of NR and a Coors Light to snap me back to reality. Seriously though — no one in flyover country says Pock-i-stahn. It’s annoying.” (The Corner on National Review Online)

“Re Gen. Petraeus’s ostentatiously exotic pronunciation of Pakistan, one thing I like about Sarah Palin is the way she says ‘Eye-raq’.” (The Corner on National Review Online)

“Most overwrought pronunciation of the night: The academic way that Petraeus says ‘Pakistan,’ with a soft ‘a’ - reminscent of a 1980s ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch in which newscasters over-pronounced ‘Managua, Nicaragua.’” (Philadelphia Daily News)

Conservatives Call Obama’s Correct Pronounciation Of Pakistan ‘Exotic’ And ‘Annoying’

My friends, during last night's presidential debate, McCain took That One to task for approving funding for an "overhead projector." Howard Covitz, who used to work at Chicago's Adler Planetarium, prepared this helpful graphic for McCain to show the difference between an overhead projector and a planetarium projector.

Note to McCain: Overhead projector is not a planetarium projector

If YouTube had a Ten Commandments carved on stone tablets, well, this would be one of them. To wit:

I'd like to see one of these with a video of the stock market indexes free-falling towards zero, and sad guys on trading floors. Because so far, that's not funny. (Thanks, R Stevens, and BB commenters Neuracnu, Miss Cellania, and Boggis)

Rev Peter Mullen is chaplain to the London Stock Exchange (I don't know why a stock exchange needs a chaplain but I imagine there's lots of praying going on there right about now).

He also has a blog (Google cache here), where he posts solutions to "problems" that would make the one-eye veil Saudi cleric proud:

It is time that religious believers began to recommend specific utilitarian discouragements of homosexual practices after the style of warnings on cigarette packets: Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan SODOMY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH and their chins with FELLATIO KILLS.

(Video: an intro that precedes the movies of Max Hardcore; no nudity or sexual acts in this embedded video above).

A US District Court in Florida has sentenced "extreme shock porn" gonzo director and distributor Max Hardcore, aka Paul F. Little, to four years in prison over obscenity charges. Writing for Salon, Glenn Greenwald wrote that he believes the verdict is a blow to first amendment rights:

“So, to recap, in the Land of the Free: if you’re an adult who produces a film using other consenting adults, for the entertainment of still other consenting adults, which merely depicts fictional acts of humiliation and degradation, the DOJ will prosecute you and send you to prison for years. The claim that no real pain was inflicted will be rejected; mere humiliation is enough to make you a criminal. But if government officials actually subject helpless detainees in their custody to extreme mental abuse, degradation, humiliation and even mock executions long considered “torture” in the entire civilized world, the DOJ will argue that they have acted with perfect legality and, just to be sure, Congress will hand them retroactive immunity for their conduct. That’s how we prioritize criminality and arrange our value system.”

His pornographic persona, Max Hardcore, is all swagger and sadism – forcing women in his movies to do things that can't be described in a family newspaper. But in federal court today, as he faced a federal prison sentence, Paul F. Little trembled and begged a woman for mercy. "It just seems a very high price to pay, I think," Little told U.S. District Judge Susan Bucklew, "and I ask you to understand how much I've suffered."

Why was Little, aka Hardcore, convicted in Florida, when the offending material was produced elsewhere and distributed in many places, even overseas? IANAL, but as I understand it: producers are subject to obscenity charges in any state the material can be downloaded when local standards deem the material to be obscene. The landmark Supreme Court case of Hustler Magazine v. Falwell is informative background reading.

The most authoritative voice I have read on the Max Hardcore case is that of Susannah Breslin, whose work I've blogged here many times. If you read one piece on this story, read hers.

Unlike most (perhaps all) of the voices you'll read on this topic, she's actually spent time on the kind of porn sets where "shock producers" like Hardcore preside, and she's watched more of his work than I could ever stomach. I can't speak for her, but I think the point of this powerful essay she's just published is this: the story is complicated. If we're going to talk about the big, abstract, meta issues -- and we should -- we owe it to the human beings involved to observe the human story, up close, with all the ugly details. Stories like this aren't easy or binary, and deserve complex, respectful treatment. We send reporters to Baghdad for in-depth reporting about the war; reporters covering this story would do well to understand this reality up close and personal, unromanticized. From Breslin's piece:

Not infrequently, [Max Hardcore] scenes are fraught with pedophilia themes, beginning when he stumbles upon his subjects in playgrounds, where they sit alone, in pigtails, talking baby-talk, and sucking on lollipops. Mostly, the sex scenes end with his latest costar a mess and Hardcore triumphant. Even for the most jaded porn watcher, Little's ouevre is over the top.

Watching Little's work is less like watching a porn movie than it is akin to witnessing a vivisection. On the screen, Hardcore bends over the female bodies before him, sometimes with speculum in hand, as if attempting to get at something within her at which he can never quite get, and so to which he is doomed to return, his methods more and more hardcore.

In Porn Valley, Little is something of a pariah. The larger, more mainstream-oriented and consumer-friendly adult production companies like Vivid Video and Wicked Pictures pride themselves on turning out adult content that plays by the rules, thereby, they hope, protecting the industry from legal persecution. In contrast, Little and company, other producers believe, put the entire industry at risk by creating content more likely to be targeted in obscenity indictments. (See: The Cambria List.)

In 2005, the Bush administration launched its so-called "War on Porn," forming the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, a Department of Justice outfit dedicated to pursuing obscenity prosecutions, and the FBI began recruiting for a "porn squad," otherwise known as the Adult Obscenity Squad, focused on "manufacturers and purveyors" of pornography. In late 2005, federal agents raided Little's offices in Altadena, California, but it wasn't until early 2007 that his indictment was unsealed. As it turned out, OPTF Director Brent Ward had found getting US Attorneys to pursue obscenity prosecutions wasn't easy. Consequently, US Attorneys who preferred dedicating their resources to crimes other than obscenity in districts more likely to win the administration obscenity convictions were eliminated. Late last year, the OPTF's first trial began in Phoenix, Arizona, pitting the US government against a producer of bukkake videos, but the result was an embarrassment, the pornographer slipping out of the government's hands in the courtroom. When it came to Little, prosecutors were gunning for a win. Finally, three years after the OPTF was formed, the Feds got their man.