Entries for May 14, 2007

Dennis Hastert, a onetime speaker of the House with close ties to the Bush administration, may find himself in trouble back home come 2008. Democratic strategists believe that Illinois district represented by Hastert, who was the longest-serving Republican speaker before the party lost the majority in last year's elections, is ripe for the picking.

Recent polling by Democrats shows his approval ratings have dipped dramatically as GOP fortunes have dwindled because of ongoing troubles in Iraq and a series of controversies in Washington.

In a sign of Democratic optimism, at least three possible candidates are openly threatening a challenge to Hastert. Perhaps the two most credible are state Rep. Linda Chapa LaVia of Aurora and Bill Foster, a wealthy, self-financed entrepreneur and physicist who started a company that is now the world's largest manufacturer of stage-lighting equipment.

Nothing quite excites the blogosphere like a threat to its fiefdom. On Friday, Wired magazine's "Threat Level" blog published a reminder that today is the deadline for Internet service providers to comply with a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), that requires telecommunication companies to build surveillance capabilities into their infrastructure. Federal and state authorities who have obtained wiretapping warrants have access to these "backdoor" methods.

Wired christened today as "Wiretap the Internet Day." It caught on, igniting buzz about the subject this morning. (A trend of the buzz on CALEA appears here.)

A Taliban spokesman has acknowledged the death of the militant group's top commander in Afghanistan, Mullah Dadullah in a statement boasting that the group will continue its attacks on U.S. troops, the AP reports.

For a closer look at who Dadullah was and what role he played in the Taliban, see Chief Investigative Correspondent David E. Kaplan's profile of the terrorist leader, whom he calls "brutal even by Afghan standards," written in January for the U.S. News Bad Guys Blog.

This morning's top stories:

• A massive search is on for three missing American soldiers in the area south of Baghdad known as the "triangle of death," an al Qaeda stronghold.
• The Recording Industry Association of America is threatening hundreds of college students with lawsuits if they don't pay stiff fines for illegally downloading music on college servers.
• The cost of a first-class stamp goes up 2 cents today, to 41 cents for a 1-ounce envelope.
• Parents of sixth graders at a Tennessee elementary school are furious after teachers staged a fake gunman attack during a field trip, telling them it was not a drill, as a test of how prepared they were for a real crisis.