links for 2009-06-06

Miss Jess sez, "The Design Piracy Prohibition Act is very, very scary to all of us in the apparel industry. There are millions of jobs at stake if this legislation passes, and this act is simply being pushed by a handful of wealthy celebrity designers who continually pirate the 'little guys' designs anyway. Basically, this act will kill my business along with thousands upon THOUSANDS of other small, medium and large design and manufacturing businesses around the US and the world if it is passed. It's a big deal!

Analysis, detail & links

In a letter sent last week from Civil Rights Division Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King to Georgia state officials, the DOJ said that Georgia's voter verification program is frequently inaccurate and has a "discriminatory effect" on minority voters, subjecting a "disproportionate number of African-American, Asian and/or Hispanic voters to additional, and more importantly, erroneous burdens on the right to register to vote." The letter went on to say that the system "does not produce accurate and reliable information and that thousands of citizens who are in fact eligible to vote under Georgia law have been flagged." The ruling bars Georgia from continuing the citizenship verification, although the state can appeal to the DOJ to reconsider.

“We have more gay people serving in South Carolina than probably in anyplace in the United States; they’re just not out of the closet,” she told blogger Howie Klein. “We have an awful lot of people in the closet — Lindsey Graham, Glenn McConnell who’s our Senate president pro tem, our Lt Governor [André Bauer].”

bring the vast majority of YouTube’s content to your TV or large-screen computer monitor. ... At its core YouTube XL is basically a redesigned version of the YouTube website. It’s still run in the browser, and you don’t have to download anything to get it working (assuming you have Flash installed). It looks (and according to the demo, feels) like a native application.

duh... More than 6 in 10 Republicans today are white conservatives, while most of the rest are whites with other ideological leanings; only 11% of Republicans are Hispanics, or are blacks or members of other races. By contrast, only 12% of Democrats are white conservatives, while about half are white moderates or liberals and a third are nonwhite.

Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission see Gallup poll as evidence that Christians need to disassociate themselves from gays and everyone else who doesn't share their right-wing values.

While 57% of Americans oppose legalizing gay marriage, Americans who personally know someone who is gay or lesbian are almost evenly divided on the matter, with 49% in favor and 47% opposed. Among those who do not personally know anyone who is gay, 72% oppose legalized gay marriage while just 27% favor it.

Americans are six percentage points more likely than they were four years ago to favor allowing openly gay men and lesbian women to serve in the military, 69% to 63%. While liberals and Democrats remain the most supportive, the biggest increase in support has been among conservatives and weekly churchgoers -- up 12 and 11 percentage points, respectively.