Today’s titillating news

Via Atrios, Novak hits a 60 year old pedestrian, allegedly flees scene, is not charged with fleeing scene but with “failure to yield right of way.”

Don’t you just love justice in America?

A modest proposal

MacroMan has come up with a detailed, workable solution for the exploding American debt and liabilities from the mortgage mess: sell the 37 36 (*)states that were added to the original 13 colonies, raising $11 Trillion.

Ummm… less investment banking fees, of course.

* Virginia and West Virginia were a single state, which was divided by the secession of Virginia during the Civil War.

That Was Fast

The iPhone 2.0 has already been jailbroken, but not yet unlocked.

Here are the instructions for Mac users, and here they are for Windows users. Enjoy!

Shout The Accusation, Whisper The Exoneration

Yet another attempt to nail Al Sharpton has fizzled:

Federal prosecutors have disbanded their criminal investigation into the financial dealings of the Rev. Al Sharpton and his Harlem civil rights group, the minister and his lawyers said Tuesday.

Prosecutors concluded that Sharpton’s substantial tax problems were better handled as a civil matter by the Internal Revenue Service rather than in criminal court, his lawyers said.

Now, he could still get hosed. But he’s been down this road before and come up trumps:

The investigation was the latest in a string of government inquiries into Sharpton’s finances, dating to his earliest days as a civil rights figure.

Each time, he has emerged unscathed. In the late 1980s he was acquitted of stealing from a nonprofit group. A state case accusing him of evading income taxes also fizzled; he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of failing to file a tax return and paid a small fine.

Funny how this didn’t make the evening news, whereas the initial investigation announcement did.