In an unexpurgated Esquire "What I Learned" interview they just put on their web site, she gives this explanation for naming her daughter who would become a high-school drop-out and unwed teenage mother:

Two meanings in Bristol's name: I worked at the Bristol Inn, and Todd grew up in Bristol Bay. But also, Bristol, Connecticut, is the home of ESPN. And when I was in high school, my desire was to be a sportscaster. ESPN was just kicking off, just getting off the ground, and I thought that's what I was going to do in life, is be one of the first woman sportscasters. Until I learned that you'd have to move to Bristol, Connecticut. It was far away. So instead, I had a daughter and named her Bristol.

There is more. There's always more with our favorite Republican Party rising star:

Bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie annoy me.

I eat, therefore I hunt. I want to fill my freezer with good, clean, healthy protein for my kids. That's what I was raised on. It is abundant and it is available here in Alaska, with caribou and moose and different game and lots of very, very healthy and delicious wild Alaskan seafood. That's what we eat. So that's why I hunt and why I fish.

The secret to chili is you gotta have good mooseburger in there. I don't know if you can get moose commercially in New York. You'd have to come up here and visit me in my home, and I'll prepare it for ya.

Hot? If only people could see me as I come in from a run early in the morning without a trough full of makeup on, I think that they'd have a different opinion.

Fleece, lots of fleece, and skinny white-chocolate mochas. That's the best way to stay warm.

After a long day, if the weather's good, I like to take a long, hot run to unwind. Otherwise, lately, I take a bath with Trig, and I answer e-mails, and then we all fall asleep in my big bed while we listen to Piper read her Junie B. Jones books out loud. She's learning to read and she'll read for hours on end. It's idyllic. It's amazing.

(Photo by Brian Adams/Contour/Getty Images)

SoapBlox grew out of Scoop, the software used on DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas's left-of-center superblog. Paul Preston, its developer, found himself running 25 different sites — the likes of My Left Wing, Blue Hampshire, West Michigan Rising, and Swing State Project. (All politics is local!)

And yet SoapBlox remained a one-man band. So when still-unidentified hackers infiltrated SoapBlox's servers, causing them to be taken offline, Preston despaired:

(+) SoapBlox is Dead
by: pacified
[subscribe]
January 07, 2009 at 08:15:46 MST
It was a good ride, but it's over.

Thanks for all the fish.

All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don't have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it.

So I hope the Hackers are happy.

If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything.

Consider this the "We're Out of Business" post.

Most of the servers have been taken off line because they were being used to hack and exploit other websites. The hackers install this crap on servers after they get in. SoapBlox's ISP then takes the servers off line.

We do not know when they will come back online.

We do not know if they will come back online.

Since then, a groundswell of grassroots support has lifted Preston's spirits, and he's working on restoring the service. But how did so many sites come to depend on such a fragile operation in the first place? One argument is that other blogging services didn't offer SoapBlox's features, like the ability to feature a casual user's contributions on a site's homepage with a single click.

That's hardly true: Drupal, a popular piece of software used on Fast Company's website, has long offered a similar tool, as do the latest versions of Movable Type and WordPress. But what SoapBlox offered that they lacked was the comfort of familiarity, and DailyKos's stamp of approval.

For its liberal bloggers, too lazy to research alternatives, it was the — how to put it? — politically correct way to publish. And why should they have bothered looking elsewhere, since it was a fine choice for their purposes? But I suspect their built-in biases against market mechanisms played a role. SoapBlox's customers never bothered to ask whether Preston really had the financial resources to support it. That's far too capitalist a question for the left-wing blogosphere to have pondered.

Jahan News, an Iranian website affiliated with Iran’s intelligence community, reported on Monday that he admitted to spying for Israel [presumably in jail under some kind of awful interrogation] ...
Two years ago, Derakhshan did not express any concern about being arrested.
“Blogging in Iran is not something that gets you into trouble now. It's a mainstream thing, because religious people, pro-government people have blogs and secular, totally rationalistic people also have blogs,” he said.

Yes, it's the hallmark of a good spy: A really active blog, where he reports his location, thoughts and meetings to the entire world. Where do we go to apply for a part in the next 007 flick??

(Photo from The Media Line)

Mr. Raja Petra, 58, has been critical of Najib Razak, the deputy prime minister who is to become prime minister early next year. Among other accusations, Mr. Raja Petra issued a sworn statement that Mr. Najib’s wife was present at the killing of a Mongolian woman who was the mistress of one of Mr. Najib’s aides.

Oh, Malaysia. Sworn statements? Bloggers in free countries just make things up, or attribute things to "tipsters." That's how we stay out of jail.

Malaysia is described "mildly authoritarian," according to lawyers, because the government has a law that allows for indefinite detention without trial. (But, you know, at least they have a law about that.)

This is the blogger known as "RPK's" blog, Malaysia Today. Fun fact: RPK is also the Prince of Selangor.

The bald one swung at me, connecting on the side of my left eye. The other one hit Josh. I remember at least one of them adjusting fingerless gloves, like bicycle or weighlifting gloves. I remember thinking they’d done this before, or at least had thought this out.

Josh moved one way, I ran the other, between cars. The bald one chased me, tripped me expertly by kicking my trailing foot so it would clip my other ankle on the next step. He fell on me, his right fist striking repeatedly on the back of my head, his left struggling to detach itself from my grip. Stunned at first, I know I started shouting “F— you! Stop! F— you!” within a couple of punches as I contained his arm with one hand and tried to protect the back of my head with the other.

Eventually the attackers just strolled off and the police came, although they don't have any suspects yet. Barnes and his friend are busted up, but okay. He says that witnesses later said that two guys matching the attackers' descriptions had been seen hanging around the parking lot for hours. That, and the weird circumstances of the attack, and the fact that he had blogged that he was going to be there that night, makes him think somebody sent out goons to get him. Blogging is once again proved to be dangerous. But he concludes bravely:

So yo, attackers: If I’m supposed to be nicer to somebody in the future, drop me an e-mail. Otherwise you’re just a coward. Black eyes fade, but cowardice and thuggery are permanent character flaws.

True, but also maybe pick up a Taser. [TU via Romenesko]

Nair is a Singapore-born lawyer who became a US citizen in 2005. He says the he left Singapore because he was "harassed and persecuted" for his political beliefs.

Nair has been posting long entries on his blog about his ongoing case. He strikes you as the type of person you see at City Council meetings throughout America, waiting to get up and harangue the politicians about their corruption and failure to fix stoplights. But in Nair's case, he's talking about the cane-you-for-chewing-gum culture of Singapore, so you have to believe he's on the side of the angels. This little excerpt gives you an idea of his personality:

Again and to bring you back to reality, the accusation here is merely that I misbehaved and yelled at police officers. I am sure you will agree that all over the world, people sometimes misbehave and out of frustration or otherwise, call a policeman a pig or a donkey. And sometimes, I am sure you will agree that some policeman; not all; deserve such a scolding.

We support this man!

[Breitbart]

More broadly, the scary reality is that here in the free speech capital of the world, a prosecutor tried both to demand confidential information about an anonymous critic and insisted, under penalty of law, that his request for the information be kept secret. We’re glad he backed down, and confident that the courts would have rebuffed his demands.

But not every blogger will be lucky enough to find pro bono counsel like ours, and few can afford to pay for lawyers. In the meantime, we hope District Attorney Johnson will be able to provide more detailed answers to the unanswered questions in this case: Who ordered this investigation of a political critic to be opened? Did it proceed through the usual channels – a complaint filed with the New York Police Department, for instance – or through the D.A.’s political operatives? The chilling threat to an important new form of speech demands that the D.A. take these questions seriously, or if he doesn’t, that a credible outside

Once again, we're dangerously close to becoming the UK.

Case in point: In November 2007, Tunisia tried to bar its citizens' access to YouTube and DailyMotion, fearing (correctly) that these sites carried devastating information about Tunisian political prisoners that would stoke popular protest. The result, according to the Economist, was that "Tunisian activists and their allies organised a 'digital sit-in', linking dozens of videos about civil liberties to the image of the presidential palace in Google Earth. That turned a low-key human-rights story into a fashionable global campaign."

It's called the "Streisand effect" after Babs tried suing websites that posted pics of her Malibu beach house, which no one cared about until she asked for $50 million to have them removed. See how that works. The Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov (pictured at right) tried the same gambit with Britain's notoriously plaintiff-friendly and border-hopping libel laws when he threatened former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray for blogging not-nice things about him after Usmanov made a pitch to acquire a larger stake of the Arsenal football club last year. The mere hint of a civil suit so terrified Murray's service provider that it pulled the plug on not just his blog but on a whole slew of other blogs hosted on the same server (newly elected London Mayor Boris Johnson was one of the victims). The tactic, again, backfired deliciously. Whereas no one had ever heard of Usmanov before, now his name and puddy visage bombinated throughout the blogosphere, which declared immediate and unwavering solidarity with Murray. Dictators, take note:

Some countries still think that the benefits of censorship are worth the opprobrium. China unabashedly blocks foreign news sites, with state-financed digital censors playing an elaborate game of cat and mouse with those trying to elude them. Saudi Arabia makes a positive virtue of the practice, warning those trying to access prohibited websites of the dangers of pornography: sources cited include the Koran and Cass Sunstein, an American scholar who argues that porn does not automatically deserve First Amendment protection.

Sunstein's currently dating the once and future Obama adviser Samantha Power, who probably doesn't need the further aggro of being even two degrees of separation removed from a Wahhabist Koran. But the more urgent point is that a hacker in Beijing can share his new software to skirt the censors with a fellow hacker in Riyadh, whose government has just purchased the already outmoded censoring technology from China. (What will become of the Potemkin Communist country once the global media spotlight of the Olympics is trained on it?)

The digital underground remains ahead of the curve.

[The Economist]

In some nations, like China, there are restrictions on blogging in general. Burma has arrested hundreds of people who may be bloggers. Sometimes no one knows if someone has been arrested or not. Also the report doesn't even mention Sheila!

We've covered blogger-arrests (despite the total lack of interest from American blog-readers!) rather extensively recently. Be careful where you tumble log, people.