Bonnie R, winner of The Colbert Report Green Screen Challenge made it to a taping of the show and got the full VIP treatment. She posted an account visit to the show on The Colbert Nation message board. This is your feel good story for the weekend.

Josh Marshall clearly and concisely explains why the US Attorney firings are a big deal. This is the key point:

The firings were not the offense. They were the clue that suggested the offense.

And here’s why it’s a scandal:

And then on one day, secretly and with no explanation, seven get canned. And several are involved in corruption investigations targetting Republicans. The first public explanation is that they were fired for poor performance. But then it turns most were among the highest performing US Attorneys in the country. Add in the fact that one of the eight was overseeing one of the broadest ranging and historic public corruption cases in US history and … well, it all got our attention.

The bottom line is that the health of the democracy in some ways rests on the integrity and independence of federal prosecutors (and the Justice Department in general). Yes, US Attorneys are political appointees, but they are also public servants. Firing some of them for not demonstrating sufficient political loyalty creates a pretty clear set of bad incentives for the rest. Not all political scandals are important, but this one is.

Update: Looks like Alberto Gonzales better start searching for a new job, or at least a publisher who will offer him a fat advance to put his story in print.

Paul Kedrosky analyzes the propsects of the YouTube competitor under development by YouTube-hating television networks. I tend to agree with him. It will be a place where you can get stuff that the networks are trying to keep off of YouTube, but it won’t be a YouTube killer in any respect.

In related news, The Daily Show did a bit about Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement. Unsurprisingly, several people have already uploaded the video to YouTube as well. (I’m sure that last link will be broken before too long.)

I’ve basically decided at this point that whenever I write applications that allow users to enter blocks of text to be displayed on a Web page, I’m going to provide Markdown support. It follows conventions that people have been using in text-based email for years, it’s unobtrusive if you don’t know what it is, it plays nicely with embedded HTML markup, and it takes care of turning line feeds in text into paragraph tags in HTML. Best of all, text with Markdown in it is not only readable, it’s eye pleasing. What’s not to love? I’ve been using Markdown when posting to this site for a long time now, and have included it in some applications, but my thought at this point is, why not include it everywhere?

Yahoo!, being FIFA’s official partner in producing the World Cup 2006 Web site, opted not to exercise its fair use rights and provide video of the biggest news story of the event, Zidane’s head butt on the final game. Why? Because they didn’t want to piss off their business partner. Needless to say, this is what happens when you have oars in too many ponds. Do you want to cover the news (via Yahoo News or Yahoo Sports) or do you want to do business deals like the one Yahoo had with FIFA?

Kevin Mitnick, who was famously tracked down by Tsutomu Shimomura with the help of some members and employees of The Well, tried to apply for a new account there this week. Denied.

Does the availability of easy credit soften the impact of recessions? Seems like a logical hypothesis. Via Marginal Revolution.

Paul Kedrosky has some of the latest numbers on the downward trend in CD sales. These days I get 90% of the new music that I listen to from emusic.com. It doesn’t have everything, but it has enough good stuff to keep interesting things flowing onto my iPod without my buying more dust collectors to find a place to store.

John W. Backus, the developer of Fortran, has passed away at age 82. Fortran was released in 1957 and is still in use. Wikipedia has an extensive article on Fortran.

Back in November, the US Copyright Office ruled that you’re allowed to unlock your phone if you’re on a GSM network. It’s a small step forward for consumer choice.