Pun Salad

"Apple will become the phone of choice for the pedophile. The average pedophile at this point is probably thinking, I’ve got to get an Apple phone.” Setting aside the question of what, exactly, an average pedophile is (or an above-average pedophile, for that matter), take a moment to savor the paranoid, intellectually dishonest, and technologically illiterate imagination of John J. Escalante, Chicago PD’s chief of detectives. He is not alone in his fear: Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI boss James B. Comey, and the editors of the Washington Post are united in their horror of the fact that Apple has taken the radical step of . . . changing the default privacy arrangements on its new telephones.

As near as I can tell, iOS has long had the ability to encrypt some data on your iThing; the difference now is: not only is encryption now the default behavior, the scope of the encryption is much wider.

Based on experience, I'm virtually certain that large swaths of users will make (or, more precisely, continue to make) poor choices here: rendering their data unrecoverable, assuming their data is secure when it's not, protecting it with a weak key. Still, Apple has moved the sticks a bit away from the snoopers and toward the users, so it's probably a net win.

President Barack Obama delayed his planned unilateral amnesty until after the election to prevent GOP legislators or the media from recognizing it as an election-winner for the GOP, according to White House spokesman Josh Earnest.

Okay, so Obama's neither courageous nor honest enough to put this issue on the front burner where voters can turn thumbs up-or-down on it. It's slightly surprising that Josh Earnest admits it, but other than that, what's new?

The frustrating part (as the article makes clear) is that the GOP leadership (largely pro-amnesty) is cooperating with Obama in keeping the heat off the issue. All the better to claim on November 5 that the voters didn't express their preferences clearly.

Same point made more incindiarily (not an actual word, as near as I can tell, but it should be): Ann Coulter.

Jeanne Shaheen should be ashamed of herself. The attack ad she’s running against my dad, Scott Brown, is flat-out wrong, and is a desperate attempt to scare women. As a young voter, I find Shaheen’s smear campaign highly offensive. It’s clearly a last-ditch attempt to distract the people of New Hampshire from her record of voting 99 percent of the time with President Obama.

I believe Jeanne's ad accuses young Scott Brown of dipping girls' pigtails in his inkwell back in elementary school. I'm pretty sure I remember that.

"If you see a quote by me on the Internet, I probably didn't say it." -- Abraham Lincoln

— Drew Cline (@DrewHampshire) October 9, 2014

I believe Thomas Jefferson said something similar.