links for 2010-06-03

Rockingham County Commwealth's Attorney Marsha Gast has apologized for illegally seizing photographs taken by the staff of JMU newspaper The Breeze. They had 962 pictures of the Harrisonburg street party-turned-riot back in April, and the prosecutor's office seized all of them based on a search warrant. In fact, a subpoena is the proper venue for that (allowing a publication time to challenge it in court). The Student Press Law Center provided the students with an attorney, whose time is now being paid for by Rockingham taxpayers, a result of Gast's office agreeing to pay $10,000 in the settlement with The Breeze.

Beefing up their election-history data, VPAP now maps the results of every election down to the precinct level. Unfortunately, the data is still locked in VPAP (there's no API or export functionality). The good news is that this data exists in one place in a standardized format, something that the SBE has never been able to provide, and that's pretty great.

My new favorite politico excuse, in this instance for an extramarital affair: "This was nothing more than two political colleagues who work very closely together for many years having one inappropriate relationship." Or, to use a shorthand term, an AFFAIR.

Benoit Denizet-Lewis provides this look back at the secret 1920 purge of suspected gay students from Harvard. One guy was kicked out just for being the roommate of a guy who was suspected to be gay. As if that wasn't enough, they were actually barred from the city of Cambridge.