Cory Gardner unseats Udall in Colorado

300cory-gardnerCOLORADO – While you may have heard that the Republicans have taken the Senate, you may not have heard that one of the seats was taken in Colorado. In a surprising victory, Republican Cory Gardner of Colorado upset incumbent Democrat Mark Udall with almost 4% of the vote.

John Hickenlooper retained the office of governor by 1.36%

Senate Bill seeks to change vanity plates

PHOENIX—There are currently three bills for new vanity plates working their way through the Senate.

SB 1116 Creates a disabled veteran special plate if $32,000 is paid for its implementation to ADOT by December 31, 2013.
SB 1343 Creates a Girls’ Youth Organization special plate (GYO plate) if $32,000 is paid for its implementation to ADOT by December 31, 2013
SB 2025 Creates a Fallen Hero special plate if $32,000 is paid for its implementation to ADOT by December 31, 2013.

If Democrat Steve Farley has his way, they will take a new shape. In response to complaints that officers complaining about the difficulty seeing the letters, the Senator has introduced SB 1206. The bill would change 24-2405 to read:

A special plate issued pursuant to this article shall have a standard design with one area on the plate that is a three inch square that is set aside for a logo or message. The department shall determine the standard design of the special plate, and the logo or message is subject to the approval of the department. This section applies to all special plates that are authorized pursuant to this article after the effective date of this section.

The Senator has also introduced SB 1198 which is aimed at preventing obscuring the readablity of license plates with coatings or electronic means. The Bill would add Paragraph D to ARS 28-2354 reading:

Unless authorized by the department, a person shall not apply a covering or any substance to the license plate or use an electronic device or electrochromatic film that obscures from any angle the numbers, characters, year validating tabs or name of the jurisdiction issuing the plate.

While there is a penalty for covering up the name of the State on a license plate, the bill does not appear to provide a penalty for violating the proposed provision.

See Also: Arizona bill targets hard-to-read license plates

Senate bill rewrite lets feds read your e-mail without warrants

Proposed law scheduled for a vote next week originally increased Americans’ e-mail privacy. Then law enforcement complained. Now it increases government access to e-mail and other digital files.

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans’ e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.

CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans’ e-mail, is scheduled for next week.

Leahy’s rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — to access Americans’ e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge.

It’s an abrupt departure from Leahy’s earlier approach, which required police to obtain a search warrant backed by probable cause before they could read the contents of e-mail or other communications. The Vermont Democrat boasted last year that his bill “provides enhanced privacy protections for American consumers by… requiring that the government obtain a search warrant.”

Leahy had planned a vote on an earlier version of his bill, designed to update a pair of 1980s-vintage surveillance laws, in late September. But after law enforcement groups including the National District Attorneys’ Association and the National Sheriffs’ Association organizations objected to the legislation and asked him to “reconsider acting” on it, Leahy pushed back the vote and reworked the bill as a package of amendments to be offered next Thursday.

Read more at CNET