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The Conservative publication Insight on the News reoprts that Karl Rove has threatened to blacklist Judiciary Committee Senators if they oppose Bush on the NSA warrantless surveillance issue:

The White House has been twisting arms to ensure that no Republican member votes against President Bush in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation of the administration’s unauthorized wiretapping. Congressional sources said Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove has threatened to blacklist any Republican who votes against the president. The sources said the blacklist would mean a halt in any White House political or financial support of senators running for re-election in November. “It’s hardball all the way,” a senior GOP congressional aide said.

constab writes “ActiveState, the Sophos-owned company that makes free distributions and commercial programming tools for programming languages like Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl and Ruby, has been sold to a Canadian VC firm. According to the article, ActiveState will go back to its open-source roots and continue development of ActivePerl, ActivePython and ActiveTcl. A full set of OS X on Intel downloads is also in the works.”

Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who is currently a writer and supervising producer on ABC’s hit SF series Lost, told SCI FI Wire that the current season will end with more than the standard 22 hours of TV.

Filmmaking partners Glen Morgan and James Wong told SCI FI Wire that they returned to make the supernatural horror sequel Final Destination 3 after seeing the second installment directed by someone else after they co-created the franchise.

Filmmaker James Cameron told BusinessWeek magazine that he wants audiences for his upcoming top-secret Project 880 movie to experience it first as a multiplayer online game.

Like Legos? Like H.P. Lovecraft? Then you’ll love Cthulego Rises, an elaborate, demented sculptural construction by British Lego fan Mark Stafford, depicting the accidental release of monsters from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos by hapless villains in search of forbidden gold.

Walden Media, Beacon Pictures and Revolution Studios are teaming to produce a Narnia-scale movie based on the children’s fantasy novel The Water Horse by British author Dick King-Smith, Variety reported.

SF author John G. McDaid told SCI FI Wire that it was an “awesome, humbling moment” when he discovered that his story “Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria With Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord With Two Manuals” made the 2005 preliminary Nebula Award ballot.

Now that Disney has completed its takeover of Pixar, the animation studio will take over development of the long-gestating Toy Story 3, the Bloomberg news service reported.

Amsterdam’s new street signs banning cannabis smoking in parts of the city have sparked global interest.

Transcripts from today’s hearing are here (html). Arianna tells the Democrats to stand strong because this is a winning issue. That’s good advice.

There were many questions Gonzales would not answer at today’s hearing citing national security:

Democrats repeatedly pressed Mr. Gonzales, without success, to state whether the administration’s legal stance would permit the government to open Americans’ mail without warrant or, in the words of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to conduct “black bag jobs.”

He offered few details of the secret program, whose existence was revealed in December by The New York Times. Though he described the program as “narrowly” targeted, Mr. Gonzales said he could not provide an “absolute assurance” that Americans without ties to terrorists are not being spied upon.

That’s the crux of the problem. Bush and Gonzales want us to believe the surveillance program is directed at al Qaeda and other terrorists. But the reality is it is directed at the communications of suspected al Qaeda members overseas with people within this country. (For polling differences that depend upon whether the question is phrased as one or the other, see this article in tomorrow’s Wall St. Journal (free link.)