It's becoming a real hassle to offer sex for money on Craigslist, apparently. At first sex workers just had to think up a euphemism for prostitution, like "FULL EROTIC EXAMINATION" or "naughty sweet treat" or the cryptic "GFE" or the almost sweet "delightful relaxing time." Then, earlier this year, they had to have a working phone number, and listings dropped 80 percent. Now, under pressure from attorneys general in 40 states, Craigslist is going to require "erotic services" providers to pony up $10 for each listing, and pay with a credit card, which the police will be able to subpoena. The sex workers are already complaining, via NSFW ads. Law enforcement authorities say their real targets are pimps:

The political leanings of Broadcom's former CEO, Henry Nicholas III, make for some post-election headscratching. Proposition 6 was one of the two state ballot measures he had underwritten and supported — to the price tag of $6 million — to increase penalties for gang and drug crimes, even satellite tracking of sex offenders. Nicholas is the same guy who is under federal indictment for felony drug use and conspiracy, building out sex dungeons for liaisons with prostitutes, and securities fraud. Good thing voters didn't pass it.

No federal charges will be filed against former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer slept with a prostitute, a million years ago last March, after a little more than a year on the job. He was in danger of federal charges because he paid for his ladyfriend, Ms. Ashley Dupre, to travel across state lines, a violation of the ridiculous and archaic Mann Act, and also because he might've done some weird illegal stuff with the money he used to pay the prostitution ring. The US Attorney for New York has a funny statement:

Craigslist has agreed to crack down on the sex workers who use the site's "erotic services" section. That this news came about an hour after it was announced that Eliot Spitzer would not be prosecuted for having sex with prostitutes? A delightful coincidence! [NYT]

Drugs! Alcohol! Baseball bats! Hey, it's a good story. IT contractor Steven Barnes will serve a year in prison and pay a $54,000 restitution after being convicted of logging into a client's network and deleting the Exchange database, among other things. Barnes claimed he acted after coworkers from Blue Falcon Networks, now known as Akimbo Systems, came to his home and took away his personal computers by force. Barnes reconfigured Blue Falcon's server as an open relay for spammers, causing the company to be automatically blacklisted from delivering real mail. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with Barnes's temper that a little prison time won't — haha! I almost finished that sentence without laughing.

Remember David Pajcin, the Goldman Sachs analyst who conspired with a bunch of other bankers (as well as workers at a BusinessWeek printing plant) to carry out an insider trading scheme that earned him $6.7 million? He appears to have fled the country! [Bloomberg]

Headline: "Andover man shot with crossbow, beaten with bat, run over, burned." Subhead: "Gruesome details and accusations of embezzlement are laid out as two siblings are charged with killing their brother. Also charged was the girlfriend of one of the siblings." Opening scene:

You can thank us later, slackers, felons, children and so forth. [Starbucks]

Roll Call reports: "The juror who was dismissed from the criminal trial of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to attend the funeral of her father in California admitted Monday that her father had not died, and that she went to California to attend a horse race." Everything about the Ted Stevens trial was and is hilarious. [Roll Call]

Tomorrow is Election Day, the famous American Holiday in which people are not given a day off of work but are still expected to wait in lengthy lines outside elementary schools during business hours in order to have their provisional ballots thrown away or watch their electronic voting machines helpfully select the Constitution Party candidate. Yes, voting is hard, and seldom worth it. Which is why civic-minded companies are giving people prizes for voting! A voter an receive a free cup of coffee from Starbucks, a free donut from Krispy Kreme, and free ice cream from Ben & Jerry's if they show up and tell them they voted. It's a great, fun way to boost turnout, and it's probably totally illegal! The laws do vary from state to state, but for elections to federal office, our Congress is clear:

A former Scientologist named Peter Letterese is suing Tom Cruise and his favorite religion for $265 million. According to Fishbowl LA, Letterese's charges include allegations that "Cruise and Scientology bribed and improperly influenced a federal judge, a Florida state judge and a federal bankruptcy trustee to tie up his original law suit in bankruptcy court." Those are serious charges, and there's no word of proof, so you might be excused for thinking Letterese is a wacko. Then again, there was that earlier incident when Scientologists tried to convince Letterese's wife that he was gay, allegedly: Back in July, Paul Barressi, a private investigator who works for Tom Cruise, gave the Daily News court papers of Letterese's allegations, including this:

HP thought it would be nifty to use Joan Jett's "Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)" in ads for its new touch-screen computers. And it was pretty nifty! The song is catchy and fun, and works very well in the context of the ad (which is after the jump). Only one problem: It was written by glam-rock singer Gary Glitter, who was convicted of child molestation in Vietnam and child porn possession in the U.K. This is terrible for HP on so many levels, starting with the fact that it enriched a child predator.

Ashley Todd is the moronic young college Republican who thought it would be a fantastic idea to, while volunteering for the McCain campaign in Pittsburgh, stage her mugging and facial mutilation by a large black Obama supporter. She drew a B on her face, backwards, because she did it in the mirror, and the rest is history. She is an American Hero. Paraded before the press in handcuffs, a faint B still visible on her face, we all knew no jail could hold Ol' B-Face. And we were right! Todd has been released from jail and will be "required to undergo mental health treatment." Then her record will be expunged, so she can still act as campaign manager for Bristol Palin's historic 2036 presidential campaign.

It was inevitable that the Huffington Post would somehow end up sullied by recruiting such a massive army of unpaid contributors. But few would have imagined something this awful: Valued HuffPo political blogger Carol Anne Burger shot herself Friday, and police now believe she was responsible for the brutal murder of her former lover two days earlier. Burger was a scuba-diving instructor who brought an amateur's zeal to her work, and in this sense embodied the best of HuffPo's democratic approach, calling to mind fellow contributor Mayhill Fowler, who broke the "Bittergate" story. But the website will not be eager to associate itself with Burger's energy in dispatching Jessica Kalish.

Back in my day, weed was bought from shady characters standing on the corner, or at a weed spot where shady characters gathered. There was none of this ordering on the phone and having some aspiring male model type roll up to your front door on his bike to deliver your quarter ounce. That's that bullshit. Just another sign of dwindling grittiness, like getting our tattoos in malls. So it's no surprise that our city's weed dealers have morphed from streetwise hustlers posted up in the shadows to fancy-free longhairs who give interviews about their business to the Observer under their real names: Stefan Fitzgerald is a bike delivery guy for a large weed operation who was only too happy to bitch to the Observer about his boss:

When the celebrity weeklies unveil their new covers tomorrow, we can bet they'll be dominated by coverage of the terrible Jennifer Hudson news story, in which the singer and actress's mother, brother, and 7-year-old nephew were murdered on Friday. And we suppose they're right to, it being big news and all. Since the issues went to print yesterday, it's up to the websites to tease what each publication has in store (and to keep up with breaking developments). So what might each magazine be featuring? We took a look at five magazines' websites today to try to see if there were any hints of what their coverage will look like tomorrow. People, the longstanding classy version of the other tabloids, has a story (kinda far down the page, honestly) about Jennifer's bond with her mother, featuring recollections about Darnell Donerson from Jennifer's acting coach and from people in Donerson's Chicago neighborhood. It's the kind of sad human interest story that People has made their name doing. Expect sidebar reactions from American Idol judges (Hudson was a contestant on the show) and maybe one of the bigger gets, like Beyonce, Hudson's Dreamgirls costar. Us Weekly reports at a more breathless, staccato clip, giving us gory details about the number of times Hudson's young nephew was shot and quoting from Hudson's sister's MySpace, in which she mourns her lost loved ones and imagines them as her guardian angels now. In your face awfulness. InTouch, Life & Style, and OK! aren't giving the story as much prominence as Us (their older and more popular sibling). OK! does a small dissection of the dispute that lead to the whole tragedy InTouch covers Idol judge Randy Jackson's reaction to the sad news. And Life & Style has nothing about the incident on their sparsely updated site. So, once again, it looks as though Us Weekly leads the pack toward getting the scoop, though their hand at the necessary quiet, soft-touch pieces is not as nimble as People's. Us ought to get the early lead while People follows up in the coming weeks with a punch-in-the-gut Hudson interview. Or not. Maybe we'll get surprised with a big Exclusive. It could happen.

Every time—every time—a horrible tragedy befalls a famous person, some of our nation's most clueless PR practitioners use it as a news peg for some unfortunate client. And of course that tradition continues with the news that singer and actress Jennifer Hudson's whole family was murdered! When hearing such horrible news, we're bound to ask ourselves: Is there any "invaluable device" that could have saved them from their violent end? Well!:

Former hedge fund manager Sam Israel sure has a talent for putting off the inevitable. The former financier faked his own death to avoid jail time back in June, then got a judge to postpone his sentencing twice so he could get treatment for his addiction to methadone in August and September. Now a judge has delayed his sentencing yet again so he can undergo a 90-day medical evaluation in North Carolina. His next court date isn't scheduled until February 2009. [Bloomberg via Dealbreaker]

[Update: Now with a minor correction, and also an awesome Ted Stevens statement!] Ted Stevens is guilty of violating ethics laws, and not understanding how the internet works. Hah, just kidding, it's just the fraud stuff. His insane jury, made up of Alaskans DC residents [deny them congressional representation and see what happens, Senators] who kept having violent outbursts, found Stevens guilty of seven charges of corruption. He doesn't have to step down from the Senate, of course, and he's still running for reelection next week. He has said he will not step down. Which is awesome. What with the presidential election going on, we've barely had time for prominent congressional Republicans to face embarrassingly public trials and indictments, like in 2006! In 2006, America watched in glee as Republican congressmen Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Bob Ney, and Tom DeLay all faced indictments on the eve of the midterm elections. Resignations and bitter GOP infighting soon followed! Ney refused to resign until days before the election! Oh, then Florida congressman Mark Foley, uh, had some sort of scandal involving sexy, sexy underaged male pages. Also there was this Jack Abramoff guy! It was an exciting time, sort of. Now we are so busy with Barack Obama being a socialist and John McCain being old that Ted Stevens getting kicked out of the Senate, finally, after 200 years, seems like some happy afterthought. So. Corrupt Alaska Republican fucks his own party and loses an election. Who knew Alaska would matter, this year?

The Jennifer Hudson saga continues to get bleaker and bleaker with news that the dead body of her 7-year-old nephew may have been found in the back of a white SUV on Chicago's West Side. Hudson had offered a $100,000 reward for the safe return of Julian King, but he appears to be the third victim of a domestic dispute on Friday in which the Dreamgirls Oscar winner's mother and brother were both killed. CNN is reporting that Hudson's brother-in-law has been taken into custody as a "person of interest." Expect a full-on media frenzy to ensue in a reminder that no matter the economic climate, when celebrity and crime mix, ratings surge.