tuesday morning briefs

Thieves took sensitive personal information on 26.5 million U.S. veterans, including Social Security numbers and birth dates, after a Veterans Affairs employee improperly brought the material home, the government said Monday.

UPDATE - Dan Froomkin
Frank James blogs for the Chicago Tribune: "In one of those perfect Washington ironies, today was the first meeting of President Bush's newly created Identity Theft Task Force.

"With today's report that a Veterans Administration employee may have just created the mother-of-all-identity-theft opportunities by losing a computer disk with the sensitive personal information of millions of veterans and their spouses, the task force may need to tackle the federal government's problems first."

The task force was created by a May 10 executive order , after a presidential photo op , and it's headed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Writes James: "At the end of today's task force meeting, the closed meeting was supposed to have been opened to TV cameras so the attorney general's remarks could be carried on live TV. But that plan was scrubbed."

Paul Krugman - Friday was a bad day for Senator Joseph Lieberman.

Slideshow of the Katamari Damancy runners in the Bay to Breakers race. (via Boing Boing)