DISQUS

Sometime back when the 60s were turning into the 70s, counterculture figure and Yippie founder Jerry Rubin wrote (and I'm paraphrasing here) that the United States would only leave Viet'nam when the embarrassment of staying outweighed the embarrassment of losing or leaving. I imagine that a similar concept applies to politicians today - that they will only abandon a flawed position when it is more embarrassing to keep the position than it is to fall on one's sword. Or whenever the position quits being profitable.

Kevin Smith references and Nintendo Wii? Sounds like a great combination.

To paraphrase the boys from Oxford, blogging makes me un-fitter, unhappier, and less productive ... well, maybe just the last part.

And yet, it's a marketable skill in the world of politics. And a way to raise insane amounts of money. When we got this video up on the front page of liberal blog leader DailyKos, fundraising jumped up significantly. But that was 2006. Most political operatives have discovered that there are actual people on the Internet ... meaning that the market is very crowded. New Candidates show up as often as new online volunteers. Also, aside from the fundraising game, good old fashioned phone calls are still the best way to reach potential volunteers. As a current blogger/activist, my holy grail, my grand unified theory of politics, is to find the next big thing before anyone else does. Ideas? I don't want a candidate to twitter, but after meetup, eventful, facebook, YouTube, the blogs, flickr, and so on, what does Web 2.0 have for the politico?

To answer J-ROD's last question, I'm surprised that the real political compass (not the WaPo one, or the biased "World's Smallest Political Test" that turns people into Libertarians) - you know, the two-dimensional one available here - isn't a feature (outside of a under-used application). It's an amazing way to micro-target (for advertisers), it would foment and interesting political discussion, and it would be much more accurate than self-identification. For example, if Edwards were recruiting volunteers, he would love to find people who were economically left, even if they were more authoritarian than libertarian.

OT- this is a great article about the brain and change you may have missed. It's really amazing. And scary.

The data from before wasn't that much better. In Charlotte, NC (for example) over 60% of people didn't have political info ... and when I ran a facebook poll on a local controversy, facebook couldn't even give me the crosstabs.

To me, it's just another category that will now be filled with the words "It's Complicated."

I'm surprised I haven't heard of a facebook app that tells you when you've been de-friended. The whole discussion of un-friending or whatever I'm supposed to call it may be a discussion for another day ... though it would be relevant to this blog as one of those interesting changes of state.

Not as cool as the time Samuel L. Jackson called up my father and invited him to see "Snakes on a Plane," but not as frightening as Mr. Taylor makes it out to be. What is cool is that the BP is competing with alligators to be the dominant predator in the Everglades. And they're "threatened" in the wild, so why not give them a new home?

McCalla Field at Gitmo.

In North Carolina and Virginia, local food production also marginally lowers health care costs by giving farmers an alternative to growing tobacco ... even if all the tobacco production is moving to Brazil anyway.

My screenplay about someone living through the writer's strike is going to be so much easier to sell with nobody else writing! As a scab, I'm in favor of it :-P

In all seriousness, the WGAs are definitely stretching (not breaking) into some new frontiers on the Internet with the way in which they're waging this battle ... but it might help their cause if celebretards like Britney, Paris, and Lindsay could stay out of the headlines and lend a little more press to the writers. Then again, Britney could always hit a picket line with her car ...

Another link that may be interesting - facebook/MySpace in a tail-spin or just hitting a trough?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/31/myspace...