Trouble at the Canadian Border

Public Radio is reporting this morning that border agents on the US Canadian border are looking way back into people’s past to find ways to deny them entry to one country or the other. Border agents are even using Google. One case mentioned in the story was of a Canadian Psychoanalyst who was denied entry after agents found an article he wrote in 2001 about his use of LSD in the 1960s. I imagine the day is not far off when border agents use facebook or...

Krugman on the sorry state of political reporting

Paul Krugman has had two great columns recently in the NYT. Unfortunately they are buried behind a pay-wall. In “Authentic? Nevermind” Krugman addresses the recent criticism of candidate John Edwards who has been living comfortably yet talks about income inequality, increasing taxes on the wealthy and helping the poor, woorking and middle classes at the expense of the rich and elite. As Krugman points out, there is nothing inauthentic about this, however that is how the media is portraying it. It would be inauthentic of Edwards, mothballed the houses and moved into a travel trailer to try to score points with the populace. He is, rather, following in the tradition of F.D.R. who lived quite well but also accomplished great things for poor Americans. Inauthentic is Fred Thompson who traded in his nice black town car for a red pickup while running for Senate, or Rudy Giulianni who claims to be a defender of the nation and tough on terror based on his “record” which is spotty at best. Giulianni has come under heavy criticism from first responders for his performance on September 11th and there after. Krugman also points out that Giulianni Partners has had some seriously questionable relationships (Berni Kerrik convicted of corruption, and FBI executive who stole artifacts from the WTC Site and a former RC priest who was accused of covering up sexual abuse in the church. Not to mention GWB and his cowboy/flyboy act. Krugman says we should stop talking about authenticity and start talking about candidates on the issues, something that is objective rather than subjective popularity contest criteria. In “Lies, Sighs and...

Obama MySpace Snafu

TechPresident features a few posts from Micah Sifry on the recent Obama MySpace snafu. The short of it is this: volunteer makes a Barak Obama MySpace profile in 2004. Over time that profile grows to 160k friends. The volunteer gives freely of his time doing it (by his account 5 to 10 hours a day since the beginning of the year). The Obama campaign decides they want control, ask the volunteer how much he’d like to be compensated. He quotes a number around $50k, they say no way and go to MySpace to reclaim the myspace.com/barakobama url and loose the 160k friends and alot of good will in the process. The whole affair raises some interesting questions, perhaps most importantly, who over at the Obama campaign decided that 160k self identified and actively networked supporters weren’t worth $50k? And how will this episode affect Obama’s support on MySpace over time? Will his paid online organizing staff be able to rebuild the 160k friend network? It will be interesting to see how this shakes out in the next few weeks. In my eyes the reluctance to compensate the volunteer for the network, or the decision to not just outright hire him and bring him into the fold seems to be a tremendous mistake and perhaps signal the political consulting establishment’s skepticism or contempt for online volunteer...