The campaign site only shows the most recent 30 comments. But even from this very limited sampling, a common theme emerges: Whitman isn't paying any attention, despite her promise that "you will hear directly from me" on her "California forum." She's neither answering, nor even censoring, her critics. Chaos!

It's a good thing Whitman has never run a major website with a large and vocal community before, or this might reflect poorly on her management skills.

As part of his 2010 AG bid, Kelly emailed prospective supporters (see below), touting legislation that makes sex offenders register their social network identities. A similar law in New York recently revealed 2,782 sex offenders were using Facebook, some under multiple screen names. Democrat Kelly wants to uncover similar Facebook users out West, and asks people to email their legislators a message stating, "I urge you to pass e-STOP here in California to keep people safe from online predators."

Which is all well and good, but kind of begs the question: Since California already has a public sex offenders database, couldn't Facebook simply collect enough information from users to cross-reference that list? And if it doesn't do so, for privacy reasons, wouldn't executives like, say, the chief privacy officer be answerable for that apparently regrettable trade off between safety and revenue growth? Just asking!

Email from Kelly (click to enlarge):

Email Kelly suggests his supporters send (excerpt):

(Top pic: Kelly, by Esther Dyson)

Oh, right, like half the population. Here's right-wing panic site World Net Daily's aghast summary of the game, via Wonkette:

The elf reveals he specializes in assassination, and the other character replies, "I bet you're good at a lot of things."


The elf responds, "Mmmm, that's quite an offer, especially coming from another man – if we are both speaking of the same thing."


If the player selects the response, "I suspect we are," the elf agrees to have homosexual sex with the character.

WND then quotes selectively from gay blogs ("Gay geeks rejoice, all your gaming fantasies have come true") and YouTube comments ("We're a bisexual nation living in denial") and provides a list of retailers (like Wal Mart!) presumably for boycotting. Because, you know, if there's one way to make gay sex look hot and appealing, it's by showcasing it with stilted dialog, jerky body movements and elf ears, in a role playing videogame like Dragon Age. Hottt.

Obama just said the following in China, according to TechCrunch and various other news outlets:

"I have never used Twitter but I'm an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access."

Some of the Twitterati are taking it hard. Just WHO have they been Following??

@netWire "Shocking, given that his account with 2.6 million followers has even been "verified" by Twitter headquarters' !!!

@BuzzEdition "WHOA...I thought Obama HAD used twitter...so sad now....."

@Amadeus3000 "I thought he used his account himself in early campaign days.."

@funuhu "Shocking! I am sad."

The rest of us can take solace in the fact that the most powerful man in the world knows he has far bigger issues on his plate than cranking out tweets. The only person who should be embarrassed is his ghostwriter, who is averaging less than two tweets per day. HOPE needs to spread faster than that!

In an email to potential donors (below) first discussed by The Frisky's Jessica Wakeman, Fiorina's campaign manager touts a video (above) of her opponent Sen. Barbara Boxer talking to a general during congressional testimony. The brief conversation seems to have offended no one who was actually involved in it, but Fiorina's campaign calls the video "shocking" and said Boxer "disrespectfully demanded" to be called "senator." Her exact words:

Do me a favor, could you say 'senator' instead of 'm'aam?' It's just a thing. (Laughter.) I worked so hard to get that title. Thank you.

This "shocking" moment of terrible rudeness is obviously the most important issue in California right now. It's a good thing voters have a tough businesswoman like Fiorina to help them identify women who espouse feminist ideals only when it advances their own ego and political interests.

In Fiorina's official candidacy announcement, published in an op-ed in the Orange County Register, the Republican hopeful lays out some of her political positions, which include safeguarding gargantuan CEO paychecks from the government; unshackling agribusiness from environmental protections; and denying national health care to people who get cancer like Fiorina but who, unlike her, aren't rich or well insured (Fiorina does think these people should be able to go to twee "community clinics," though).

Fiorina also boldy writes, "Let's put every government budget and every government bill on the Internet for every citizen to see." Great idea, Carly! If this were 1996. The government already puts federal and proposed budgets online here and here, and the bills can be found here, among many other places. At home in California, the budget is here and the bills are here and here. Maybe you should ask your good friend John McCain to teach you a thing or two about the internet.

Stuck twenty points behind Democratic rival Jerry Brown and without the support of "major San Francisco donors who helped underwrite Newsom's successful campaigns in the city," Newsom is dropping out of the governor's race. Newsom dropped the word "young" into his exit speech, a move that helps remind people he's a rising political star who in all likelihood plans to try again for higher office, just once he tackles some of those festering homelessness and crime problems he promised to attack when first elected mayor six years ago.

Though losing an alcoholic wife-fucker like Newsom will take some fun out of the gubernatorial race, the contest still features Democratic hopeful Brown, who proposed a state space academy last time he was governor, and Republican contender Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO whose personal voting record is "unacceptable," according to one Meg Whitman.

The Facebook communications manager communicated the first news of his gig on archrival social network Twitter, according to Business Insider. If only it were possible to make such public pronouncements on Facebook.

UPDATE: Noyes writes, "To clarify, the news came first as my Facebook status msg, not via tweet." That's cool. Thanks for telling us — via Twitter again.

(Pic: Noyes, by Andrew Feinberg)

Said Judge John Grady:

"Sheriff [Thomas] Dart may continue to use Craigslist's Web site to identify and pursue individuals who post allegedly unlawful content. But he cannot sue Craigslist for their conduct."

Since the sheriff filed his suit in March, Craigslist has renamed the section "adult services" and imposed rules requiring a working phone number and valid credit card from, err, adult service providers. This doesn't seem to have impacted business much. But that's actually a good thing for the sheriff: since hookers will continue to flock to Craigslist, which cooperates with police, Dart can continue to use the site as a choke point for large-scale prostitution busts, as he has in the past. He just can't demonize the site for his own political posturing.

McCain last night tweeted about how she was spending her evening eating takeout and reading an Andy Warhol biography. To accompany this radical take on an evening in, McCain uploaded a picture of her in her usual home alone outfit of sweat pants and a tank top. And apparently this set of shitstorm of conservative condemnation — apparently young women should not be encouraged by their role model Meghan McCain to expose any part of their breasts, ever — and fat jokes.

So then McCain says she's quitting this awful Twitter place forever, except maybe not really, because she wanted to "sleep on it" and probably woke up this morning realizing she now has the moral high ground again and fodder for a whole slew of new outraged Daily Beast columns:

There's another thing Meghan McCain has that she didn't have "about 16 hours ago," which will keep her on Twitter forever: lots and lots of fresh new attention. For her perky and hugely well articulated political positions, of course. Both of them.

It would seem, you see, that pundits on right-wing Fox News and lefty Huffington Post have arrived at the same place with regard to Swine Flu vaccines: They are dangerous and should be avoided!

Attached, find a clip of Fox's Glenn Beck riling up a studio audience against "this government's" flu shots, and saying the vaccines are kind of barbaric and backward.

And over here on HuffPo you can find "Dr. Frank Lipman" saying much the same thing: He advises "NO!" against swine flu vaccines (in bold and caps), due to an unholy alliance between the government and "the Pharmaceutical Industry" (again with the caps). But he does say "yes" to Vitamin D supplements, fish oil, "antiviral herbal supplements," "a probiotic daily... with 10-20 billion organisms," and a ready supply of "homeopathic Oscillococcinum."

Astronomer and former HuffPo contributor Phil Plait calls this "far-left New Age... antivax nonsense" over on Discover Magazine's website, advising, sensibly, that people consult their actual personal doctors on the matter. Controversy also dogged HuffPo's health coverage back in May, when another Living section writer suggested treating swine flu with colon cleanses. The writer, who just happened to be selling a cleanse book, was duly rebuked by a doctor writing for Salon.com.

At the time, we noted that the Living section, in which both these controversial swine flu articles have appeared, was stocked by writers recruited by Huffpo "Senior Editor At Large" Russell Bishop John Morton, a disciple of the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, to which HuffPo publisher Arianna Huffington belongs. At least one Living section editor has reportedly been forced by Huffington to attend an "Insight" seminar, organized by a group with close ties to MSIA.

Former members have called MSIA a cult of personality around leader John-Roger (pictured, left, with Huffington in 2004), who acolytes believe can heal the ill and who is said to eschew Western medicine. One ex-member described in his memoir John-Roger scolding him for using prescription drugs, rather than just a "natural... nutritionist," to rid himself of parasites contracted on a trip Africa (see the end of this post for more).

We'd hoped HuffPo's new medical editor Dr. Dean Ornish, who joined in August, could improve HuffPo's health coverage. It's not clear if he signed off on this latest article; we're curious what his thoughts are. Perhaps he'll leave a comment here as he did on our last post. In the meantime we'll enjoy observing the comical similarities between the people near the furthest edges of Fox News and HuffPo.

The bare-bones fundraising site has already attracted its own attack video (see below), a rant by the Huffington Post's Jason Linkins ("the most insufferable thing she's ever done in her life"), disbelief from political blogger Atrios, and on and on. At one point in the splash graphic, Fiorina appears to compare herself to a dog: "It's day & night... It's dogs & cats... It's good & bad... It's Carly vs [Democratic rival Barbara] Boxer."

It could be a trick: Get people talking about the terrible website, and you can sweep aside concerns over Fiorina's voting record (or lack thereof), clumsy campaign resumé fudging, Iranian trade connections and track record of offshoring jobs en masse. But recent history would seem to indicate she and her team are not that clever.

O'Keefe told the Washington Post he acted independently in making his ACORN videos. But the Village Voice has traced a series of benefactors to the firebrand: The Leadership Institute conservative think tank appears to have given O'Keefe $4,000 for a monitor with which to make his movies, and $500 to start his conservative newspapers. Then there's the "small government group" through which the money of PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel came.

Thiel's people told the Voice that Thiel didn't know of O'Keefe's videos until he saw them on YouTube. But they acknowledged that $10,000 of his contributions reached O'Keefe. O'Keefe's estranged friend Liz Farkas apparently told the publication that Thiel ponied up a full $30,000, and that the money was used to produce the ACORN video. Thiel's people disputed that larger sum, to the Voice. But they acknowledged that the group Thiel funded was behind another O'Keefe video, in which fake, oversized "Sweepstakes" checks are delivered to various families and revealed to be bills, a stunt designed to illustrate the scale of recent federal bailouts.

Any modestly resourceful college kid knows how to stretch $10,000, so it's quite possible Thiel's money ended up being used on the ACORN video, even if he didn't know it. Why not embrace the fact? Here is a young man whose clever reporting stunt showed up the mainstream national media and may well be the undoing of its subject. O'Keefe started a conservative college publication, just like Thiel, and wants to bolster right-wing politics using YouTube, just like Thiel.

Besides, with his funding of O'Keefes earlier video, Thiel has gotten over his earlier disdain of media producers who "try to be gratuitously meaner and more sensational than the next person... like a terrorist who is trying to stand out and shock people." Those were the words Thiel used to condemn Valleywag as "the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda;" they would seem to fit O'Keefe nicely.

(Thiel pic by Auren Hoffman)

The Obama administration just announced a new cloud-computing initiative. It claims it merely wants to streamline $75 billion in federal IT spending. So what's with the "mind mapping" component of the plan? And why so cozy with Google?

The "mind mapping" software is listed under "productivity apps" on the cloud computing initiative's website. Glenn Beck, call your office! To paint the president as a socialist big brother, a monster computer "cloud" that centralizes sensitive government information and is deeply interested in your brain is a boon.

Especially when it is tied, however loosely, to that all-seeing corporate eye in Mountain View, California, Google Inc. Google is the leading proponent of cloud computing, in which shrink-wrapped PC software (like, say, Outlook) is replaced with Web applications (like, say, GMail). In fact, NASA Ames CIO Chris Kemp, who is in charge of NASA's cloud computing program, has quoted Google's CEO as an inspiration for it. NASA Ames is where today's federal announcement is being made, so presumably Kemp's work is now spreading.

It seems likely Google will be on hand for the announcement: NASA has announced that "top Silicon Valley information technology leaders are scheduled to attend," and, besides, adjoining Moffett Federal Airfield is where top Googlers park their private jets, per arrangement with NASA. Google cronies at private zeppelin company Airship Ventures are also allowed use of the field. Kemp, in turn, has apparently used a Google jet for NASA "meteor hunting," and heralded the release of high-resolution NASA imagery for use on moon.google.com (see 9/17 entry here). He has also hosted "VIP guests," including from the Silicon Valley tech scene, at a space shuttle launch.

This must all seem, no doubt, perfectly innocent to Kemp, who is steeped in the startup world. The 31-year-old worked as chief architect at Classmates.com before being "pushed aside" as co-founder of vacation rental broker Escapia and detouring into the public sector. But amid the increasingly paranoid partisan rancor of Washington, DC, the Obama Administration's "mind mapping" cloud computing plans and ties to Google will inevitably be re-marketed on the distinctly irrational market that is national politics.

(Top image via, second pic via)

Like the current movie-star governor, the carefully-shellacked San Francisco mayor makes the Golden State's gubernatorial race feel surreal in a "fruits and nuts" way that competitors like ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman and even former hippie governor Jerry Brown just can't. This is the guy whose press secretary jokes merrily about weed, and who recently had the gall to tell the New York Times that his affair with his friend's wife was "much more benign than [things] actually appeared in print."

The blog I Love You Gavin Newsom claims that City Hall and campaign sources say Newsom will quit the governor's race, probably in the fall, since he's anywhere from 9 to 29 points behind Brown in the polls. On the other hand, Newsom is rumored to be getting an endorsement from former president Bill Clinton, and I Love You Gavin Newsom has proven a touch too conspiracy minded in the past (we sympathize!). So let's hope they're wrong on this, if only because we might otherwise have to draft Gary Coleman to run again.

Yes it was. In the summer, the coastal elites hailed Twitter's brilliant simplicity for allowing the microblogging service to route around authoritarian sensors and transmit poignant messages that made otherwise apathetic Americans really care about Iranian activists, as evidenced by their willingness to turn digital avatars green.

But now they're starting to fret that Twitter and its social networking brethren, like Facebook, are not so much simple as simplistic; reductive media that distill a complex debate like universal health care down to its most emotional, televisable sideshows. Of course, we've seen this flip flop before: Hollywood celebrities fell in love with Twitter as a free marketing channel, then despised it as a haven for uncouth and often unchecked imitators; earnest liberals loved what social nets did for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, but hated the eternal platform they have given birthers.

Of course, this dysfunctional, love-hate relationship is basically endless. The brands might change from year to year, but the practice of ultra-concise and often crude networked communication is only going to become more common. The lessons for the future are, as always, in the past; it was the current president who showed there was an emotional and reductive way to package online the candidacy of a novice black politician with a Kenyan father and a liberal political platform. There's got to be a way for him to similarly distill the health care debate. He could start by asking Michael Moore for tips.

A British programmer last month launched a petition on the PM's website to win just such an apology. Though he was instrumental in breaking German codes during World War II, Turing was convicted of homosexuality, chemically castrated and thus driven to suicide.

Gordon Brown's statement includes the following:

While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction...



So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.

(Image via Mark A.M. Kramer)

A Massachusetts legal blog called The Docket carries an odd story: a federal judge wanted to hold Sullivan to account for marijuana possession on a national seashore, which after all is only a misdemeanor and $125 fine, and other people are prosecuted for it all the time in his very court. But the U.S. Attorney's Office insisted on dropping the charges, to keep Sullivan's record clean so his immigration can go through.

Are bloggers getting VIP treatment at the federal level now? The magistrate hearing the case, Robert Collings, certainly thought Sullivan was:

Collings says he expressed his concern that "a dismissal would result in persons in similar situations being treated unequally before the law. … persons charged with the same offense on the Cape Cod National Seashore were routinely given violation notices, and if they did not agree to [pay the fine] were prosecuted by the United States Attorney … there was no apparent reason for treating Mr. Sullivan differently from other persons charged with the same offense."

In his day, newspaper columnist and radio host Walter Winchell enjoyed a close, favor-trading relationship with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover; according to Neal Gabler's biography of Winchell, this mainly involved the funneling of confidential information. But his special relationship with the Justice Department eventually became public knowledge and helped turn him, in the public eye, from the scrappy underdog into a dangerous media baron. If anything, the blogosphere has bred an even stronger distaste for special treatment than the tabloids did; which is why Sullivan, heretofore tight-lipped about the incident, will probably issue some sort of plausible explanation for the whole affair posthaste. Or at least attempt to.

UPDATE: Here is Collings' "memorandum and order" on the matter, which at 12 pages is quite concise by the standards of federal legal documents. We daresay it's almost eloquent! Docs via The Docket.

(Pic: Sullivan by Trey Ratcliff)