You'd think, with financial fraud costing society about $35 billion last year (that's over $100 per person), the credit institutions would do more to fix this. While they talk mightily about the fantastic biometric technologies on the horizon, they keep a lot of people employed handling all of this identity fraud and pitching "Identify Theft Solutions". But they don't have to. Here's a breathtakingly simple solution: start having the major credit card companies, as well as the major credit bureaus, register people's email and SMS addresses.

They're vulgar, increasing in frequency, and containing shameless displays that shouldn't be shown to impressionable young children. No, I'm not talking about the variations on profane words which Congress wishes to ban on broadcast television. I'm talking about celebrities making impromptu speeches on televised award shows.

Let's say you had a question for Howard Dean, leading contender for the Democratic nomination for President in 2004. Here's the most frequent contributors you may run into on the official Dean For America forums: practical-magic, BrionLutz, NJHack, Grizz, Jakey, Dean-Uber-Alles, Jakey, WVMicko, slam-the-neocons, Bush_Stopper, Zackpunk, Kire, IndieMind, Political Amazon.

A nice, welcoming bunch, right? For all the emphasis on the face-to-face, "Meetups" of the Dean campaign, the official forums look like a rogue's gallery of cyberspace...

A curious comment by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press leads me to consider the difference between real rallies and virtual rallies.

A look at the visual growth of weblogs.

I heard on MPR's MarketPlace this Thursday that the USA Network has been promoting the new "Traffic" series by re-introducing into circulation 50,000 dollar bills with a promotional sticker on them. (see the summary, hear the report). The reporter, Jeff Tyler, informed us that this was fully vetted by the company's lawyers, so I suppose it follows that this was legal. I suppose that the removeable stickers are not permanently defacing the bills.

Often I've heard "blogs" and "meta-commentary" in the same breath. I have to find some real references on this. In the meantime, I wanted to just point out that they aren't exclusive to each other.

This describes the story types (akin to departments in magazines) used by Civilities to drive the layout, and help the reader know what's what. This is in contrast to the all-content-is-blog-posts mentality pandemic through the blogosphere.

Michael is a great liberal, or so he prides himself. He's so agreeable because he answers his own questions to me "I can tell you're a smart guy. You know why? I see you reading your New Yorker." "You studied Latin? Of course you did, I thought so."

David Brooks, on Wednesday's All Things Considered with E.J. Dionne, remarked:

"Only 42 percent of people voted for him because they agreed with him on the issues. 46 percent said they voted for him because he's 'electable'. What they're doing when they're saying when he's electable is that one group is saying that he has certain qualities that appear to appeal to other groups of people. That's pretty suspect to go about voting, because people tend to be wrong."
"Multi-State Primaries Await Democrats"

In more than one context, I've heard starting hearing to "the blogs" as the subject of a sentence, much as one would say, "the news." "The blogs were all talking about the Paul O'Neill book this weekend," a co-worker said. Also, the phrase "support among bloggers" has starting showing up as well: 8 hits in Google, all related to the political campaign. I think I've heard it from talking heads as well, but I can't place any right now.

But what does it mean? Are these people relying on hard data, or are they just picking generalizations from thin air?

Thoughts on an otherwise exciting football game. Had I not watched the halftime show, I would have skipped writing this and been happily asleep with the Patriots win. And a party mostly cleaned up.

Sure, in the course of consumer choices, advertising exists so that consumers are reminded to stick with the product or service. Do they worry that taxpayers will somehow forget the whole convenience of getting their refunds withing 2 weeks, and go back to good ol' paper returns? Forget to file? Move to Canada?

David Brooks devotes today's New York Times column to two points: 1, that we should take at face value the conclusions by David Kay, Richard Kerr, and senate Intelligence Committee, that there was no political pressure to slant the intelligence analysts*; and 2, that the very problem with the CIA is that it should be more politicized, and less "scientific". Just the sort of hack piece you'd expect from a guy who also writes a column for the Atlantic Monthly, edits the Weekly Standard, and is a regular campaign panelist on All Things Considered and The Newshour.

This is a brief introduction to the taxonomy, or classification systems on this site.

If Super Bowl commericals have passed their peak and jumped the proverbial shark, maybe they've lost their effect completely. And if we're lucky, political campaign commercials as well.

An inspiring trend is the spontaneous guerilla marketing efforts forged by simply forwarding on emails. Now that the whole world over has gotten tired of forwarding along the chain emails which never really brough good luck, here's one that may just do that: a link to Dishonest Dubya, an interactive animation which allows everybody to hear the President in his own words.

Timothy Noah, in this Thursday's Chatterbox column for Slate, alerted readers to the Ron Suskind's initial release of The Bush Files, an online archive of the source documents for his bestselling book, The Price of Loyalty. (This is the book about the Bush White House from Paul O'Neill's point of view, sourced in part on 19,000 documents which had been released to the O'Neill, while he was still Treasury Secretary).

If only he be meeting the press more often. A linguistic foray into today's Presidential interview.

The social software and use of the Internet attracted the media, the media attracted attention, and Howard Dean rode the polls up. He peaked too early, and he was stung too many attacks; he criticized the "Washington establishment" of Democrats while soliciting endorsements from them. (In 1992, it was seemed ok for Jerry Brown, or even Ross Perot, to criticize the Washington Democrats for rolling over in the Reagan/Bush years. Now, when liberals think of this group, we like to think of them as the last people defending our nation from indulging into a dangerous cocktail of laissez-faire attitude and crony capitalism, and the preventing the extension of the state of paranoia). Dean just wasn't the best candidate. The only question left was, how did he spend $40M?

The DeanSpace team-- the ones driving the technology for the campaign-- have been asking whether anything went wrong. (I followed DeanSpace only in the last several weeks, so I have a marginal association at best). Mark Ratcliffe provides a summary of answers in his Meta-Analysis of the Dean Campaign. A few commentators, such as the pseudonymous Spengler of the Asia Times, have made an ill-informed comparison of DeanSpace developers to a "dotcom startup", and compare the "crash" to the Internet bubble. (It was roundly criticized by letters to the editor). The only thing I can add is some insight that the "social software" used by the Dean campaign wasn't always social, and sometimes it was anti-social.

1. The software has to continue to be developed, especially along the lines of fostering truly effective deliberation. The emphasis on blogs will be subsumed into more comprehensive community systems. I call it constructive media. Whatever the technique is, it has to be more thorough-sounding than just "Internet-based".
2. We'd have to start using the software for local, smaller efforts, and prove that they are effective complements to committee-meeting politics.
3. We need candidates who really believe in this stuff and practice it, and make their way from the beginning of their political career using it.

Does Howard Dean remain the patron saint of the movement? Not to me, really. It is ultimately ironic that the politician most associated with the Internet, Al Gore, did not inspire this movement after losing the most contested election in the modern age. So maybe it would be prudent to evolve the software to DemSpace for now, that would certainly please the Democratic nominee. It also might call to attention that there's no comparable "GopSpace".

It's hard to think of a world without news headlines as we know them today, but that existed before 1889, when Joseph Pulitzer stretched headlines beyond a single column and thus made them a more prominent part of the front page.

I still haven't found any blogs on politics that are must-read on a daily basis. I thought that the Columbia Journalism Review's CampaignDesk would be one, but then I read Managing Editor Steve Lovelady remark to Jack Shafer in a recent Slate dialoge: "To date, the version that I have been to skeptical readers who ask me how Campaigndesk.org is 'different from any number of blogs?' is this: 'Read my lips: IT'S EDITED!'"

Why register with a party? So that you can vote in the primary, of course. Even though the Democratic primary may appear locked up by Senator Kerry, the Massachusetts delegates to the national convention are assigned in proportion to the vote totals they get in the primary. In addition, registering with a party in your residence is used to determine the voting power for your locality in the state party convention. Here, for example, is from the bylaws of the Massachusetts State Democratic Committee on the selection of selecting state committee members:

I hereby apologize to Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean: I passed on the mistaken observation that he had improperly benefitted by steering Dean campaign ads to his agency. Fortunately for me, I only told this to Same, of my lawyers on the C-line (where all of my lawyers hang out), who never takes me seriously.

As a penance, I'll promote Trippi's new blog, Change For America, where he convincingly explains that the financial arrangement with the Dean campaign wasn't a conflict of interest. Trippi in fact has picked up where he left off, which was Dean's Blog For America, with just a small change. Trippi's makeover came as he was heralded at Monday's Digital Democracy Teach-In in San Diego at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Wired News reported that he told the sesion:

Picking a candidate is hardly done rationally (as I had feebly done earlier in trying to deduce, according to the Civilities Themes, who would be the best candidate). More often it's about rationalizing your choice once you've made it. Now obviously, Kerry is the best choice for me, for the Network/Access reason alone. After all, I know people in Massachusetts politics, and I'm more closely linked to Kerry than the rest of the candidates. Besieds, it looks like he's going to be the nominee.

Dr. Yang Jianli is a neighbor of mine in Washington Sq., but it may some time before I run into him again. Dr. Jianli, had been living in forced exile from China since his participation as an activist at Tiananman Square activist. He returned to China in April 2002 to assist labor activists, but within a week was caught and detained by the Chinese government-- as a Communist country, they have a version of the "USA Patriot Act" which allows citizens to be detained indefinitely without access to a lawyer. His wife and children remain here in Brookline. Joining them in appeals to the Chinese government are his employer, the John F. Kennedy School of Goverment at Harvard, and the United States Congress. And now me.

In the town of Brookline, the cable company had given an ultimatum to customers to convert to digital, and pay extra per month to rent the convertor boxes. This has caused a bit of rancor, as cable television is expensive enough as it is. When everyone has a digital cable box, the cable company will be able to fine-tune each viewer watches; no longer will a subscriber be able to simply hook up to a cable-ready set and watch channels. This could be a cause of deep concern. Or it could be a great opportunity, to finally introduce a real market in television by using à la carte pricing, where users can choose to only pay for the channels they want.

I've made my best effort to make them multi-browser compatible, with the help of QuirksMode, a website by PeterPaul Koch of Amsterdam. In every (web-browser) generation there comes along a website which clearly and plainly illustrates the different ways that each browser implements web standards (javascript, DOM, CSS). QuirksMode is it today, and for the foreseeable future. Koch's illustrations are simple and elegant.

Essentially, my access logs fill up with lines like "SEARCH /\x90\x02\xb1..." (for 32,000 characters), and my Apache configuration has proved very stubborn in filtering them out automatically. So it's a bit annoying. Plus I don't like 32KB getting sent to my server unsolicited, in much the way that spam is.

I've written on length about Social Network Fundraising, which is so called because it pulls people in to the network. The nature of this "pull" campaigning is that a relationship ties each person into another person closer to the campaign.

Putting aside the question of where the Bush's quote ranks with other incredulous answers in uttered in Presidential news conferences (cf. Eisenhower on whether he could give an example of a major idea of Vice President Nixon's that had been adopted in his administration: "If you can give me a week, I might think of one."), as well as how grace under pressure is perceived as a reliable indicator of leadership (Eric Rauchway considers these in Altercation today), not too mention, after three years, is this guy still embarassingly underprepared for the most important job on Earth? let's actually consider the point.

This perhaps drew winces in every living room in America. But it did inspire me to consider how a structured forum for questions & answers can offset some of the better-known deficiencies of press conferences. I wrote it up in a proposal called the Question Scoreboard. This page is a sampling board for questions for the President and the 2004 campaign.

And now I just learned (thanks to Matt Gordon) that somebody had in fact raised more money online-- a lot more money: $75,000. He is the anonymous blogger Atrios, who pointed out on his blog afternoon that Kerry HQ had not included this contest entry until too late. This might also explain why the contest results were not readily publicized.

• Friends of the Boston's Homeless Benefit at Avalon: $20
• coatcheck, 2 coats: $6 (+$1 tip)
• Two drinks, $14 (+$2 tip)
• Winning the silent auction for two tickets to Swan Lake: $140 (anything to avoid ticketmaster charges)
• Taking in Jonathan Soroff's presence for 5 minutes, for the second time in a week: cliche.

Next time we'll show up early. Jamie and I missed the dinner (which only would have set us back another $30), missed the Mayor, missed meeting any new people, and missed much of Kendrick Oliver's band playing-- they played one song in the third set. The crowd really thinned out after the dinner; I haver never seen Avalon so empty. And once again, I get that feeling of winning a fundraising contest in weak competition. It would have been nice to learn more about the organizations my money went to. I hope I have the courage to look a homeless person in the face now.

When I heard that President Bush had given an interview on Al Hurra television, I recalled that this was the Arabic satellite channel funded by you and me, the American taxpayers. So I was curious what sort of programming we were sending out this evening, or any evening. How popular the 3 month old network is has not been well reported, but early reviews derided it as poor propaganda.

Since then, the GOP has blossomed into the party of no accountability. After all, accountability would be tantamount to admitting error, and admitting error would invite investigations, and that would just get in the way of the important things a government does, like wage war and cut taxes. As Dick Cheney said, in a Saturday night prepared release defending Rumsfeld: "People ought to get off his case and let him do his job." Move on, indeed. The talking points from Republican Senators today (outside of McCain and Warner) were on that message: let's not dwell on the past; let's focus on the present, and the future. I wouldn't be surprised if we have an incumbent President who campaigns on the same theme, to forget the past.

I've read many excellent pieces in the New Yorker in the last seven years of being a subscriber-- some which come to mind. Malcolm Gladwell on the "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg" (1/11/99), Michael Specter's "The Rug Missionary" (3/6/2000), Katherine Boo's "The Marriage Cure" (8/18/2003).

I'll be doing the American Lung Association Asthma walk on the Charles River in two weeks, and I've joined team Sánchez. For a couple of simple reasons. One, my Dad has suffered from an asthma-like condition. The more direct reason is that Rep. Jeff Sánchez asked people to join his team at the recent Democratic Town Committee meeting. So I joined up, and I pledged to raise an additional hundred dollars. Sánchez's district covers part of Brookline-- not my part exactly, but just down the street, one of the places that I'm looking to buy a condo. Or just as well, Sanchez's district may yet change thanks to a court-ordered redestricting of Boston's legislative districts.

Periodicals:

• Slate (every day)
• New York Times (columnists every day, most of the Sunday Times)
• Salon (many days)
• Boston Globe (check Boston.com everyday)
• The New Yorker (subscribe weekly)
• Jewish Advocate -- Boston's Jewish newspaper (weekly)
• Brookline Tab -- weekly, 2-section community newspaper (read some each week)
• Campaign Desk -- Columbia Journalism Review campaign report (occasionally)
• Princeton Alumni Weekly (subscribe biweekly)
• Boston Phoenix (every few weeks I remember to pick up a copy)
• Atlantic Monthly (subscribe monthly)
• Hadassah -- The Women's Zionist Organization of America (monthly)
• Entertainment Weekly (some each week)
• Ha'aretz English Edition (rarely)
• The New Republic (occasionally)
• Metropolis -- design/architecture (I pick it up every now and then)
• no blogs -- only if I'm looking for something specific. None I really feel compelled to read day-to-day.
• tech trades (hardly ever I do read an occasional Tech Review)

Magazines I used to subscribe to, and may yet again:

• Economist (too thick)
• Harper's Monthly (too polemic, too esoteric)
• Scientific American (not sure why I let the subscription run out)

Radio/TV:

• The World with Lisa Mullins -- coproduction of BBC, PRI, WGBH
• NPR's All Things Considered
• MPR's Marketplace with David Brown
• MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann (some weeknights)
• WGBH's Greater Boston with Emily Rooney (some weeknights)
• If it's Sunday, it's NBC's Meet the Press

Notes

I meet Jewish people who won't listen to NPR or read the Times because they are "anti-Israel". This is absurd. Such people are missing out on excellent journalism. It may be a defensible position to not donate or not buy a subscription; I don't agree with it.

My helpers were the C-SPAN Community, where some members picked up on an erroneous statement I had writtin an article that the national public access network was funded by cable companies, but also "mandated by the government." The article in question was "When it comes to cable reform, the Cato Institute fears the free market", which I have republished with the correction. I aim to correct any falsehoods and also encourage users to post. Still, I only found out about the complaint by checking the referring URL's in my server logs. (Later that evening, someone did email me directly, but didn't mention the C-SPAN site).

"Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies...."