In the end, voters want real people with actual arguments in order to change the country. That’s why Huckabee and Obama have prevailed. They’re real. The establishments of both parties lost.

I expect the Clinton campaign to launch a vicious, sleazy attack against Obama, which will backfire, convincing more people not to vote for Hillary. Obama or Edwards could win the presidency. I doubt she can, her negatives are way too high and people want change.

Guliani is toast. I suspect his numbers collapsed on precisely the same day that his ex NYPD chief of police got indicted on multiple federal felonies.

Ron Paul polled 10%, a highly respectable number for a supposed fringe candidate. If he does better in New Hampshire, and he could, then he becomes a player.

Any previous poll numbers for New Hampshire are now null and void. New polls need to taken because of the momentum created by the Iowa upset.

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Scientists to make cows fart like kangaroos to cool the planet.

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Saudi Arabia’s most popular blogger has been detained for “interrogation” after criticizing corruption and calling for reform on his blog.

Condemnation of the arrest has been immediate and worldwide. You can track what’s happening both on Free Foaud and on his blog (now being updated by friends.)

“An injury to one is an injury to all.” Free Foaud.

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‘We told them to come out of the church, but they locked the door … So we burned them‘

(Bloggers with breaking, on-the-ground coverage)

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Uber-geek blogger Robert Scoble used a third party script to download his contact list from Facebook who then responded by deleting his account saying it violated the Terms of Use.

Now comes the hilarious part

I’m getting dozens of emails asking for my script. See, there’s a ton of people who WANT to be deleted from Facebook. So far Facebook has been denying them, saying it’s impossible to delete everything you’ve ever done from Facebook. Well, if you go over to Rodney Rumford’s blog you can see that’s totally hogwash. Facebook CAN totally delete you from Facebook IF IT WANTS!

Facebook has managed to shoot themselves in the foot again. Clearly, this is a company that does not get it - not about community, not about being responsive and listening to users, not about being open about what they’re doing - the list of their cluelessness just goes on and on.

Others do get it though.

Oh, and Jimmy Wales (the guy who founded Wikipedia) wrote me and said, about my attempts to get my own social data back: “This is the kind of thing that I would consider to be a *benefit to our customers* rather than a *threat to our business*.”

We need open standards for social networking sites. You should be able to get your info out of Facebook just as easily as they let you import contacts from GMail. After all, it’s your information, not theirs.

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Environmental Economics shows us how severe the drought is in Georgia.

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Sun. Jan. 13, 2 PM
Herbst Theater at Veterans Memorial Bldg
401 Van Ness, S.F. CA

Candidates: Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Jared Ball, Kent Mesplay

Moderated by: Cindy Sheehan, Ross Mirkarimi, Matt Gonzalez

Info

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An independent presidential run by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg now looks like a near-certainty.

For Bloomberg to achieve 270 electoral votes in November, he would essentially have to supplant the Democratic nominee. Bloomberg’s strength would come in states like Democratic-leaning California and New York, not the GOP-dominated states of the South and West. That means creating a two-way contest with the Democratic ticket essentially pushed into a position of irrelevance — either that, or an election that could be decided in the House of Representatives.

Hmm, Bloomberg would certainly pull lots of potential Republican votes too, so I’m unclear on why the Democratic candidate would be irrelevant. But with a major third party candidate, the entire dynamics of the election would change. It would no longer be the tiresome ritual of two parties mud-slinging at each other.

If you then factor in a probable Green Party run by Cynthia McKinney and quite possible third party run by Ron Paul (who has specifically not ruled it out), you get the Republican and Democratic candidates, Bloomberg who says he will run right down the middle, and highly visible third party runs on both the Right and the Left.

If this happens, it will be an election unlike any we’ve had. With five prominent candidates, triangulation and the usual political machinations would be nigh on impossible. Rather than the standard slime-the-other-side approach. Campaign strategies would become so convoluted that they’d look like the image to this post. Perhaps the thought of such convoluted tactics will inspire them to talk about the issues as a way of differentiating themselves from the other candidates. It could happen.

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U.S. at the bottom of global privacy rankings.

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