Big Brother Lance Is Watching

Sitemeter is wonderful. It gives so much information about my readers.

For example, as expected, my post yesterday concerning my hacked-up pol of a Representative, Leonard Lance, R-NJ, drew the expected visits from the US House's Information Systems. I have an IP address, but it's the same one for four different visits on my post about Lance, from computers using four different operating systems.

Two visits were touch n' go's, but the last two were for over two minutes, and one viewed two pages. I'm guessing perhaps yesterday's post, and the prior one about Lance.

Just so you know, though, a little political blog like mine publishes one post critical of a sitting US Representative and- WHAM!- the House or Senate webcrawlers are all over it.

In a way, it's a good thing. Maybe one of Lance's staffers who is smarter than he is- not too hard to imagine- will explain to the idiot that he shouldn't be favoring his crony capitalist housing campaign contributors when he will be exposed for it.

Regardless of what you think of him, Jefferson was right. Newspapers and their modern technological descendants shine bright lights on suspect, stupid behavior of our elected representatives.

In this case, perhaps Lance, dim-witted as he is, will realize his mistake and retract his signature on and support of this dumb idea of further empowering the two money-losing GSEs.

Politics In The Age of The Blog & YouTube

Thursday's Wall Street Journal carried an excellent editorial by Dan Henninger concerning the current implications of a long-ago technological competition between telephonic circuit switching, and today's prevalent data packet switching. Allowing for a little confusion and oversight of AT&T's engineers developing packet switching for their backbone network with the coming of ESS switches, he is correct in noting that we are now seeing ramifications of the eventual domination of communications technology by packet switching networks.

Henninger's example is the recent anti-Hillary YouTube video, which I discussed in this recent post, developed by Phil de Vellis. If you still need any more evidence of how useless so-called 'campaign finance' regulations are, consider this example. de Vellis said he did the clip 'in a Sunday afternoon with "some software".' So much for raising $100MM to run a multi-media campaign. Now, a major presidential candidate's supporters can develop and air free spots on YouTube for nothing. And talk about exposure!

As usual, the Feds are running behind. This week, failed Democratic presidential contender and habitual coiffed-and-sore-headed Senator John Kerry demonized Bush supporter and ambassadorial nominee, Sam Fox, for his 527 Swift Boat financial support in the 2004 campaign. Going forward, that sort of issue may be moot. Who will need that kind of support for independently-produced, supportive videos on a multitude of burgeoning, free video clip sites?

Henninger also theorizes, correctly, I believe, that voter appetites for, and consumption of, political media is becoming shorter. YouTube clips, instead of whole 30 minute programs.

How wild is it that de Vellis uses a real "1984"-styled Orwellian video clip, modeled on the infamous Apple Superbowl ad, as a "really real" political statement today? Art/life/art/life....

Can you even tell anymore which is the "art," and which is the "life?" The de Vellis ad really smacks Hillary where it hurts- her stuffed-shirt, overbearing, arrogance and put-on attitude of actually caring what anyone else thinks. Maybe voters have finally caught up with the pols.