This is Web 2.0000001

I'm behind in the reading for this week due to moving to a new apartment, but from what I've read thus far I've really enjoyed reading this book. I certainly intend to retroactively read the rest of the book as I'm certainly captivated. Perhaps the section that I have found the most interesting is that of the Pack v. the Herd.

I wrote a comparative analysis paper this past summer on the cyberterrorism strategies of the United States and England. I argued the point that both countries needed to mobilize their citizenry to fight the war on terror (online and offline). During the 7/7 UK train bombings a passenger's camera phone became the first private image ever licensed by the Associated Press. The government asked all citizens to provide these types of images and videos too. Instead of asking people to recount their memories of a tramatic experience, which may be skewed by false cognition, the images are concrete and give additional angles that the CCTV network were unable to provide to law inforcement. My other thought about the online citizen army related to the white hats. If private citizens saturate the Internet with fake radical Islamic websites than those sites which are run by terrorists would be harder to find and lose some of their value. Before Napster was deemed an illegal tool and pulled off the market by the Supreme Court the record companies began to publish fake music MP3s with varying file names. Their theory was that if for every 1 illegal MP3 of a song that is available by a user if the record companies post 20 MP3s under the filename of a song in their library but with only dead air, then users will become frustrated with Napster and stop using their service.

About beucracries v. small group, I started to think about the FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina. As basic of a necessity of sending bottles of water to the Houston Astrodome, where the refugees were being sent, the government took days...but the Target Corporation took hours. Both are beucracies but a private sector institution was able to respond quicker because of reduced layers of beucracy and a supplychain in place to make the shipments possible. Citizens, like those on 9/11 in the NYC waterways were able to mobilize just as easy. In "The Tipping Point" Malcom Gladwell spoke about the power of small groups too. I am starting to see a trend here...I like trends.

So, it's getting late and I'm having trouble following the Ohio democratic debate between Obama and Clinton and write this so I closing on the "I like trends" remark.

Chris Wallace just made an interesting comment on his show that the McCain camp responded to the New York Times article about the senators alleged favors given to a telecom lobbyist nine years ago by sending out an email to their contact list as part of a fundraising campaign. The campaign was successful and brought in the most revenue in a single day.

All week I have been hearing about how the unintended consequences of the liberal NYT's article could be to energize the conservative base to get behind McCain. I don't know the demographics of the donations -- whether they were from existing backers or new supporters -- but that comment alone explains what is wrong with our political system:

1) why would an externality change the opinion of a conservative to back a liberal-republican senator. As an American we should vote for the individual who we believe best represents our views and policy opinions. This whole thing reminds me of the kid's rhyme, "I'm rubber, you're glue, what you say to me, sticks to you." It's all media hype and a PR fight.

2) why donate money to a candidate that you don't support. Rush Lambaugh and Anne Coulter have been saying for months that they'd rather vote for Hilary than McCain but this past week they both through support behind McCain. WHY!?!? Just because a newspaper wrote an article that hinted something improper happened? This again is another reason why I strongly believe in public funding of campaigns.

Speaking of campaign finance reform, I was ELATED to see Lawrence Lessig announce that he is considering running for Tom Lantos' vacant seat in the House. I'm a big fan of Lessig. If he decideds to run, he will be a great addition to the House. Since I don't believe in donating money to candidates (like Lessig) but I do fully support throwing maven-support behind candidates I like, I joined the Facebook group to encourage Lessig to run. I sent it around to a few friends who I knew would be interested and got them to sign-up too (I'm a connector...woohoo!).

Well I was all over the map in this post. And to continue the random comments, I enjoyed class this past week. The guest speaker was dynamic and knew his stuff. The "Army of Davids" book is pretty good but I'm real far behind cause I'm moving this week to a new apartment. And I actually enjoyed watching the Texas democratic debates this past week. Obama is a funny guy calling Clinton's tactics about the plagerism "political silly season."

Fin.

Labels: Barack Obama, John McCain, Lawrence Lessig, New York Times

CNN has projected that Barack Obama will win Wisconsin today. This will be the ninth straight state for the Illinois Senator, and according to CNN's projections its by a pretty wide margin. I've been farely preoccupied with moving and writing a paper on net neutrality for my other class, but I did hear that Hillary pulled out of the state awhile ago. On Meet the Press and Chris Matthews this past Sunday, the pundits were discussing how Clinton's entire strategy was based on her being the presumptive nominee after Super Tuesday. So now she's running low on money and trying to catch up quick to Obama's momentum.

McCain also seems to be seperating himself further from the Incredible Huck, but my money is still on the fact that he holds on until Texas (since he's polling close to McCain there).

Onto Internet stuff...through my commitment to MyBarackObama.com, I was asked to volunteer for Obama in Ohio. Unfortunately it is not a good time for me as my stress level with moving, papers, work, and awaiting confirmation of being accepted to two programs so I can go to Romania and Israel on educational/ambassador misions. I've enjoyed my participating in that network and feel a ROI in volunteering my time to it, but I am still unsold with Change.org. I still receive their weekly emails but they're asking me to get involved in campaigns which I am not interested. What's the point if I sign up for an organization, fill out a personal information profile, and they send me information at random.

Labels: Barack Obama, hillary clinton, John McCain, network neutrality

Two events of this week have stuck out for me. The first -- and most important -- was that I performed my civic duty and voted in the Washington, DC, primary. It was interesting getting to the pools and seeing more enthusiasm (by number of voters) than I've ever seen before in DC. The lines were stretched out the door 15 minutes after the polling location opened. After the numbers came in, it was obvious that I wasn't the only Obama supporter in the Washington, DC, metro area. Wow...I couldn't have imagined things to have gone better!

The second memorable activity this week was that Rep. Ron Paul visited Georgetown to speak to the student body. I organized an online advocacy effort to sway Prof. Rosenblatt from letting us out early. It worked and a few of us went to the event to hear Paul's comments. The audience included passionate Paul supporters and a mix of people that were just interested in hearing his radical remarks. He def. is a good orrator but after 20 minutes, he started to get a little too extreme for the liberal audience. I think the point he lost us was when he started to say that the U.S. should not have been involved in WWI. More info on his presentation can be found at http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=31291.

This week I was also invited to go to Ohio to be a volunteer for Obama. I really want to go but their primary is right after I am moving into a new apartment. Maybe I'll go to another state or help out in the general election (when my life will be a little less hectic).

Class was also good this week. Besides the fact that I was successful in my advocacy campaign, we had a spirited and interactive discussion about the reading. I certainly hope that the rest of the class will stay in that format.

Work was a whirlwind too this week. I launched a new homepage for the association's website, which includes some localization of content (a first for us). I've still got 300 other projects on my plate but as next week is our Board meeting and I'm not going, I should be able to get through a lot of it.

This weekend is going to be a three-dayer due to observance of Presidents Day. I'll be spending a lot of it working on a net neutrality paper, but I'm def looking forward to some R&R; family time; and preparation for my move at the end of the month.

Labels: Barack Obama, internet advocacy, ron paul

Hey, it's a dead horse! Anybody want to beat it? The authors of "Constinuent Relationship Management: The New Little Black Book of Politics" sure want to give it a couple more whacks.

Well obviously with that introduction, you can imagine that I felt that the book was say 60-80 pages too long in getting their message across that CRMs and integration are a good thing; but my second rant is that the IPDI seriously needs to find a better executive editor. Frankly, I know this blog has typos galore all over it, but I'm writing in a stream of consciousness. If I released a publication with as many typographical errors as was in this little black book at my job, I'd get my litle pink slip and shown the door after being introduced to a dictionary. Same could be said about handing in an academic paper with such gems as "Next, allow your stalwart supporters to delcare themselves the as captains...(pg. 87)" I'd be given a package of crayola crayons (only the pack of six though) and told to draw my own diploma because one is not coming to me by any acredited university any time soon.

So this is what I learned and what was beaten into my head. CRMs are good. Integration is ideal. 100% buy-in from staff is important. Think of your users as constinuents and not customers (difference between the two...blah blah blah). Open Source applications are available. Their is no excuse not to run a CRM. Drupal rocks. My eyes won't bleed if I read 108 pages of redudant text.

In today's Information Age, it is scary to think that an organization can try to get away without a data plan. I admit, I've worked for and with organizations that do not have a long term strategy to data and others who lack the expertise to extrapolate raw data and make it into usable information, but no matter what type of organization you are...everything in 2008 consists of data data data and data.

For a novice or an individual without any professional experience, I could imagine that 70 pages or so of the IPDI study would of been relevant. Unfortunately, I am not that novice. I use a sophisticated database management program every day in my association; I help to teach staff how to use it effectively; and I was part of a development team that built a custom CRM system on top of it to improve the GUI. I can testify that the authors were correct in stressing the importance but they missed several important factors. Let me list them in order of importance:

1) The Chain Principle: Any chain is only as strong as its weakest link. When a robust CRM system is your life-blood of an organization you can live or die by one individual's gross incompetence.

2) The O'Shit Principle: Due to that weakest link it is incredibly important that beyond having an individual or team that audits the data regularly, their is a system in place to back-up the data for retrieaval. Ideally that back-up should be in a third party site in-case of any physical damage to the server that it sits on (e.g. if a fire burned down your office and your server and computers all went up in flames then "o' shit...you're out of data" so definettely back-up your data at least daily and have the duplicates stored away from the rest of your system somewhere.

3) The People Factor: Any system should be user friendly but sometimes a critical part of your staff may be computer illiterate or have his/her own way of doing things out of tradition. Perhaps its a senior executive or a sales person that can't understand how to do something and is embarassed to ask for assistance. Other times it can just be a bandwidth issue where if Joe Staffer had 4 meetings with clients but only has enough time to add 2 of the records than the other 2 technically didn't happen. Like the bar code example for door-to-door canvasers, the system should be as user-friendly and automated as possible but not system will ever be perfect because the technology is useless without human interaction at some point and we're prone to make human error somewhere in the process.

I'm still highly sleep deprived so that's all I will say about the study. Getting up at 6 AM to perform your civic duties to vote + working a stressful marathon day = a sleepy graduate student.

Tonight I launched a petition to persuade Professor Rosenblatt to let us leave class early on Wednesday, February 13, so for those of us interested we can go to a lecture by Ron Paul. My strategy will be three fold to get out the vote:

1) Monday, February 11: I sent a blanket email to to my constinuents. My primary target were my peers in CCTP 697, who are directly affected by the conflict. My secondary audience were the Internet Politics students in our sister-class at American University.

2) Monday, February 11 - Wednesday, February 13: Using secondary networked communication tools, I will try to convince three of my friends to take action. First, I called Kristin Smith to ask her to support the cause through a direct one-to-one conversation. Secondly, I went onto Facebook and sent messages to Kristin, Sean, and Jenna. Since timeliness of action will be critical for this campaign to work, trying to reach these "influentials" will be critical for my campaign. I targeted these three people as I have prior relationships with all three and I know that they can bring in 1-2 more votes each.

3) Wednesday, February 13: I will bring a laptop into class on Wednesday and set up a sign outside of the class before it starts to canvas students who have not taken action yet. I will create a sign and have hard copies of my petition to hand out.

I am not sure but I also think that I have a friend in the AU class. If so, I will try to reach her offline to make her into a "connector" so I can get access to the rest of the AU students.

I set a goal of ten students, which will be a consensus. Our ask isn't very large, so I am confident that with support we can get Professor Rosenblatt to cut the class short. Lastly, I also provided an incentive for the constinuents to take action as I offered to buy the first pitcher of beer at The Tombs for anyone interested in grabbing a drink after the Ron Paul event.

In-case you missed my email or received this in your RSS feed first, please take action to request that class ends 15 minutes early on Wednesday at:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petition/819781831

Stay tuned, to hear more about the success of this campaign later in the week and my comments about the Ron Paul event!

Labels: internet advocacy, ron paul

Yesterday's Demoratic Presidential primaries and caucuses focused on several smaller states including Nebraska, Louisiana, and Washington State. The Republicans also had a three state focus, but instead of Nebraska they had the Kansas Caucus.

I was out last night celebrating my friend Kelly's 24th birthday so I couldn't track in real-time how the races were going. On the Democratic side I had heard all week that the pundits expected Barack Obama to take all three states, but after New Hampshire --- who can believe those guys!?! Yet although I was disconnected from those pundits on CNN, NBC, and MSNBC last night, I didn't need traditional media to keep me informed because I received an email on my BlackBerry from Barack Obama's campaign in the late evening informing me of the victories. I had a few margaritas at that point and didn't feel like reading the whole message but was glad to get the notice.

I visited CNN.com this morning to learn more about the three races. WOW! I figured that Obama was going to be strong in these states but for him to win by a margin of more than 2:1 in two of the three races, I was amazed. Now that's momentum moving into the Potomac Primaries this week. I'm still cautiously optimistic about the democratic race not having a clear nominee going into the convention but with the money Obama continues to raise and his ability to win over all these small states; he should be in a much better position than Hillary "the big-state" Clinton.

On the Republican side, after Romney's dropping out of the race earlier in the week, Huckabee got a boost and took two of the three states (also by a large margin). For an outsider candidate, the Incredible Huck keeps on showing promise as being a viable candidate for POTUS or VP.

After the race is over, I'd be really curious to learn how much "The Colbert Bump" helped Huckabee. For a fake pundit, Colbert has been a Maven and a Connector. His plugging of Huckabee and running joke about being his VP has given Huck a regular forum to the credible youth vote. The day that Rommey dropped out, Huckabee made an appearance on "The Colbert Report" and played air hockey with the host where Texas was the puck. Huckabee discussed how he feels he can win Texas and his personality shined through the screen. Like his appearance on Leno playing the guitar with Kevin Eubanks and the Tonight Show band, his charisma and vitality is clear and as a strategy helps him with the Republican voters who like McCain but are worried about his age and health. Huckabee lost 40 lbs and talks about it and the health issues of average Americans. He's relatively young (I hate saying youth is equal to inexperience because that's age-ism) but he is less experienced than McCain, but maybe that's a good thing when the buzz word for this race is "change."

I certainly don't agree with many/most of Huckabee's policy positions, but I like his consumption tax plan. It's weird though, for a die-hard conservative that's social positions are sooooo unbelievably on the other side of scale than me, I can't stop liking him because of his charisma. As a fairly educated voter with the understanding of his policy, if he can win me over with his personality then he can win over a lot of the Midwest and South (as shown this weekend).

...bring on the Potomac Primary!

Labels: Barack Obama, hillary clinton, John McCain, Mike Huckabee

So apparently all of this time my RSS feed hasn't been working so my beautifully crafted rants against idealism have been unread....and that is why this is "Web 2.0000001" aka my IQ.

For the last couple of weeks I have been engaged in three social networks relating to my interests in progressive politics and specific social causes. I found mixed results using Facebook, Change, and myBarackObama based on the scale of the network and how they are designed/used.

I am no novice when it comes to using social networks. I had been an active Facebook and MySpace for the last couple years, but I've only used it to communicate with friends and acquitances. Prior to this academic initiative, I had used Facebook to research online politics but relied more heavily on the candidates' official websites for policy positions and background.

In order of joining, I signed up for Facebook's 1,000,000 Strong for Obama group; three courses on Change.org; and lastly began blogging on my.BarackObama.com.

Facebook
I wasn't impressed with Facebook as a tool for politics. The 1,000,000 strong campaign was to me the same effort of a Web 1.0 static site. The page pointed people to official Barack Obama webpages and pointed people to take action. Their was nothing inherently dynamic about the group, but the one element that I noticed was effective was the news feed. After joining the Obama group, Facebook dynamically added my action to the news feed of all of my 200+ friends. Whether it was directly a ripple from my action, I noticed several of my friends also join the network within 24-48 hours from me. I didn't ask them if it was serenpedity, but I did receive in my news feed their action. If it was directly because of my action, this has nothing to do with the group's administrators but more-so on my stepping into a "Connector" role and Facebook's overall archetecture.

Change.org
Change.org has been a huge waste of time in my opinion. I was active in posting comments, taking action alerts, and writing commentary but nobody responded and I didn't feel like I was engaging in active groups (although the system showed it active). Instead it was more like I was posting to a bulletin board that may or may not have been read. To compare this to my experience with Facebook, I would assume that the smaller scale of Change impacted the result. I hadn't built a community of friends on Change and was low on the todum pole. But I am also skeptical that they're running a sound ship. They were sending me regularly emails, but to take action on campaigns that were irrelovent to the interests that I originally signed up for. I lost confidence in their brand and don't intend to be as active as I was when I first started off.

My.BarackObama.com
Obama's official campaign site was the most innovative and dynamic. I first decided to join the network through a plug on Facebook. It didn't cause my instantanous action, but after some thought -- and my lost confidence in Change -- I signed up. They're success is two-fold in my minds-eye. First, they're the only successful push-marketing group. I received numerous messages from Barack, Michelle, volunteers, and others. Each message was relevant, but prior to Super Duper Tuesday; they did over-do it and send me multiple messages in one day. The messages always had an ask, they were brief, and also were informative. The other two networks were passive and relied on pull (except for the news feed). The second thing that I felt really interesting was my.barackobama.com's ranking of activists. They gave points for every action and compared my contributions with the tens of thousands of others on the network. This reminds me of th Wikipedia and Amazon.com phenomenon of energizing an army of authors and editors to work for free. Each want recognition and to build up their personal brand. So too is Obama's desire with this effort. I get nothing in return besides a pat-on-the-back from a website and a listing in a CRM database. But as I moved up from 80,000th to 50,000th best activist I was drawn to do more to get down to 30,000th. This incentivizes the user to stay active and keeps the supportor in the Obama camp.

So...I'm really tired and am not sure that anything I wrote is going to be coherent, but as the Potomac Primary as nearing, I thought it appropriate to discuss how I'm going to be refocusing my efforts to advance Obama's campaign through blogging on his site and linking to it from other mediums.

Labels: Barack Obama, change.org, facebook

MoveOn's "50 Ways to Love Your Country," is the prime example of how the whole is larger than each individual's parts (or whatever that saying is supposed to be.) The book tells, in a concise abstract, the stories of fifty Americans who have contributed to an advocacy effort in some way-shape-or-form. Whether it be from saving wolves in their natural habitate from hunters to assisting in a gubernatorial campaign in Iowa from a long-short candidate...these individuals volunteered their time for change.

As interesting and uplifting as many of these stories are, my innate skepticism kept on peaking over my shoulder like the dark part of your consciousness when you know you really shoulnd't do something (but you want to anyway). I'm certainly not a scorned American wallowing in my lack of voice (i.e. - I am a Washington, DC, resident so I have less Congressional rights than Guam) but I am certainly not an idealist either who believes that sending an e-mail to president@whitehouse.gov will go anywhere besides the nether-realms of a darkhole email that will certainly not even be backed up. I manage the grassroots for the trade association that I work for and know that nine times out of ten (on a good day) any e-mail sent via my Capwiz service will be printed and left in a draw or read by an undergraduate intern inbetween he/she answers phones or swings a bat in one the Congrsesional softball leagues.

But even so we do not stop sending the message. We have learned, like the whole of the sum of its parts, that we need to follow-up with key Members and bring those printed letters to the office as a leave-behind during a constinuent meeting. And even as a relatively large trade association we have our limitations with bandwidth, so I don't think its skepticism but honesty that makes me believe that for every successul wolf campaign their are 400 dolphin campaigns that go unnoticed. Same as for every Daily Kos blog their are 800 www.jasonlangsner.com/blog "This is Web 2.0000001s."

The Internet has overly saturated Congrssional offices with turfroots messaging that real grassroots and real problems are lost between the fake threads of sod. For instance, I am one of the rare Americans who not just can name my U.S. Congressional Member but has taken the time to visit and write him on numerous occastions (note --- I do not claim Delagate Holmes as my representation but still utilize the services of Rep. Rush Holt from New Jersey, where I used to live). Rep. Holt is a man of great character and he represents my interests (even though I am legally not a constinuent...but my parents and brother are and I certainly control a great deal of opinion power in swaying their vote). Yet when I write a heart-felt email to Rep. Holt that deals with the pressing issues of U.S. competitiveness and education, the response takes months to reach my ex-Jersey home. I am thankful that it works its way up to the Member and am glad that he hand writes a note on it to show that he actually read it, but I do see the staffers initials in the footer. I agree with the book that sometimes (often times) getting the key staffers ear is just as important -- if not more important -- than speaking directly with the Member, but the 21 year old George Washington Poli-Sci grad didn't receive my or my parents vote and how can I guarentee that with all of the other important things facing the Member, that my message will get to him in the way that I communicated. Anyone remember the "telephone game" that you used to play in elementary school?

I can't blame the staffer or the Member. I know they both want to do more. That is why they became a public servant. They have altruism in mind and give up much more money in the private sector to hear from me and my Dear Aunt Sally, but long gone are the days when Andrew Jackson would open up the doors to the White House to hear from any American citizen with a qualm or opinion. Enter the days of the K Street Project and Internet saturation. I agree with Speaker Pelosi's essay about how MoveOn has helped energize people about democracy, but can the current system obsorb MoveOn and other online advocacy efforts? My thoughts are no if those messages (whether they're form letters or not) are disgarded in the circular filing cabinet.

We need a new, technological, government. We need U.S. Congress 2.0 which doesn't handle business the old way but leverages technology to do the job better, faster, quicker, and smarter. For instance, even though the House has electronic voting those silly laggards across the street in the Senate still hold onto tradition and procedure. Maybe that should be MoveOn's next major campaign. We moved on from one Clinton's infidelities in office and after this Super Duper Tuesday, could possibly get another Clinton closer to taking the healm of the ship. She's for modernization, but so is Barack. Maybe the Internet Gods should start a letter writing campaign to tell the Congress to modernize...but will anyone read it?

Labels: Congress, Government Modernization, MoveOn.org, U.S. Politics

As I mentioned yesterday (in my last rant), I read "Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics" this past week. I unfortunately did not have the opportunity to read it prior to Wednesday's class, when we were going to be discussing it, because of the fractured onlive v offline world of half.com. In a virtual world where instantaneous gratification with e-commerce has become the norm -- per my shopping habits -- the delima of needing to wait two weeks for the USPS to deliver a tangible good purchased online when all I really need is a soft-copy frightens me. Ode to the music industry parable. But, back to my book review.

I echo the points made in class about the book. Beyond it's over-arching bias that Dean is/was/still could be the savior of the Democratic Party and/or the World, the book had some interesting gems. First, I was surprised to learn that Howard Dean wasn't the mastermind of the '04 Internet strategy that brought the Vermont governor to nationally recognizable status and a formidable opponent to Kerry and the other Democratic hopefuls. I found some elements of the book to be mildly inconsistent to that point and to fact:

1) The glaringly incorrect references to "Action Alerts" being a phenomen of 2004 were hard to look past. I was using them in my trade association, through a license agreement with an online advoacy group for years preceeding 2004, and as discussed on Wednesday, Capitol Advantage had been offering that service since 1996. I could agree that that in '04, the practice of using email action alerts for grassroots broke past the tipping point and reached a critical mass, but that wasn't their arguement. They said it was a new technology.

2) The introduction mentioned that Dean could hardly operate e-mail when the campaign kicked off but in the interview with him and subsequent chapters it was unclear about who masterminded the plan. Obviously Joe Trippi should and is given credit for leveraging Meetup and for the fundraising success, but they also credit dumb luck as a factor. That was my arguement while reading "The Tipping Point" last week; that sometimes all of the stars need to align for their to be a credible "hope" for a plan like Dean/Trippi/JoeInternetUser's to work.

While reading the book, I couldn't help to also draw the comparison of Dean to Mike Huckabee. Obviously these two politicians views on issues are on polar opposite sides of the liberal/conservative litmus test scale but their characters and personas are quite similar. Both candidates peaked early and the traditional and new media outlets overly hyped them up as spoilers or underdogs that could take the whole she-bang. But the ol' rabbit vs the turtle metaphor didn't pan out for Dean and it doesn't look like it is going to for Huckabee either. But the turtle-y (can i use that as an adjective???) wisdom of both and both of their success has catipulted both from small state governorship obscurity to major party powers.

Dean became Chair of the DNC after the race. Yes, he was Chair of the National Governors Association but that didn't get him the job...his charisma and success in '04 landed him the position. Huckabee too looks primed to be a contendor for McCain's vice-president. Huck's conservative base and their mutual public respect for each other will certainly make it a strong ticket in '08. And I can't see McCain picking Guilini (too polarizing and doesn't win McCain any states he couldn't pull on his own) or Leiberman (I think he's still a democrat and wasn't he the VP-nominee for Gore a few years back...I can see that tearing him apart in the debates). So it's back to the guitar playing, constitution changing, disbanding the IRS preaching, former baptist minister from Hope, Arkansas. It's a strong ticket that would certainly give Clinton problems and for those ignorant Americans who would have issues voting for a minority (woman or African-American) the McCain/Huckabee ticket certainly appeals to their demographic.

All could be told in two days as Super Duper Tuesday unravels the clear leader for the Republicans. I don't think much will change with the Democratic side. I'm pretty certain it's going to to the DNC convention...and that brings us back to Dean (the savior of the party)!

Labels: Barack Obama, hillary clinton, howard dean, John McCain, Mike Huckabee

I just wrote a very thought provoking blog post about all of the interesting activities that took place this week but blogger crapped out on me, so instead of re-writing the whole thing...I'm bulleting like woah!

- went to a book reading by Garrett Graff on Howard Dean's 2004 campaign and how globalization should be impacting the presidential candidates' views;

- created a blog on my.bararckobama.com to discuss that event and to spout out my crazy ramblings about my feelings about public financing for campaigns. That blog post can be found at:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/jasonlangsner/CGBgW

which includes my thoughts about how Obama's January online fundraising totals supersceded that of the entire Dean campaign;

- joined a Corporate Social Responsibility club at Georgetown and may create and chair a committee that focuses on promoting Green and Clean Technologies;

- sent in my U.S. National Security Education Program Boren fellowship application so I can live, work, and study in Israel in 2009;

- learned about and began to apply for a Youth Summit in Romania which will be held in conjunction with a NATO Summit in April; and

- last but not least, read "Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope" but since it wasn't shipped to me until after class I was not able to participate in that part of the class discussion...grrr to the Internet and USPS gods that took 2 weeks to send my book on half.com.

That's what I can remember from my original post...I promise it was much more profound than this =)

Labels: Barack Obama, campaign financing, howard dean