techPresident has created a wiki devoted to information about staff members of the ‘08 campaign. I for one love the idea and have already contributed to it. (I will contribute more throughout).

Go check it out and contribute!

This is just random opinion but if we keep raising the debt ceiling every couple of years why in the world do we have a ceiling at all? We should at least change it from the debt “ceiling” to the debt “space”, as in limitless void. Ceiling implies there will come a point at which we stop being able to grow without a force pushing back.

Senate 2008 Guru points to some evidence that things aren’t looking good for Republican Senators in 2008.

Reports on Minnesota, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Kentucky, Illinois.

You always want to meet expectations. Time and again I see it with stocks. Company is doing well, they make good products, have a nice market share, everyone is talking about how great they are doing, they give a big prediction about how well they will do in the next quarter. Then the end of the quarter comes and they don’t meet expectations, company’s stock tanks. Doesn’t matter what they’ve done, doesn’t matter what they will do, it just matters they didn’t meet their goal.

Meanwhile another company that has bad products, bad market share, bad press, bad everything makes a low prediction, they do better than expected, their stock rises. This is the expectations game and it works the same in politics.

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The NY Times Caucus Blog is reporting that Republican candidates are getting an interesting question “Is the federal government working on a NAFTA superhighway extending from Mexico to Canada?

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From the Chicago Tribune:

“YouTube is a website that allows kids to network with one another and make friends and contact each other,” Romney explained. “YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their web site. They had 29,000.”

Actually, YouTube is the popular site that allows Internet users to upload and watch a variety of videos. The web site, which is owned by search-engine behemoth Google, also was a co-sponsor of the Democratic presidential debate held on Monday night.

The web site MySpace is the one to which Romney actually was referring. MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., said this week it had found 29,000 registered sex offenders who had submitted profiles to its site and removed them.

Either way the story is kind of odd considering the campaign has both a MySpace page & a YouTube channel.

OK as I noted in the last post a new Iowa poll and some people starting to ask questions are raising the question if this whole Clinton vs. Obama thing is any good for Democrats. Here is my brief summary/thoughts.

1) I have continually mentioned the very massive flaw of Barack Obama’s campaign. Namely putting the candidate up on a moral pedestal with all this “hope” and “change” and “I am not a bad person who will go around attacking people, taking money or working inside the system” maneuvering. The problem is not one person can actually live that way.

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That is what is being reported in Guardian Unlimited which cites a fresh CNN poll in Iowa which showed Senator Hillary Clinton & Senator Barack Obama both dropping 6 percentage point and into second and third places respectively.

I apologize if you came here earlier today and couldn’t get to the site. For some reason I have yet to learn about my Web host was down for seven hours today making this place basically vanish.

I rely on traffic being able to build over time and having this place up and running so it was a major blow to continually come here and see nothing up.

Kathleen Parker writing in the IndyStar says no:

YouTube invites silliness, which is part of its appeal, but inviting so-called “ordinary Americans” to film themselves posing questions to presidential candidates does not advance democracy, no matter how much hoopla we manufacture.

What anybody can do, anybody can do. Anyone can make a goofy video and ask a goofy question, but the man or woman intending to lead the free world should resist dignifying the charade.

Joe Biden came close to showing his disdain for this insult to American intelligence, such as it is, when a Michigan fellow asked whether he and his Second Amendment buddies could be sure their “babies” would be safe. He then cradled his own baby, a military-grade automatic weapon.

Biden said he wasn’t sure the fellow was “mentally qualified to own that gun.”
Even if the candidates were irritated by this faux show of democratic connectivity, they had no choice but to participate. If you refuse to play with the YouTubies, you risk being viewed as elitist and out of touch with Tha Peepul.

I haven’t been a big supporter of the YouTube style debate and after seeing it I believe most of my concerns were justified and on target. At the end of the day I would much rather see them ask questions to the public on YouTube etc. for every debate and then toss a few in.

At the end of the day the debates themselves are flawed this early on (and later too) because the entire format is flawed. Too many people, too little time for answers, too long as a whole and little if anything in substance with the questions, the answers etc.

The user submitted questions with people dressing up in characters, singing songs, wasting time doesn’t help it only adds to those flaws.