The Web on the Candidates

• Afraid that the Hillary Clinton campaign is “trying to start some serious racialist ish,” Liberal funnyman Baratunde Thurston has started the Clinton Attacks Obama wiki. “I’ve seen the strong black community reaction to what looks like a pattern of race-themed attacks against Obama by Bill, Hillary and other members of her campaign. As folks have questioned the number and validity of these incidents, I thought I’d put together a place to keep track of them,” Thurston writes on the wiki’s front page. So far there are 16 documented incidents. (Also see Josh Marshall’s post on whether or not the Clintons are using surrogates to attack Obama with racially-charged language and Sam Stein on an Obama memo alleging the Clinton campaign playing the race card.)

• Sheesh. The New Republic’s James Kirchik recently tracked down Ron Paul’s notorious newsletters from before his presidential run. Although Paul was always given the byline, it was often other writers who were tasked to outlined his libertarian politics. Unfortunately Kirchik finds some serious displays of nasty racist and homophobic streak in those newsletters. For the time-starved, Netscape founder (!) Marc Andreesson read through the report and provided a list of Ron Paul’s greatest hits. A few doozies: “Opinion polls consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions…”; “[Martin Luther King was] the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration”; “Order was only restored in LA [after the 1992 riots] when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began…”. Paul has said that, since others wrote these things without his knowledge, he isn’t responsible for these and other quotes. But they appeared in a newsletter bearing his name and with his byline. If that isn’t tacit approval, we don’t know what is. Also, it’s nice to see Andreessen blogging in such a politically engaged way!

• Just in time for a new session in Congress, OpenCongress — a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation — has launched My OpenCongress. The newly personalized site helps you track specific bills, Members of Congress, or issues by building a profile showing up-to-date Congressional info. Of course, it also includes a social networking function so you can view your friends tracked items and participate on discussion boards. One of my favorite bits is a kind of Amazon.com for Congress that lets voters rate bills, Senators, and Representatives. It’s an elegantly designed site that should make it much easier for voters to track byzantine legislative processes. (techPresident’s Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.)

• That crazy Why Tuesday prankster Jacob Soboroff, fresh off of his horse-drawn carriage, had a chat via webcam with Lee Brenner, director of MySpace Impact. They talk about the role of new media in the election cycle and MySpace’s impressive efforts in this cycle. Unfortunately, the audio’s pretty bad, but hang in there.

• A while back we wrote about the use of online video by medical marijuana advocates, focusing on on the work of the Granite Staters for Medical Marijuana. A group of political comedians have noticed too, and posted a video on Current that tries to be at once funny and political, calling attention to Mitt Romney’s particularly dismissive behavior around the issue. It comes of as an improv group trying to do political humor, and isn’t always that funny, but it’s great that they’ve connected to the project and called Mitt out.

The Candidates on the Web

• The Huffington Post’s Kirsten Anderson reports that a request for a recount of New Hampshire primary votes, coming in part from Dennis Kucinich, has been granted. The issue revolves around a disparity between hand-counted votes and those counted by optical scanners. While there may in fact be an issue here, the importance of New Hampshire — which is all about national influence, not number of delegates — can’t be reversed.

In Case You Missed It…

Just before last week’s ABC/Facebook debate, Hillary Clinton asked her supporters to submit their questions on her website, making an explicit appeal to young voters in the face of Obama’s Iowa win. Now Hillary’s answered those questions in a new video that provides a semi-cozy yet distanced view of the candidate. Kind of like her web campaign.

Amidst all of the head-scratching — or self-flagellating, as I like to call it — following pollsters’ erroneous predictions in New Hampshire, Yahoo! gives a sign that the web may have had it right all along.

Barack Obama | Hillary Clinton | medical marijuana | Mitt Romney | MySpace | OpenCongress | Ron Paul | Why Tuesday
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