Liberal bloggers are divided about Hillary Clinton's aggressive campaign tactics; maybe Peter Daou is finding success at Daily Kos after all; in a cosmic quest for accurate predictions, Huffpostrology combines polling data and astrology; new widgets from MAPLight let voters track congressional fundraising; Jeff Jarvis catches up with British Conservative leader David Cameron; and Dennis Kucinich drops out.

As Congress considers again a new FISA update, bloggers urge Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to head back to Washington for the vote; a CREDO campaign to get voters to email Obama and Clinton about the vote allegedly causes Obama's email server to crash; new charts from Matthew Hurst show online buzz for the Republicans and Democrats; more Fred Thompson post-mortems, and a question about why he failed to use the web as promised; EveryBlock is a great new site that helps you find info about your city block; Clinton Internet Director Peter Daou tries out some spin on DailyKos, gets walloped; and two sites compare the candidates' stances on tech and science issues.

A new site does a great job of illustrating the candidates' health care positions; progressive liveblogging during the Michigan primary; the Caucus Calculator is updated for Nevada; why aren't the Republicans using the web to get out the vote in Michigan?; John Edwards once again teams up with Eventful; Dennis Kucinich successfully sues MSNBC, will attend the Nevada debate; and a new report says that most Congressional website are plain awful.

Some writers forget that Ron Paul is in fact (partly) responsible for his own fundraising numbers; Huckabee and Kucinich try out their own money bomb schemes; MayorTV inserts urban issues into the race; new websites seek to attract the millenials; the TPM Book Club features former Deaniacs; Steven Levy thinks Hot or Not may have some lessons for electoral voting; and John Edwards releases a "preview" of his upcoming election.

Harry Shearer moderates the hysterical silent debate; MySpace and MTV kick off their presidential forum series with John Edwards next week; Marc Cooper heads the Off the Bus team; Bloomberg for Prez supporters organize on Facebook; Newt shows up in Second Life; Hillary Clinton hosts an "interactive" webcast that's not quite interactive; and Dennis Kucinich sports a new website, bringing him firmly in step with the 21st century.

The Web on the Candidates

A new web site, health08.org, is billing itself as a "hub for information about health care and the presidential campaign" and it truly is. Started by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the site offers an impressive amount of information about how health care is impacting the election, and details the candidates' stances on the issue. In addition to links to videos, campaign events, polls, and analysis of health care as an election-year issue, the site also includes a page for every Democratic and Republican candidate, with links to their sites' sections on health care, relevant videos, press releases, and news articles. It's refreshing to see a substantive site so dedicated to a single issue; health care is shaping up to be the dominant domestic issue this year, and health08 is looking like voters' most essential resource.

The Candidates on the Web

Rudy finally steps up to the plate: Rudy Giuliani, who's online presence has been pretty lackluster thus far, is actually using the web to -- gasp! -- try to engage online voters. This week he issued Rudy's Baseball Challenge, a fundraising game that asks supporters to "help Rudy build the team by raising $25 from nine friends," which will score you a Team Rudy pennant. But there's more: "For the teams reaching $2,008 or more, we'll send you a signed original Rudy baseball card. And for the teams that raise $5,000 or more, we'll send you a baseball personally autographed by Rudy!" It's a pretty simple challenge, and Rudy isn't the first candidate to utilize the baseball metaphor, but for a candidate with a private MySpace page and no Facebook profile, it's a start.

The Web on the Candidates

John Edwards and Barack Obama "have distinguished themselves in the presidential field by running campaigns that deliberately part with a longtime rule of election-year politics: Keep the spotlight on the candidate," writes Salon's Michael Scherer. While their attempt to build "semiautonomous political movements" is not wholly altruistic (they do want to actually win), the strategy is an acknowledgment that the power of the Internet and of organizing lies in connecting supporters with other supporters. "The whole focus of the Internet program is to enable people to work together to take action on the issues that matter," says Ben Brandzel from the Edwards campaign. Adds Andrew Rasiej (this site's founder), "simply asking people for money or e-mail addresses rarely builds support. The campaign that encourages voter-to-voter communication has the potential of leveraging the power of the Internet."

"Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them," writes Markos of the Daily Kos. "All it takes is one "Macaca" incident to transform a race or create one where one didn't exist." Most people would probably agree, though Jeff Jarvis points out that, from a Democratic standpoint, it's probably prudent to record every second of your own appearances as well, "for why not create your own narrative rather than leave it to a bunch of GOP shooters?"

The Web on the Candidates

Last night YouTube launched a new feature called "Spotlight." Each week, a different candidate will be in the "spotlight" on YouTube, putting up a video and asking for video responses from the YouTube community. Viewers will have one week to upload their responses, and at the end of the week the candidate will upload another video reflecting on those responses. As Jeff Jarvis notes, this is basically a mirror image of his PrezConference project, which asks citizens to upload videos first, and for candidates to respond. The first candidate to participate is Mitt Romney, who asks the not-so-substantive question "what do you believe is America's single greatest challenge, and what would you do to address it?"

The Web on the Candidates

Rudy Giuliani advisor Patrick Ruffini looks at theories that the Democrats own the internet and decides it isn’t true. “The basic gist of the argument is that because Democrats embrace open systems online (blog comments, user generated content), they’re more successful and raise more money. This totally gets it backwards, I think.”  Ruffini thinks that the “top-down” style of generating massive email lists is still the way candidates are raising large amounts of money.  Supporters are still “far more likely to interface with the campaign from a top-down email sent from headquarters than they are by having a peer-to-peer dialogue with the campaign,” he writes.  In this regard, the Repubicans are competing with the Democrats.  “The lesson is that Web traffic (and donations) follows media coverage and the political environment, and Republicans more than held their own in a difficult year.”  Matt Stoller has a different explanation: “The Democratic Party is ‘ahead’ not in the sense that its masters have learned the new tools, but because the party is becoming much more open and aligned around a left-wing ideology that is ascendant in America,” and the Republicans have yet to catch up to this shift.

The Web on the Candidates
Jeff Jarvis posts a great video on PrezVid grading most of the candidates on their use of YouTube, and showing us some of the best and worst moments from their videos.  John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich both get a 'B,' the highest grade Jarvis hands out.  Edwards is "the best of the bunch" with a video of a speech to a labor convention.  "He's passionate and the video is well-organized," Jarvis says.  The Kucinich video actually stars his British-born wife, and Jarvis likes it: " Best candidate spouse accent. Best candidate spouse hair. She’s quick, newsy, and charming. What’s not to like?"  Most of the others were average at best.  Obama "keeps making Sally Field videos: They love him, they really love him," and Giuliani is "pathetic" for putting up audio of Steve Forbes' endorsement, paired with a photo of Forbes.  Check out Jarvis' video for the report card.

The Hotline's Blogometer notes a growing frustration with Barack Obama among the netroots community.  Linking to the Daily Kos and MyDD,  the Blogometer says that "Obama has not done enough to separate himself from the Dem establishment on netroots bread and butter issues like the war and economic populism."