But seriously folks, I hear that Obama received a grand reception at AIPAC, where, according to a source, he has “100%” of their support. In other words, he didn’t stray from script of standard American support for Israel as it’s been practiced for the last 30 years, including a call for a united Jerusalem.

Is Obama sincere? His history suggest so, as he’s stayed pretty consistent on Israel ever since entering public life.

While this may be good tactical move — 85 year old bubbes in West Palm Beach will be heartened by the news — what does it mean for those of us who sit to the left of AIPAC at the political seder table, and are inclined to support organizations like the newly-sprung up J Street? Despite my support for Obama, I’m disappointed that either he really holds hawkish views on Israel or that he believe he must hew to the center-right if he wants to be President.

Money quote from a YouTube commenter: “I think i’m going to watch this video every day for the rest of my life. “

Tags: BarackObama, Bollywood, election

Anyway, you can read about that at tPrez.

Here’s a pic of some bald dude… oh no, that’s me at the event, furiously blogging away!

Micah had the idea of posting a photo to Flickr of me updating Twitter about my liveblog and posting that to Facebook.  Here’s the fruits of that idea, courtesy of Bob Brigham.

Tags: JohnMcCain, MTV, MySpace

A rally where each speaker denounces Ahmadinejad’s reactionary policies and just a few call explicitly for military action will still be perceived, on campus and around the U.S., as pro-war. The right-wing media, from Fox News to the New York tabloids, has already jumped on the event, and will spin it to favor their cause. Conservative organizations with no affiliation to Columbia’s campus, such as the David Project, have already signed on to the rally on Facebook, and are likely to distribute hundreds of warmongering flyers and picket signs. The rally will seem to be a sea of pro-war demonstrators — and the more people who attend it and the more organizations that endorse it, the more powerful this disastrous message will be.

A U.S. attack on Iran, which is not an inevitability but is a real possibility, would have consequences just as terrible as the invasion of Iraq. Thousands would die in initial air strikes, and more in the resulting backlash and regional conflagration. The work of Iranian campaigners for free speech, women’s rights, and lesbian and gay liberation, and against racism and anti-semitism, would be set back immeasurably. As Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi has pointed out, “Human rights are not established by throwing cluster bombs on people. You cannot introduce democracy to a country by using tanks.”

Now new numbers from Compete.com show that the top two presidential candidates on Wikipedia are — you guessed it — the low-polling Ron Paul and Mike Gravel (candidates are ranked according to number of article readers, minutes spent on article, percent also visiting candidate’s site, and a few other metrics). While Compete’s Matt Pace says that “The results might come as a surprise to those accustomed to seeing the party front runners capturing all of the headlines,” they weren’t that surprising to me.

This is a trend that’s been affecting news coverage as well presidential politics. In the immediate aftermath of the shootings at Virginia Tech this past spring, the most reliable source for up-to-date information was Wikipedia, so much so that even journalists used it as a source. Noam Cohen of the New York Times counted contributions from over 2,074 editors which resulted in a polished, detailed article on the massacre, with more than 140 separate footnotes, as well as sidebars that profiled the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, and gave a timeline of the attacks. There were 750,000 visits to the page in the two days after the shootings, and it became a vital resource for anyone paying attention to the tragedy, since it was sure to be more up-to-date, and more open to fixes and edits, then anything produced by a traditional news organization.

Because of this and other incidents, Wikipedia has been transformed from an ever-growing reference book into a ever-updating news source. Meanwhile, in the 2008 election mainstream media sources have already decided that the only two, and sometimes three, contenders from either party are worthy of mention. Articles following debates discuss foreign policy tiffs between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, or whether Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani has flip-flopped more on social issues. Now Fred Thompson — with his TV-star appeal, folksy charm, and on-camera comfort — is the latest infatuation.

Meanwhile folks like Mike Huckabee, Mike Gravel, and Dennis Kucinich are often completely ignored. And then there’s Ron Paul, who’s inspired comparisons to Howard Dean in 2004 for the passionate online support he continues to receive.

It’s always amazing to watch a computer application designed for one thing get used for something completely different (see Twitter), and that’s often how innovation happens. What’s interesting about the candidates’ entries in Wikipedia is how a site that was originally designed to be a community-generated encyclopedia has become not only a news source, but a rallying point for grassroots political partisans. It’s as if the Encyclopedia Britannica included community-edited versions of Thomas Paine’s pamphlets in every new edition. The encyclopedia has become its own medium.

David Weinberger points to a couple of illuminating articles from Ethan Zuckerman to explain that the Somalia strikes aren’t isolated incidents, but the opening shots in a struggle to control the horn of Africa, which we need if we are to continue dominating the universe protecting human rights.

Tags: iraq, somalia