Dr. DigiPol

In celebration of World Press Freedom Day yesterday, the Bush Administration has made two policy decisions regarding media coverage of the Iraq war that fly squarely in the face of a free press. First, new military rules require soldiers to clear all content with superiors before posting them to their blogs and this rule may be applied to email, as well. Second, the Army’s 1st Information Operations Command new handbook lists journalists alongside al Qaeda as a threat. Add to these the fact that the US continues to hold two photojournalists prisoner without charge and we begin to see a picture of an Administration that is aggressively assaulting our rights to a free press.

We were very excited to provide more insight into Karl Rove’s role in the firings of the eight federal prosecutors, but we have apparently lost the emails containing those insights. They were last seen being carried off from the RNC mail server by an AI named Wintermute. Rumor has it that Wintermute has been working with the Bush Administration to ensure that official communications exchanged via unofficial email addresses were not available for investigators to review as they try to detail the extent to which Mr. Rove is politicizing every aspect of the Executive Branch in order to shore up a perpetual Republican majority. It seems Rove might no longer be confident that the Iraq War will serve this role in securing the President and his Party’s legacy. The Democrats would be well-served to call in their own cowboy to dig to the bottom of this technical and legal faux pas.

Senator Tubes is at it again. The man who doesn’t get his internets fast enough because his tubes are clogged wants to strip the heart of the internet out of our libraries and schools. No more social networking sites. No more MySpace. No more Facebook. No more any site with […]

A member of Care2.com scooped the mainstream media when he discovered in a White House press release that President Bush is asserting the power to search through private mail of US citizens without a warrant.
As far as I know, it is a federal offense to read someone else mail without authorization, so the President’s assertion […]

GasBuddy.com let’s you pop in your ZIP code and find the cheapest gass within a few miles of your home. And you are going to need it, as since the election is over gas prices are on the rise. They went up 4 cents today, alone, and 7 cents since Tuesday.
Its […]

I was reading
Sacha Baron Cohen Gleefully Pushes All the Wrong Buttons in ‘Borat’ in the New York Times and came across this this tidbit, “‘Borat’ was to some extent made outside the Hollywood system. Fox kept the film off its production list and created a separate company, One America, to be the nominal producer.”
Fox […]

Can you just hear James Earl Jones saying that title? I can.

All jests aside, we are in the midst of a very touchy and serious debate over our rights to petition Congress via email. There are two key issues at stake here, as has been pointed out by Jeffrey Birnbaum of the Washington Post.

First, and most importantly, constituent email to Congress is being obstructed by Congress in two ways. Technologically, Congress has been implementing webforms and validation processes (for example, CAPCHA codes and Logic Puzzles) that are obstructing the ability of citizens to exercise their First Amendment rights to petition the government in the name of protecting Congress from SPAM. Behaviorally, Congressional staffers are apparently ignoring and sometimes deleting constituent email because they don’t believe it comes from real constituents.

Second, as a result of the technological barriers erected by Congress, there is growing evidence that the ability to deliver email to Congress via grassroots advocacy email software is being hampered. Worse, the ability grassroots advocacy software to deliver the email to Congress is uneven in a way that seems to suggest that vendors who have the resources and the will to get the messages through are succeeding, while others who lack the resources, the will, or both are failing.

John Kerry just told Wolf Blitzer that in addition to heading up to New Hampshire this weekend to campaign for candidates there, he is also going to many states that, “have nothing to do with presidential politics.”
I thought every state had something to do with presidential politics.
It is this attitude that lost Kerry the election […]