"Is it possible that Hughes brought too much of the Facebook magic with him -- including even inside knowledge of an upcoming feature? Levy and Sifry say that if this did occur, Facebook "may have made an illegal in-kind donation to Obama." It's not clear yet that it did. But it doesn't smell too good."

Knowledge is an in-kind donation? If I talk to my neighbor and she tells me that she's wavering in her support of candidate X and I, in favor of candidate Y, call up Y's office and suggest they give my neighbor a call, have I just made an in-kind donation?

I hesitate even to mention the comparison, but it's not as if Obama's campaign is taking this allegedly "inside" knowledge and making a stock market killing with it. The campaign is improving its web presence. Is there something sneaky, shameful, or illegal about that?

If competing campaigns are savvy enough, they'll sign up as beta testers for some other new tech widget and when that widget is ready to launch, they'll have a head start. More power to them.

I'm not an Obama supporter and have not been following Salon's coverage enough to form an opinion on whether Salon is out to get him, but this article really is Whitewater-esque in its whipping up non-news and innuendo into "it doesn't smell too good." Can we please leave that sort of thing to Fox News and out of Salon?

To follow up on my previous post, I recognize that Manjoo is really just passing along without comment the piece on techPresident, but as we've seen with the Swift Boaters, the original hit piece in an obscure corner of the web is not what matters. It's the larger media's uncritical retelling/retailing of the piece that does the real damage to truth.

YouTube is usable, duh. Comedy Central's website is poorly organized, loads slowly (when it loads at all), and is just plain ugly to look at. Even though I only rarely viewed Stewart and Colbert videos on YT, I'm certainly not going to view any of them on CC's site. So well done, Viacom - you've put one of your "properties" out of sight, out of mind.

I recently hoped to get into a very popular show at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. I had missed the tickets going on sale so I decided to try my luck outside the club the night of the show.

But this is what I encountered:

1. All tickets were will call so you had to get them at the club the night of the show.

2. All sales were limited to two tickets.

3. All tickets had to be picked up by the owner (ID required).

4. As soon as you got your tickets, you (and your pair, if you had one) were required to go into the club.

Wicked genius. Frustrated as I was at not being able to get in, I had to admire the scheme.

Perhaps this would have some limitations with larger venues or family events but it sure put the kibosh on scalping in this particular case.

Another "solution", though only in the case of pre-teen and tweener events, is to simply, honestly tell your child "I couldn't get a ticket for this. Too many people wanted them and there were too few tickets. Everybody who wanted one couldn't get one." A ten-year old would certainly understand the basics of that. And would this not be a better lesson for your ten year-old, that sometimes you try and fail anyway, than "given enough money, you can have anything you want?"

I bet most people live by the former principle, not the latter. A ten year-old is, or should be, ready for that reality.

I realize this is not scalper-related per se, but let's use the scalping as a teaching opportunity!

"Everybody who wanted one couldn't get one" should have been "Not everybody who wanted one could get one."

Hillary will lose, because this country's citizens are mainly sexist, racist, and uneducated.

Stupid people will believe everything. This past 6+ years showed it clearly. K Rove is a loyal

student of Hitler's propaganda minister Goebbels. He said, "if you repeat a lie loud enough

and often enough, it will become the truth in the mind of the masses". He was right.

If this wouldn't be true, Bush and his criminal gang would be history by now.

VEB

and then write about how touching it is that GWHB tears up on recalling how well American (and coalition) troops treated Iraqi soldiers during the Gulf War.

Leaving aside arguments regarding whether the father is responsible for the son's actions, GWHB's convenient forgetting, ignorance of, or plain lying about what was done on his watch is just as disgusting as his spawn's.