mail@davemoral.es

If someone were to pose the question to you:

“How many men and women in the United States of America are running for President in 2012?”

…how would you answer? Ten, twenty perhaps? Many know the four contenders for the Republican Party Nomination. We know the incumbent President, coasting to re-nomination from his own Democratic Party. And yet, did you know that even the sitting President has to stand against as many as 37 pretenders to the throne of his own party?

Indeed the number of American citizens who have taken the time, effort and expense (at least $5,000) to actually file with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) is staggering. To date 342 individual citizens have jumped through the requisite hoops to be considered “official” candidates at the Federal level. Official in the sense that they may, should they bounce through similar state-level hoops, in turn appear on individual state ballots. You don’t have to file with the FEC, as Ralph Nader effectively demonstrated in 1996, but it helps.

Our fellow citizens and the labels they attach to themselves:

• American Independent Party : 2
• American Party : 1
• Citizens’ Party : 2
• Constitutional Party : 2
• Democratic Party : 38
• Green Party : 5
• Independent : 71
• Libertarian Party : 11
• No Party Affiliation : 32
• Other : 22
• Reform Party : 2
• Republican Party : 126
• Socialist : 1
• Unknown : 27

I am as guilty as the next person for sharing drivel, harsh comments and incongruity on Twitter. Tweeting has an element of vanity and free flow that other services lack. I find myself more sharp tongued and snarky on Twitter than on other social networks. It is difficult to quantify how my tone is on Twitter vs Facebook for example. I do find my usage expanding, year over year and often default to this service for news and content updates. My filter bubble has become largely driven by Twitter interactions (for better or for worse).

A check of my profile on Tweetstats indicates that I tweet 7.3 times each day and the volume remains heavy. My 6,917 tweets play out as follows:

Likewise I gravitate to, and opt to share other’s content ~1/8th of the time, again, from generally a few sources I like and trust. My political news and content consumption, for example, generally comes from two meta sources (@TheFix and @Politico) while I further influence my filter by leaning on a (wicked smart) blogger (@FiveThirtyEight).

(Side note: @DangerRoom (Wired.com), damn cool defense, security technology blog. Just wanted to interject that.)

Looking at my common hashtags… ya know, I don’t know what to make of it…

Guess I like the Dodgers, Virginia… and Curling…

In the context of today’s epic political theater, a Congressman making things orders of magnitude harder on himself than would otherwise be the case… and in light of a truly disgusting political muckraker I offer suggested rules for avoiding (or mitigating the impact of) public sex scandal.

1) Don’t write a personal check to cover the cost of prostitutes.

2) Don’t pander or offer excuses with technical jargon (i.e. “My Twitter account was hacked“), you will sound all the worse to the people who actually know how these systems work.

3) Don’t compel your wife stand next to you, in some act of faux solidarity, at  press conference where your misdeeds are revealed. You will instantly earn the ire of an entire gender.

4) Don’t use a personal cell phone to sext when your significant other knows the unlock code.

5) Don’t use Facebook or Twitter to do anything remotely sexual, it always comes back to haunt you. Pro tip: Computer logs and screenshots have a nasty habit of never going away.

6) And for the love of God, don’t send any photos. Images have the nasty trend of etching themselves in the minds of the public.

Bonus: The coverup is always worse than the act. The lie of the lie always gets you in the end.

Politico just posted a great postmortem on the Nevada Senate campaign and the Sharron Angle inner circle. Even the author’s words do not fully qualify how much of a train wreck this effort, and candidate, truly were. One choice quote:

“In the 20 years that I’ve been involved politically, I’ve never had the misfortune of working with such sheer, utter incompetence. Too much is at stake in these political campaigns — people like Campbell don’t need to be anywhere near them,” said Chris LaCivita, who served as political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee this fall and worked directly with the Angle campaign. “If they were filming a sequel to the movie ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ Terry Campbell would have a feature role.”

Another favorite:

Campbell frequently pitched unorthodox forms of advertising, such as buying advertisements on closed-circuit television cameras at gyms and hiring a plane to be called “Angle One” for sky-writing the candidate’s name — all of which were criticized as a waste of money by the professional operatives working on the race. At one point, Campbell hired a digital billboard truck with Angle’s face on it that drove around the tourist-drenched Las Vegas Strip — a tactic he referred to as a “game changer,” according to three sources.

At the end of the day I am glad Ms. Angle can spend more time with her family, back home, in Nevada.