For those who don't know me from my previous diary entries (i.e. 99.99% of you), I'm a grad student in communication research at Cornell University.  Among other things, I study political engagement online, and I wanted to take a moment to do two things...

In the whole country, to the best of my knowledge, there is only one pro-embryonic stem cell research measure headed for the ballot this November—in Michigan, the state which has been called the most "pro-life" in the Union.

Personally, I am very much pro-life—meaning I support the living, feeling their rights outweigh the civil liberties of microscopic dots of tissue in a Petri dish.

But "pro-life" in politics unfortunately generally means anti-research, and that is the case in Michigan today.

Fellow Kossacks,

There is news today that the Clinton campaign is on pace to raise $10 million in 24 hours.  At this point, it is very difficult to believe that that money is coming from Democrats, because she already tapped out most of her big donors a long time ago, and I have a tough time believing that there are very many small donors who support her or want this race to continue.

I suspect that a significant amount of her money is now coming from the Rush Limbaugh crowd.  Republicans have a history of giving money to candidates they do not like that will harm our nominee or that they perceive as weak (e.g. Ralph Nader and, yes, some to Howard Dean).

Let's hit opensecrets.org and find out who has been donating to her since Super Tuesday (yes, I realize we cannot get the records from the last 24 hours)....

An April 19, 2008 news article written by Kenneth P. Vogel of politico.com sufficiently supported the argument that Senator Barack Obama dishonestly claimed that he believes in the Constitutional right to bear arms.  Or did it?

The article; "Obama Linked to Gun Control Efforts" highlights Sen. Obama’s service on the Board of Directors of the Joyce Foundation while arguing against the veracity  of his public positions on the right to bear arms and gun control. The Joyce Foundation, a charitable non-profit organization, located in Chicago, IL awards grants to initiatives that promise to have an influence on public policies.

An important aspect of the Joyce Foundation’s mission is to advance the public debate about important policy issues as well as help policymakers understand how public policies are working and where improvements are needed.  

In the special session of the Louisiana Legislature that ended on March 14, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal took an important stand for the future of biotechnology in the state. He called for, and achieved, an investment of $50 million for Pennington Biomedical Research Center, going so far as to open the legislative session on Pennington’s campus alongside the facility’s president.

A bill that passed out of committee on April 9 completely nullifies that commitment to scientific advancement.

(If this topic has been posted, please tell me and I'll delete it. Since only pro-Obama / I-hate-Hillary diaries have been making the rec list for months, now, I haven't been reading this blog as much, lately. If it was posted, it probably slid quickly off the front page into oblivion, anyway, since it's something negative about McCain, the Republican, instead of one of the Democrats.)

I was watching the idiot box over the noon hour and I heard Monica (Novotny?) talking to something like the 18th person about Rev. Wright. When she asked, "What has Obama got to do to put this behind him?" what was left of my brains spattered against the wall as my head exploded.

After I gathered what gray matter I could scrape off the walls and scooped it back into my now-empty skull, I screamed at the teevee, "You could start by talking about that asshole John Haggee's endorsement that McSame is so F%#$#ing proud of for a change!!!"

In the middle of heavy sniper fire and other such lies, i saw a nice little story about us. Us= humans.

Apparently a french man called Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded a short part of a song. And this happened in 1860!

Before this discovery the title was owned by Thomas Alva Edison, but he made his recording in 1877.

Follow the sound of a phonograph..

So I am doing a paper for my undergrad Polisci Class on Political parties. I chose to do it on the influence that blogs have on the parties. I feel that it is still incomplete, and I thought who better to get a more complete view of the role that blogs play than from none other than my fellow bloggers. So I invite you to critique, inspect and tear it apart. If I have missed anything major, please let me know. I have not included the citations in this particular post, but rest assured, they exist. I do not plagiarize. Thank you very much!

Professor Ed Felten and his Princeton colleagues are known internationally -- and with good reason. They've done some of the most thorough, ingenious, groundbreaking research on security issues to be found anywhere.  Their most recent tour-de-force was demonstrating a technique that overcomes a wide variety of full-disk encryption methods: Attack on computer memory reveals vulnerability of widely used security systems.

It seems that the folks at Sequoia Voting Systems -- one of the makers of black-box voting systems -- are concerned about what Dr. Felten and his team might find if they get their hands on a Sequoia system.  Their response?  A direct threat.

Fellow Kossacks who support Obama -

One of the most impressive aspects of Daily Kos is the wealth of information I come across every day.  I am trying to help Senator Obama's campaign in Pennsylvania.  

I have been disappointed to read that my fellow Catholics in the Keystone state seem to favor Hillary Clinton.  I would very much like to pursuade them to consider Obama.

Can any Kossacks help me gather information about voting record differences (or other policy differences) between Obama and Clinton, particularly differences that might conflict with Catholic ideas?

Okay the media will not bring this up, yet.  However, I am sure many are wondering why Hillary Clinton has not denounced and rejected Geraldine Ferraro.  Why does Geraldine still have a non-paid job, as a finance chair?

Is Geraldine Hillary's big money person?  Kossites, (and Kos) we need to do some more research, there is something else happening here, and of course, it involves your favorite people.

More after the hop.

Thanks for all the insightful comments on my last post.  I got a lot of great tips and some useful criticism as well.  I started my look at DK by compiling some information about the happenings on the front page (more on that in a moment).  It's clear that I'll need to drill down a bit and look closely at diaries on the site as I proceed, and you've given me some great advice for doing so.

With this post, I'm including a graph that shows some of the numerical data I compiled during the two weeks in question.  It shows the frequency of posts to the main page, the number of comments per post (in red - a surrogate for the amount of attention Kossacks gave to a post), as well the number of links from other sites that each post received (in blue - a surrogate for the amount of outside attention a post received).

See the data and read some qualifiers after the jump...

Hello!  I'm a grad student at Cornell University working on a research project that focuses on the Daily Kos.  I'm studying similarities and differences in how online communities and traditional news media decide what ideas and events are newsworthy.

You folks are part of a vibrant discussion and you obviously have a good sense of your own community.  So I'd like to involve you in my analysis - to give you a chance to react to and comment on my findings as I do my research, if you feel so inclined.  I'm doing a close reading of two weeks' worth of posts and comments to the Kos main page - specifically the week leading up to and the one following Super Tuesday.  It'd be impossible to write about every post and comment that was made, of course - there were over 116,000 of them.  But I'll do my best to pick out what's interesting during that time period.

More on my research question, and a bit about me, after the jump...

I'm a graduate student at Georgetown, studying online political engagement. I've just launched a survey for my thesis, which focuses on users' desired outcomes in political candidate websites.

The survey is at http://mindcanvas.net/....

Please check it out! The survey is fun (I promise), and should only take 10-15 minutes.

Thanks in advance for your input!

I'm listening to Ed Schultz, and he caught my attention about the new 527 that Clinton's supporters are forming to help her beat back the Obama support around the country.  I've read a little bit, but the first thing that came to mind is how far the mighty have fallen.

The second thing that came to mind is anger.  The Democratic Party is coming back from the dead.  The 1980's really hurt us, and the response from the people in power was to reach out to the high level donors and ask for help.  The result was the DLC, which won the 1992 election by moving the party towards those money interests, closer than it ever has been before.  Campaigning as a progressive, Bill Clinton got into office and tried to implement some progressive ideas.  But during the 1992 election he had failed to build the party from the bottom up, and thus when he needed the help of the grassroots, we were not there.  Heck, I was in the Navy, ignoring everything political at that point.

Perhaps I have a different way of approaching my voting or supporting my candidate than most. Perhaps not. But I haven't read of anyone doing what I do, so I thought I'd make my Diary and see whether others are familiar with this practice.

In the name of full disclosure: I've decided to support Obama in the primary. I'm in Massachusetts, so I've already cast my primary vote. I will vote for Clinton if she wins the primary.

Because Clinton is the more well-known candidate, it seems that often the process of choosing Obama is first one of discarding Clinton. Unfortunately, that can mean people feel they have to present their anti-Hillary sentiments before getting to their pro-Obama sentiments. Attention spans being what they are, most people don't pay attention to the second half. I believe this results in supporting the perception that Obama's campaign is not based in substance.

I've taken a different approach, both in determining who I would vote for and how I explain my decision.

Let’s take a quick look at the consequences of a Presidential choice, or rather, what happens when not enough people vote...

If President Bush wants to remain at all relevant and leave any kind of positive legacy in his last year in office, he could put whatever muscle he has left in service of restoring the federal government’s commitment to medical and health research.