Putting on her old red campaigning suit caused an unstoppable urge to call a press conference, and, well, she had to announce something.

Part of careful plan to capture the White House in 2012 by convincing Americans that she’s the leading incoherent, out of control Republican.

She can see crazy from her backyard.

That’ll show the world McCain made a great choice in picking her!

Only way to exorcise those chain-rattling Ghosts of Machine-Gunned Moose Past.

Bridge to Nowhere, meet Leaper.

Michael Jackson so needed to be knocked out of first place on Twitter.

You don’t understand? Just wait for Mark Sanford’s next press conference.

Face it: Alaska’s a dump. [Hey, these are her reasons, not mine!]

Desperate bid to be mocked by Tina Fey one last time.

[Tags: palin humor ]

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Ethan is once again knowledgeable and provocative, this time about what it takes for a coup to get some attention in this country. He compares the media’s interest in Honduras’ institutional coup (as a guy called it last night on The News Hour) with the almost complete ignoring of various coups in Africa.

Ethan concludes (but read the whole thing):

So why does Honduras get the Iran treatment, while Niger is ignored like Madagascar? Proximity? Strategic importance? (though Niger’s got massive uranium reserves – you remember yellowcake, right?) It’s not population – Niger’s roughly twice the size of Honduras. Expectation? Perhaps we’re sufficiently accustomed to African coups (Madagascar, Mauritania and Guinea in the past year) that Niger’s not a surprise.

Or perhaps all the pundits are still trying to figure out which one’s Nigeria and which one’s Niger…

Ethan conspicuously leaves out racism — the soft racism (as that ol’ phrase President George W. Bush once put it) of not knowing, not caring, and not bothering to develop a narrative.

(By the way, be sure to click on the link in the quote from Ethan. It leads to one of The Onion’s funniest videos ever.)

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman africa niger honduras racism media ]

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Yup. Pretty damn creepy.

[Tags: cluetrain advertising ]

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a href=”http://www.buzzmachine.com/”>Jeff Jarvis led a discussion at PDF among 1,000 people about what government could learn from Google, and, more generally, what a bunch of techies would do to make government better. Jeff’s got this rare cross of skills as a writer, teacher, entertainer and provoker. If you haven’t seen him at work, you should grab the next opportunity. And, yes, Jeff is a friend, so I’m biased. But I’m also right.

So, here’s a way the government is becoming like Google. Remember how a few years ago, Google was grabbing the best and the brightest techies of every stripe? Every time you turned around, someone else you admired had moved there. Now the same thing is happening with the federal government. It’s the glamorous place many of the best and the brightest — including some from Google — want to work. The government is becoming a center of innovation. It may not be as wild as the garages of Silicon Valley and the Charles River, but it’s dreaming big and its heart is pure. These positions are being filled with the diametric opposites of lobbyists. It’s pretty amazing.

Note to self: Re-read The Best and the Brightest to see if there are lessons for the new federal techies.

Tags: pdf09 e-government e-gov egov experts

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PDF was an unusually rich conference. Great folks there and an especially good year to be talking about the effect of the Net on politics and governance.

My take-away (although having a single take-away from a conference I just said is rich is rather contradictory, don’t you think?): The Web has won in a bigger way than I’d thought. The people President Obama is appointing to make use of the Web for increased citizen participation and greater democracy (well, at least as access to the Web and the skills required are distributed more evenly) are our best, brightest, and webbiest. And they are doing remarkable things.

Douglas Rushkoff interviewed me for his radio show yesterday or was it the day before? Anyway, here it is. We talked about PDF and about my presentation there, which was about transparency and the changing role of facts.

[Tags: pdf obama rushkoff e-democracy e-government e-gov egov pdf09 ]

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These photos of bubbles bursting may be old (or not), but I just stumbled across them, and they’re pretty amazing.

[Tags: bubbles ]

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Steve Myers at Poynter has a good story about NPR’s crowd-sourcing Dollar Politics project. One element of it was a request for help identifying 200 people who attended a Senate hearing, some percentage of whom were lobbyists.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous media crowdsourcing npr ]

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