Monday night I had to move my semi-built-in desk yesterday so the electricians could upgrade my wiring. As a result, I saw what had dropped behind it during the course of 8 years. It was pretty much the usual stuff, with a couple of exceptions:

One copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto
One copy of The Tipping Point
8 little screws used to attach hard drives to computer cases
12 uncurled paperclips used for resetting small hardware devices

Pretty much the story of my life.

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Note: Contains completely partisan Deanism…

I spent the day in Exeter, yet another picture perfect New Hampshire town, alternating between standing outside holding Dean signs and sitting in the unheated Town Hall, checking off voters on the Dean supporter list. Then, at 5pm, it was back to the Portsmouth HQ, phoning people to urge them to vote.

In short, I spent the day being a little-d democrat. This is the real thing: American democracy. People reduced to their singular equality. Each one of them nuts in her or his own way. With the kids in their winter caps with animal ears or jester’s horns. Shuffling in, trailing the midwinter cold behind them. Seeing friends they haven’t talked with in months or years. College kids voting for the first time. A grandmother and her grown daughter, both wearing festive mittens. A blind woman being assisted in the voting booth. A husband taking a pink ballot to vote for a Republican and a wife taking the blue. A beautiful baby asleep in a back carrier as the father repeats his name softly to the local voting official. The real thing.

Outside, the cold was the fact you tried to forget. Lots of Dean supporters, lots of Kerry supporters, some Clark, a few Edwards, and one lonely and very affable man with a Bush-Cheney sign. (Oddly, it turns out he likes Bush because he wants a balanced budget. He didn’t accept my offer to take up a Dean sign.) We all shared our coffee and muffins. We laughed at the same jokes. All us Democrats know in a few months we’re all going to be working on behalf of the the same person.

My back aches. My feet are sore. My butt is warming up. And I’m ready to do it again.

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I’m going up to Portsmouth tomorrow at 7am to drive Dean supporters to the polls. I expect to be gone all day and thus won’t be blogging.

While I’m out, the electrician will be running two 20 amp wires up to my office to replace the single 15 amp source. I sure hope this is the cause of my frequent frier program: Last night I toasted the Linksys router I’ve had for about 4 months; usually they last a full year. Sigh.

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Chris Lydon’s two-hour NPR show last night brought together some of my very favorite bloggers to discuss the effect of Internet and blogging on politics. There was a lot of talk about the “popping of the bubble” (as Ed Cone put it) with a healthy respect for what blogging has done for and to politics already. Chris is, of course, the best at what he does, and reminded everyone of the importance of blogging despite the Dean campaign’s crash landing in Iowa.

Although many of the guests and Chris himself said that blogs are a grassroots tool open to anyone, the quite reasonable focus on high-traffic bloggers may have led people to think that the blogosphere is a new daily, opinion-based newspaper in which we can read columns by journalists and columnists who have important views that have, on occasion, shaped real world politics. Now, I love the A-List, at least the portion of it I read. And it’s thrilling that these are people that we have made popular, whatever the network dynamics are that form A-Lists in the first place. But put ’em together, and the A-List is another daily paper.

Blogging strikes me as more significant than the creation of a competitor to USA Today, albeit one that’s fresher, livelier, more personable. Blogs constitute conversations, social networks, and our proxy selves all at once. That’s a trio no other “medium” has ever put together and, as Jay Rosen said on Chris’ show last night, it’s challenging our very model of authority.

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Declan reports on a bad idea put forward by Dean 15 months before he announced his run for the presidency (and six months after 9/11): Requiring users to insert an identity card — presented as an upgrade of today’s drivers license — into a computer in order to log on. Apparently, the campaign is not responding to questions about this. It’s certainly not an idea I’ve heard bruited about by the campaign, but I’m certainly not privy to every bruiting. (Thanks to Eric for the link.)

Dana Blankenhorn responds. (Ignore the nice thing he says about me.)

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Democratic presidential contender John Kerry holds a shrinking three-point lead over Howard Dean on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, according to a Reuters/MSNBC/Zogby poll released Monday.

…Kerry led Dean 31 percent to 28 percent in the new poll, with John Edwards jumping three points to narrowly trail Wesley Clark for third place, 13 percent to 12 percent. Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman remained static at 9 percent – Wired News

Yeaaaarrrggghhhh. I cannot take the G’s, cap’n!

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David Deans writes about Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s interest in slapping a tax on accessing the Internet.

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Hanan Cohen sends along a link to the American Jewish Committee’s 2003 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion. The sample of 1,000 self-identified Jews, a representative cross-section of Americans, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 points.

76% of us think caring about Israel is a very important part of being a Jew. Only 5% are more positive this year than last about the chance for peace. 81% of us think “”The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel,” but 54% support the creation of a Palestinian state. 69% support dismantling at least some of the West Bank settlements. 60% support the current handling of relations with the Palestinian Authority. 63% think American Jews ought to support Israel even when we disagree with it. 76% believe 9/11 does not reflect the true teachings of Islam.

Only 16% of us identify ourselves as Republican. 51% are Democrats and 31% are independents. 40% of us are some type of liberal, skewing toward the “slightly liberal.” 27% are conservatives. We voted for Gore over Bush 66 to 24. Clark, Dean and Kerry beat Bush 2:1. Lieberman beats Bush 71:24. We’re more mixed about the Iraqi War: 54% disapprove of it, and 54% disapprove of the way Bush has handled the campaign against terrorism.

We definitely do not want tax payer funds going to faith-based programs (73%) and don’t want government aid to religious schools (73%), but we do want “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance (66%).

97% of us think ati-Semitism in the US is a problem, and 37% think it’s a very serious problem. (For perceived anti-Semitism in Europem the figures are 96% and 55%.) 67% of us expect global anti-Semitism to increase.

My own views frequently are outside what the survey says is the Jewish mainstream, so please spare me your rants. Thank you.

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(I just blogged this at BlogCritics.org)

We went to see Return of the King for the second time last night because our 13-year-old wanted to see it for his third time. My pre-VCR generation has trouble being entertained by a movie more than once, but there are exceptions. Lord of the Rings is one: Giant trolls, gargantuan elephants, catapults firing heads, fierce bad guys with faces made out of cookie dough, fire-tipped battering rams, stirring music, flying dragons, all in one scene. What more do you want in a movie? Even though it was my second time, I still had trouble finding a slack time to take a bathroom break. Thank goodness for Liv Tyler (or, as she’s uncharitably known in our household, Mrs. Ed).

I have a small wager with my son. I say that Gollum will be nominated as Best Supporting Actor. He deserves it. So does Sean Astin, but as Best Actor; nominating him for Supporting Actor would confuse his character (Frodo’s support) with his structural role in the movie.

And I will be personally outraged if LongBeard the Ent beats out Viggo Mortensen for the award for Best Acting by an Inanimate Object. IMO, Mortensen was way better, although I realize it’s a topic about which reasonable people can disagree.

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David Reed — you know, the End-to-End guy — goes through the candidates one-by-one. He’s captured a lot of what I think and feel about these guys.

This dance remix of The Scream that’s been going around makes me laugh.

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