Over at Tapped, GF-R is making the mistake I wrote about previously. The fact that Joe Trippi, campaign strategist for John Edwards, belongs to the Barack Obama Facebook group means nothing.

People belong to Facebook groups for all sorts of reasons, one of which might happen to be they support him.

It's like reading something into subscribing to the RNC's email list, which you might want to receive to see the kind of crap they are sending.

Hardly a blog, at that:

What a strange way to run a blog all around — normally, an article title links to a standalone version of the post, not to some outside piece. The way the Guiliani site is set up, I don't see how you can link to a particular article, leave a comment or trackback, or do just about anything else you expect to be able to do on a normal blog. It's as though they decided to create a blog-like piece of communications technology without the actual blog features.

The big feature is has, and I just had to take a look, is this "Views" box, which basically counts how many times a link is clicked. And, indeed, most links push readers off the site.

I guess encouraging your readers to leave your site is one approach you could take. Unconventional, though.

The way this views counter works is actually pretty obvious, and since the left hand column shows "Most Viewed," it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out you can click on a link a lot, to try and get it up to the top.

The number one "most viewed" right now? "Rush Limbaugh on Mayor Giuliani."

Go figure.

Or, maybe not. Since the "most viewed" are all links on Rudy's "blog," my guess is they're not actually determined by the clicks on the links, which, if true, basically means he's playing his supporters for suckahs.

Again, go figure.

I'm sure Rudy's not even interested in using the Internet for his political campaign, although anyone watching the Ron Paul online phenomenon can see its potential. Even Kos, commenting on Paul's latest fundraising tallies:

"This is the single biggest example of people-power this [election] cycle," wrote Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the liberal-leaning website the Daily Kos. "And as annoying as it is that we're seeing it from a Republican -- and a crazy one at that -- it's nevertheless a beautiful thing to behold."

But, you know, linking to articles on National Review is pretty cool, too.

There's something creepy and fascistic seeping through John Ashcroft's NYT op/ed today. His argument rests on two pillars. First, there's what we can call the "Because I Say So" defense:

As a practical matter, in circumstances involving classified intelligence activities, a corporation will typically not know enough about the underlying circumstances and operations to make informed judgments about legality...If the attorney general of the United States says that an intelligence-gathering operation has been determined to be lawful, a company should be able to rely on that determination.

Of course, this Administration defines lawfulness to satisfy their own ends. Redefining torture to the point of inflicting death, for example, while anything less than death is allowed. In turn, President Bush gets to say, "We do not torture."

And we also know the Attorney General is now a political arm of the Executive Branch -- the days of impartiality, or relative impartiality, are probably gone. The idea that a company should be relying solely on the judgment of the AG, or any other advisor from the Administration, seems, to borrow a phrase, "quaint."

He second argument is simple: Take telecoms to court, and everyone will die:

To put the matter plainly, this puts American lives at risk.

Well, who can argue with that one?

Throughout this whole warrantless wiretapping business, one area that I don't think has been explored enough is the way our government is relying on corporations to do their spy work. We see it here with AT&T's "communities of interest" programming code. And it's that same scent of fascism we smell when we see Blackwater SUVs roaming the streets of New Orleans.

Speaking of that scent, the best line of this whole article defending immunity for telecommunications companies -- Ashcroft repeatedly calls the idea of taking them to court, "unfair" -- was this, at the end:

John Ashcroft was the United States attorney general from 2001 to 2005. He now heads a consulting firm that has telecommunications companies as clients.

Of course.