On August 1, I wrote about how Time.com's "Swampland" blog was soliciting suggestions for guest bloggers on its 39-member Facebook group home page. I gave NewsBusters readers the address and sure enough some of you left suggestions in the topic thread.[For NewsBusters' home on Facebook, check here.] As of publication of this blog post, there were but a few liberal suggestions (such as strategist James Carville) from members of the "Swampland" Facebook group, but the vast majority of suggestions leaned rightward and included such names as Ace, Mary Katharine Ham of TownHall, independent Iraq-based journalist Michael Yon, Patterico, and libertarian writer P.J. O'Rourke. So given two weeks to digest input from Facebook, who have the editors at Time.com chosen as a guest blogger? None other than liberal activist Ralph Neas of the People for the American Way (PFAW), who is guesting on the site from August 13-17.
While looking at a friend's profile on Facebook today shortly after 10 a.m., I spotted her "Election '08" application which proudly lists her support for the Republican Party in 2008. Immediately below are three of the "latest politics headlines" on Newsvine.com, the Web site that created and manages the Facebook application. Yet the headlines were hardly the "latest" and had nothing to do with the 2008 race or its principals. What's more, all three headlines carried downbeat news:
Slate magazine found out that Rudy Giuliani's daughter Caroline has a crush on Obama.
Well, maybe not a crush, but she had joined a pro-Obama Facebook group and describes herself as "liberal" (but then that's also how many Republican voters would describe Caroline's father).
The article, complete with evidentiary screen grab, was written this morning by Lucy Morrow Caldwell, like Caroline Giuliani also a student at Harvard University. Caldwell has a profile on Facebook in the Harvard and Washington, DC networks, and has poor taste in sunglasses, as the screencap below shows:
On the online networking site Facebook, Time Inc. employee Betsy Burton asks "Who would you like to see as a guest blogger on Swampland," the Washington/Campaign 2008 blog on the magazine's Web site. "Self nominations [are] not accepted," Burton added.I've already left my suggestions. If you're on Facebook, you can join their group and place yours. With its solidly liberal blogger bullpen and wildly liberal fan base (read the comments threads on an empty stomach), the blog could use a conservative voice to bring in balance in reporting and analysis of the '08 race and the Democratic Congress. While you're at it, join NB's home on Facebook and say "hi" on our wall.
I got this in my Facebook inbox a few minutes ago from FreedomWorks staffer Brendan Steinhauser. The YouTube video (slight content warning for coarse language) is appended below the fold:
We were protesting Gore's appearance at George Washington University when one of his supporters decided he didn't like what we were saying. What did he do? Watch!
Joshua Levy and Micah L. Sifry have a June 4 article at techPresident noting that among the major presidential candidates, only Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has taken advantage of new software on the Facebook social networking site to broaden his Web presence. (Portions in bold are my emphasis):TechPresident’s Alan Rosenblatt took an early look at the new feature and the Obama application, which allows Facebook members to see new videos and messages from the campaign and share them with their Facebook friends, on the day it went public, and he was impressed. As Rick Klau of Feedburner pointed out in a contemporaneous post, the app adds a significant amount of value to the Obama campaign. “If you’re interested in exposing your network of friends to info about Barack, the campaign is making it a one-click affair that greatly simplifies the redistribution of campaign info,” he wrote.
But when Platform launched, Obama was the only candidate with an application. Why didn’t John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Ron Paul, or anyone else get in on the possibility of reaching 20 million or more Facebook users and potential voters? [...]
In the spirit of Noel Sheppard's earlier D-Day remembrance post, I thought I'd share with you some kind words a Marine stationed in Iraq sent me via Facebook*:
I've really enjoyed NB over the last couple of months while stuck in Iraq. I've gotten a couple of laughs at the idiots in the MSM and those laughs go a long way to make the time behind this desk pass quickly. Pass my thanks along to the rest of the NB crew? God bless and Semper Fi.
CBS News producer/blogger Greg Kandra opened the e-mailbag today to relay to "Couric & Co." readers some negative reaction to the network's coverage of Rev. Jerry Falwell's death. In particular, Kandra quoted from a female Liberty University graduate and vascular surgeon who took issue with historian/guest pundit Douglas Brinkley's assessment of Falwell's views on women.
In an appearance on the May 15 "Evening News," Brinkley dismissed Falwell as a reactionary who (emphasis mine) was "opposed to some of the progressive liberal high watermarks of the 1960s, and certainly he wanted--his returning to family values was returning to women being in the kitchen, in many ways."
That unfair assessment is shared by CBS ombudsblogger Brian Montopoli, who in a May 16 "PublicEye" post agreed that Brinkley's statement was "a pretty fair characterization."
[A quick aside, Montopoli has previously described himself as a "secular humanist" in the online networking forum, Facebook.com]
The only trouble is its an unfair, inaccurate cheap shot against Falwell. Noted Dr. Amy Lipscomb in a letter to CBS News (emphasis mine):
I've not seen this in searches on Google News or on their respective Web sites yet, but I got this today in my Facebook inbox (click here to look at the NewsBusters Facebook group):
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