Good question. I'm reminded of a Simpsons quote - "You sir may have attended Harvard but you have the boorish manners of a Yalie" Portman is a self-righteous boor.
Top 10 hoffman Campaign Promises -
10) On his first day in Congress he'll rip Waxman-Markey in half with his bare hands. Not the bill, the actual moron congressmen. But don't worry, they won't be harmed at all: they have no spines.
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7) Will create an American parallel to the Nobel Peace Prize, the Hoffman Hippy-Punching Prize.
I have long dreamed of a hippy punching prize
Slashdot - One of the stupider ideas I have heard - plus I think it's prior art Tom Clancy describes something similar in his novels
"To exist or not to exist: that is the query. That's what the famous Hamlet soliloquy might look like if subjected to Amazon's newly-patented System and Method for Marking Content, which calls for 'programmatically substituting synonyms into distributed text content,' including 'books, short stories, product reviews, book or movie reviews, news articles, editorial articles, technical papers, scholastic papers, and so on' in an effort to uniquely identify customers who redistribute material. In its description of the 'invention,' Amazon also touts the use of 'alternative misspellings for selected words' as a way to provide 'evidence of copyright infringement in a legal action.' After all, anti-piracy measures should trump kids' ability to spell correctly, shouldn't they?"
The Other McCain - Alyssa Milano doesn't follow me on twitter - don't feel bad my own mother doesn't follow me on twitter, much less @Alyssa_Milano.
Yahoo / Politico - Sarah Palin's $100K speaking fee upsets Iowa Republicans -
A conservative Iowa group’s effort to lure Sarah Palin to its banquet next month has had an unintended effect: Rather than exciting conservatives about the prospect of a visit from the former Alaska governor, the group’s plan to raise a six-figure sum to bring her to the state has GOP activists recoiling at the thought of paying to land a politician's speaking appearance.
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But representatives from other Iowa-based political advocacy groups said they would never consider shelling out money for what many politicians see as a privilege: the opportunity to speak to a room full of sure-fire caucus-goers who often serve as precinct captains and can be instrumental to a presidential candidate’s success.
“If somebody tells me they want me to pay an appearance fee, it tells me they’re not very serious about running for president,” said Ed Failor, Jr., president of Iowans for Tax Relief and an influential GOP insider.
Or maybe she considers Iowa as irrelevant as I do. Funny though it was just a couple weeks ago that Politico was telling us how embarrassing it is that no one will pay Palin's speaking fee. Now it's embarrassing that they will.
Yahoo / AP - China, U.S. try to take sting out of trade disputes -
The United States, for its part, agreed that imposing curbs on Chinese exports was not the way to tackle the country's politically contentious trade surplus, Chinese Commerce Minister Chen Deming said.
"The two have agreed that the solution to the trade gap between the United States and China is not to restrict imports from China but to promote balance," Chen told reporters through an interpreter.
They're right. We shouldn't restrict imports, we just shouldn't buy them.
Wired - The Troubles of Korea’s Influential Economic Pundit -
Until the day he was outed, the most influential commentator on South Korea’s economy lived the life of a nobody. Park Dae-Sung owned a small apartment in a middle-class neighborhood of Seoul and freelanced part-time at a telecom company. Thirty years old, he still hoped to earn a four-year degree in economics. In the mornings, he would bicycle to the public library to study for the university entrance exam. His standard uniform was slacks, loafers, and wrinkle-free button-down shirts, as though he were going to work in an office. But with his slightly chubby moon face, glasses, and neatly parted hair, he easily blended in among the rows of students. While they worked through school assignments, he immersed himself in the text of his chosen profession.
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Under the cloak of anonymity, Park believed he could insulate his real life from the adulation surrounding his online presence. Minerva had no published email address, and Park read only a few of the hundreds of comments that accumulated beneath his posts. Wearing the mask of Minerva allowed him to set aside the polite restraint that characterized his personal emails. As Minerva, he wrote with fiery bombast, comparing the gravity of the crisis to Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. Minerva’s ascendance, he now believes, was due to the “pure purpose” of his writing — the sincere desire to help his readers ride out the crisis. “Some people use the Internet for money or fame,” he said later. “I didn’t.”
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The first sign of trouble came when Park’s phone rang in early October. It was a representative from Daum asking if he would be willing to speak with a journalist. Park hung up in a panic. He had told no one about his secret, not even his sister. But he had submitted his national ID and phone numbers when setting up the Minerva account. So someone at Daum, he assumed, must have handed it over. Then, a few weeks later, the government’s finance minister reportedly urged Minerva to step forward so that he could correct the blogger’s faulty notions about the country’s financial policy (the minister later denied having made such a statement). When this invitation went unanswered, the attorney general announced an investigation into Minerva’s true identity.
Fearing exposure, Park began to scale back his blogging. “I will shut my mouth because the nation ordered me to be silent,” he wrote. A few days into 2009 he posted an epic farewell, which he hoped would cement Minerva’s legacy. Entitled “We Must Rely on Hope,” it contained fantastical confessions about Minerva’s life as a selfish financier and begged his readers to turn away from a life of greed: “Devils finance capitalism. Don’t live like me. Please take care of your family and yourself … Rescue yourself from money. It’s made of paper and ink.” His farewell ends, “I apologize again. I’m really sorry. I can only say sorry, nothing else.”
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At trial, the government argued that false information published by Park had rattled currency markets and panicked thousands of citizens into selling off dollars, at a cost to the government of $2.2 billion. This, asserted the prosecution, violated a law forbidding the use of a computer to “spread a false rumor maliciously intending to damage the public interest.” They asked for a prison sentence of 18 months.
Among the experts who testified on Park’s behalf was Kim Tae-Dong, an economics professor at Seoul’s Sungkyunkwan University who once served as an adviser to South Korea’s president. “Minerva is a much better teacher than I am,” Kim said later. “His writing is so easy for ordinary people to understand. I was surprised about his lack of a formal economics background.” The judge agreed with Kim’s argument: Even if the Minerva posts about the government’s policies were false, Park sincerely believed them. Park was acquitted of all charges.
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When Park lost his anonymity, he lost his credibility as well. Rather than accept that the ramblings of a self-educated freelancer were superior to their daily newspapers, most of the public wrote off the cult of Minerva as a fad. Daum’s hardcore readership became consumed by conspiracy theories about the identity of the real Minerva, who must have set up Park through some Byzantine plot.
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It is very difficult to find anyone in the South Korean government willing to talk about Minerva. The prosecutors say they can’t discuss the case until the appeal is over. Two spokespeople for the Korea Communication Standards Commission explain that they weren’t directly involved with the case, though they do have as many as 50 employees watching Daum and other sites at any given time. “We have to protect our children and our public,” one of them explains. “That’s the government’s job, to maintain a nice, clean Internet.” A spokesperson for the Ministry of Strategy and Finance says Park was beneath their notice. “If his theories were made by a publicly recognized institute, we might have some comment. And it is not appropriate for the government to comment on forecasts published by citizens on the Internet.” Months before, the head of the same ministry had argued that Minerva’s influence over exchange rates had cost billions. Now, however, the government had nothing to fear. Once again, as it had been during his whole previous life, Park could be treated like any other nobody.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned in that article. The power of the little guy, the oppressive power of government, the arrogance of the press. The most importnat one though get good lawyers when the feds come knocking. :-)
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