The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government is sponsoring a conference on Women and News tomorrow. I’ll be on the panel “New Media, Old Media and Opportunities for Change” at 1:45 in Cambridge, Mass., along with Caroline Little and Robin Sproul.
(St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, Nov. 25. 2007)
And from The Washington Post, via The Stump:
Even Huckabee appears to have been caught unprepared by the sudden turn of events. His Iowa state director is in Costa Rica hunting snakes over the Thanksgiving weekend and won’t return to the state until tomorrow.
Smart man.
Here’s more on Huckabee state director Eric Woolson, courtesy of Radio Iowa, from more than a year ago:
An Iowa political insider is signing on to Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign….[Eric] Woolson left the Waterloo Courier in 1987 to work as press secretary for Delaware Senator Joe Biden’s Iowa effort. Biden, as you may recall, dropped out after admitting to using a British politician’s words without attribution, Woolson left Iowa, worked in Biden’s DC office for a while, the negotiated a return to the Waterloo Courier where he resumed covering the statehouse before moving to the paper’s editorial pages. He left…to become Governor Terry Branstad’s press secretary.
Woolson also recently acquired a BlackBerry — in November 2007.
Some will question the “irony status” of a “YouGoGirl” Hillary trucker hat in Iowa, but if it’s real Midwestern irony you’re after, you’ve got to check out the oeuvre of Leslie Hall of Ames, Iowa — “the Midwest Diva.” She’s like a female Divine and reminds me that the former lead singer from Fluffer, late of MoveOn, also came from Iowa. Pleasantville, to be exact.
The below video was shot on location in Ames, where, according to Wikipedia, Leslie lives with her parents:
Also hilarious, if you’ve ever lived between the coasts, is this segment she did on the Mobile Museum of Gem Sweaters.
And with that, I’m heading to a sunny U.S. territory until Thursday, with 12 of my closest relatives. Blogging will be light.
So I was poking around the interwebs with an eye toward writing an item on customizable product sites, such as MyKleenexTissue.com, when the old proverbial lightbulb went off.
What if political partisans started to treat customizable U.S. Postal Service issued photo stamps as more than a chance to put their kids’ pictures on the stamps that grace the holiday cards to grandma and the cousins? What’s to stop anyone from creating customized stamps with their favorite candidate’s visage on them?
This feature could be great for holiday cards. Think about it: It would be a subtle way for Hillary-supporting older women to send their whole social network holiday greetings with a nifty political message on the outside, and an incentive for Obama-backing college kids to mail out their thank you cards, pronto. And I’m sure Ron Paul supporters would love the idea of his face on a stamp.
The campaigns are worried about how to campaign over the holidays, and how to break through the clutter of holiday mail while not being intrusive and obnoxious. Since people need to send holiday mail anyway, the campaigns could sell rolls of customized stamps at a slight mark-up, to be bought by supporters in lieu of T-shirts that will be broken out only for the gym or household chores.
Sewell Chan over at The New York Times‘ City Room blog takes on the questionable claim in Rudy Giuliani‘s recent campaign commercial that New York is “America’s most liberal city,” and concludes that, no, it’s probably not (see: San Francisco, Cambridge, Austin, etc.).
Of course, the claim Giuliani was making was virtually self-negating. If New York were really the most liberal city in America, it would never have elected him mayor. Twice.
