On February 8 2012 and again on February 10 2012, Americans Elect announced an event during which it says it will answer the questions of the American people:

At 6 pm eastern, we’re hosting a live, interactive webcast… a live Q&A session… Stream the event live at this page when it happens Sunday at 6 pm…. Questions may be submitted either by emailing ThreeWayRace@AmericansElect.org or by tweeting us at #3WayRace…. This is where we let our voices ring out. Bring your best ideas, questions…

a live town hall meeting hosted by Brian Findlay, Policy Director at Americans Elect, who will describe how the candidate process works and answer any questions voters may have here.

Those interested can submit questions for the Town Hall by email at threewayrace@AmericansElect.org and via Twitter using the hashtag “3WayRace” (#3wayrace).

You heard Americans Elect. Policy Director Brian Findlay will answer any questions voters may have. Questions may be submitted by e-mail, but that’s private — what’s really interesting to me, besides the fact that Americans Elect says it will finally answer voters’ questions, is the invitation to pose those questions publicly by posting at Twitter and using the #3wayrace hashtag. You can click on this link to see what questions people have posed to Americans Elect for this event taking place in about 27 hours.

As of right now, the number of questions posed via #3wayrace is zero.

That’s not to say there haven’t been any posts using the #3wayrace hashtag at all. The graph below displays a dot for each Twitter account that has made at least one post with #3wayrace in it since February 4 2012, four days before Americans Elect’s first public announcement of the town hall and the date when the #3wayrace hashtag first appeared. There’s an arrow pointing from one dot to another to signify a Twitter account that has mentioned another Twitter account in its #3wayrace hashtag post.

All Twitter posts save one refer to the main Americans Elect Twitter account or that of its for Communications Manager and current National Campus Director, Nick Troiano. The exception, preachermatt_83, is the one of only two people to post a Tweet critical of Americans Elect (“@AmericansElect: #HuffPost piece: #3wayrace #crashtheparty” stupid. An Independent running will guarantee one thing..an Obama victory!”). The other critical post, by user bogardner, declares that “@BarackObama is more of a centrist than 3/4 of the @AmericansElect candidates. #crashtheparty #3wayrace.” The remainder of other Twitter posts using “#3wayrace” are either retweets of posts by Americans Elect accounts, or are a conversation among Americans Elect official accounts providing feedback on attempts to configure a UStream account for tomorrow’s event. Many of the twitter posts come from Americans Elect employees. None of the posts are questions.

This leaves open a space for you. Are you an Americans Elect delegate? Are you an American citizen? Then Americans Elect says you are its “true boss” and has pledged to answer any questions you might have.

The floor is open, so let this experiment in democracy begin. I urge you to post your sincere, thoughtful questions for Americans Elect using the #3wayrace hashtag on Twitter between now and 6 pm on Sunday, February 12. I’ll post my own questions, too. I’ll also track what questions people have asked — and finally, I’ll compare them to the questions Americans Elect actually mentions and answers. If Americans Elect is really a democratic exercise in which the American people and the delegates are the “true boss,” then Americans Elect should answer questions that are a fair sample of the questions people pose. If Americans Elect fails to do this, that will be a fairly clear indication of Americans Elect’s undemocratic intent.

Some people might say that there wasn’t any point to showing up for a Democratic Party caucus, because there wasn’t any challenger to Barack Obama on the ballot. The truth is, though, that there’s a lot more that goes on at a caucus than just the selection of a presidential candidate. The caucus is the opportunity Minnesota Democrats have to make their wishes heard on the direction that their political party is taking.

The Daily Show is the opportunity Minnesota Democrats have to listen to some jokes about the news and watch some advertising. The Daily Show doesn’t give Minnesotans the opportunity to get involved. It’s purely passive entertainment.

Some people like to think that they’re getting serious information from the Daily Show, and I won’t deny that some useful information does get included in the humor. Much more important information gets excluded from the Daily Show, however, to make way for fluff. A few days ago, for example, Jon Stewart had an “extended interview” with Brad Pitt, in which the actor “recounts the challenges of getting his movie Moneyball made”.

When Rocky Anderson, presidential candidate of the Justice Party, contacted The Daily Show to schedule an interview, he couldn’t even get a telephone call back in response. “We’ve tried to make contact,” Anderson says. The Daily Show has ignored these efforts.

The Daily Show needs to entertain its audience in order to fulfill its purpose: To get people to watch advertisements. The Daily Show is a corporate creation, owned by Viacom, and Viacom needs to get profits to its shareholders. So, the staff of The Daily Show has the right, and perhaps the financial responsibility, to give Rocky Anderson the cold shoulder. That’s how corporate media works.

In return, however, progressive Americans have the responsibility to give The Daily Show the cold shoulder, and get involved in commercial-free direct politics instead. Jon Stewart’s schtick is a cheap, high-carb substitute for political activism. There’s nothing funny at all about the flab that the Sedentary Left has developed waiting for the latest punchline.

“The Americans Elect Candidates page has been up for a short time, but already, ’360,000 delegates have drafted 52 candidates for president,’ says the San Francisco Chronicle.”

… but as Americans Elect ought to know, that “360,000″ number is misleading. There are about 360,000 people who have signed up for accounts at Americans Elect. Some smaller number — nobody but Americans Elect knows who — have actually qualified as delegates by agreeing to have their voter registration status checked and verified. And a much smaller number than that has actually participated in the process of drafting and voting in support of candidates for president.

What is that number? Again, we don’t know for sure, because Americans Elect isn’t telling. But what Americans Elect has revealed is the number of votes of support for each presidential candidate. A successful draft candidate needs 1,000 votes in each of 10 states to make it on the AE ballot if they’re a political insider, and five times as many votes if they’re a political outsider. As of 7 o’clock this morning, 4557 votes of support had been cast for 141 presidential candidates on the Americans Elect candidate system. A delegate can cast one vote of support per candidate, but can vote to support as many candidates as they like. At most, if each delegate cast just one vote to support just one draft candidate, there are 4,557 delegates participating in the system — a much lower number than the implied 360,000. If the average delegate is voting to support two candidates they like, the number of participating delegates is halved, down to 2,279 participants.

Lower still are the numbers of people who’ve been taking to social media to talk about Americans Elect since the presidential draft system emerged. Using open-source NodeXL software, I’ve generated the following graph of Twitter posts about Americans Elect from January 31 through February 5, a period when 248 Twitter users made 661 Twitter posts featuring the phrase “Americans Elect.” Each dot represents a different Twitter account making reference to “Americans Elect,” and each line indicates one account retweeting or mentioning another account.

A few trends are noticeable. First, there are many fewer posts about Americans Elect being made than just a few months ago. Compare what you see above to this graph of Twitter talk being made during the week of Christmas 2011.

Second, mainstream news media do not dominate the online discussion of Americans Elect as they did last year. Indeed, the sole mainstream journalistic source playing a prominent role in this graph (conservative columnist Byron York) is actually captured in this network for writing the unrelated text regarding Mitt Romney, “do Americans elect businessmen president?”

Third, there was noticeable Twitter talk about Buddy Roemer and Ron Paul running under the Americans Elect system, some of it generated by Buddy Roemer’s own Twitter account and some of it generated through conversations held with jenn_56, a devotee of Ron Paul who repeatedly asked her followers to vote Ron Paul up in the Americans Elect system. Twitter talk by or on behalf of other candidates is negligible or absent, as we’ll see in a graph below.

Fourth, there are a number of connections between the Americans Elect primary account, Americans Elect staffers Sam Edelen and Nick Troiano, Americans Elect Chicago co-organizer Bonnie Larner (account blarner), centrist website Rise of the Center, and Buddy Roemer. By contrast, the Ron Paul draft effort during this period is entirely self-contained, not conversing with any of these players.

Finally, if we look simply at the volume of tweets made during the period of January 31 through the morning of February 6 containing the phrase “Americans Elect” and either the name, the hashtag or a mention of the account of a presidential candidate, we’ll see that Ron Paul and Buddy Roemer are the only draft contenders for whom this connection is being significantly made. This graph shows results for the current top 10 draft candidates in the Americans Elect voting system:

When we include blog mentions of “Americans Elect” with candidate names, significant discussion activity appears for Barack Obama, Michael Bloomberg and Gary Johnson. In contrast, Bernie Sanders, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and Elizabeth Warren have made it into the top tier of supported candidates despite the lack of discussion of them (in the context of Americans Elect) in blogs or on Twitter. Support for those possible presidential candidates is coming from somewhere else.

Jill Stein: 1210 votes
Roseanne Barr: 438 votes
Kent Mesplay: 33 votes
Harley Mikkelson: 8 votes

At approximately 6 AM on January 31 2012, the Americans Elect corporation opened its system to draft presidential candidates through clicks of support. 60 hours later at 6 PM on February 2 2012 (the same time that the Green Party straw poll was scheduled to close), Americans Elect had attracted 935 total clicks of support. Unlike the Green Party straw poll, the Americans Elect straw poll allowed one person to vote up more than one candidate, meaning that Americans Elect likely had far fewer than 935 participants over two and a half days. As of 6 pm, the top ten presidential candidates in terms of support were:

Ron Paul: 197 votes
Jon Huntsman: 135 votes
Buddy Roemer: 78 votes
Bernie Sanders: 67 votes
Barack Obama: 53 votes
Michael Bloomberg: 45 votes
Stephen Colbert: 37 votes
Gary Johnson: 28 votes
Jon Stewart: 20 votes
Lawrence Lessig: 18 votes

Of the top five Americans Elect vote-getters, Jon Huntsman has firmly ruled out an Americans Elect run and instead called for Republican Party “unity” behind Mitt Romney, while Barack Obama is the heavy favorite to walk away with the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Meanwhile, somewhere in the bowels of the Comedy Channel studios, the writing staff is chuckling.

For all the network and cable news shows that have treated Americans Elect staffers to repeated interviews over the past year and a half, wouldn’t a comparison of these results indicate it might be time to invite a Green Party candidate in for a visit?

Tony Perkins, of the Christian right wing Family Research Council has denounced the ability of characters in an online video game to enter into homosexual relationships. Characters in the game are not able to have actual sex, but are able to form same-sex romantic attachments.

The video game, Star Wars – The Old Republic, is set in a time thousands of years before the rise of Darth Vader. That particular detail of the the video game got me wondering what the theological justification is for getting upset about the relationship status of fictional extraterrestrials in far away galaxies in the distant past.

There is no Christian Bible in the Star Wars world. The characters aren’t humans. They’re extraterrestrials. If Darth Vader lived “a long time ago”, and the video game is set thousands of years before Darth Vader, that means that the characters in the video game lived long before the book of Leviticus, which right wing Christians cite as the source of the ban on homosexuality, was written. So, how can Christians object to the idea that somewhere on another planet, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, members of another species had same-gender sexual bonding habits?

Jesus didn’t preach on the moon of Endor, as far as I know. There’s no way that the characters in the Star Wars video game could have read the book of Leviticus. Leviticus was never published anywhere in the galactic republic of the Star Wars world, so, even if the authority of the god of the ancient Israelites were supposed to extend all the way to this distant galaxy, the specific prohibition against homosexuality from Leviticus never seems to have been imposed there.

Besides that, Leviticus declares that “You shall not lie with mankind, as with womankind”. That’s men and women. It doesn’t say anything about what ewoks or wookies should do.

Finally, and yet most obviously, the Star Wars universe does not exist. It’s fictional. So, the characters there aren’t really in homosexual relationships, are they?

Many people would point out that the god of the Bible is fictional too – just a different kind of fiction from the fiction of the Star Wars universe. These two fictional settings are completely separate. To get upset with characters in the Star Wars universe about their lack of obedience to the rules made by the divine main character of the Bible is kind of like getting upset with Peter Pan for not helping Dorothy and her friends defeat the Wicked Witch of the West.

Maybe Tony Perkins and his friends at the Family Research Council believe that their deity is so powerful that its laws against homosexual relationships apply to absolutely everything – even fictional non-human species in distant galaxies in far away galaxies. If that’s the case, though, surely there would also be a ban against homosexual relationships among non-human species here on Earth. There are plenty of non-human creatures on Earth, however, who engage in homosexual relationships. If it’s wrong for non-human fictional creatures to have homosexual relationships, then it must be wrong for non-human creatures on Earth to have homosexual relationships too. So, why isn’t Tony Perkins preaching to these creatures to change their ways?

“NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has made player health and safety his No. 1 priority, and that extends not just to the terrific athletes you see on the NFL playing fields on Sunday or Monday nights, but that extends to youth athletes of all ages, both sexes, and all sports.”

– David Krichavsky, Director of Community Affairs, National Football League

Wow. This means that NFL and Pee Wee football leagues around the country will be shut down next week. What a bold move. Look for it!

Other gems from this Portland Press Herald article:

“It seems like the more we know about concussions, the less we know about them, especially true with young people.”

– Rep. Donald Pilon, D-Saco

“The most minor concussion is the most significant concussion.”

– Dr. Paul Berkner, Colby College

I’m sure this would all be clearer to me if I hadn’t hit my head in that freak curling accident last week.

222: debate
153: marriage
135: wife
131: open
122: romney
119: cnn
101: ex
82: gop
71: media
68: carolina
63: news
62: south
61: santorum
54: question
47: john
46: over
45: king
43: marianne
41: obama
38: cnndebate
36: wanted
36: video
36: out
34: president
32: sc
31: republican
31: last
30: perry
29: cain
27: rick
27: daily
26: paul
26: gergen
25: show
25: interview
25: asked
24: tax
24: despicable
23: primary
23: politics
22: york
22: clinton
22: claims
22: abc
21: herman
21: asking
20: calls

173: south
169: gingrich
169: carolina
123: final
96: tax
86: ap
75: obama
69: braces
67: newt
67: gop
66: paul
63: santorum
60: borowitzrepo
59: wives
55: entered
49: mcdonnell
47: debate
45: returns
44: virginia
38: wall
38: president
33: governor
30: like
30: endorses
29: america
28: streets
28: last
27: right
27: real
27: no
27: endorsement
26: bob
24: video
24: sc
24: ron
23: money
22: think
22: street
21: wins
21: time
21: sopa
21: against
20: republican

Filter: remove candidates’s names and non-substantive words (a, an, the, like, and so on)

Software Engines: WriteWords and Wordle

Newt Gingrich would have had a point if he supported policies of freedom and self-determination in marriage for other people. But he doesn’t. Newt Gingrich is all about freedom for himself, and all about taking freedom away from other people. What a despicable man.

How DARE he? He’s running in a presidential contest and the American people have the collective memory of, oh, what’s a dim, slimy little scurrying animal with incredibly low self-awareness? Right, a Newt.

Justice Party presidential candidate Rocky Anderson wrote: “Great to see what websites like Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit are doing in response to SOPA (and PIPA). I am vehemently opposed to both acts. One of the essential elements of my campaign is the democratized means of communication that is helping to bring down dictators — and allowing us all opportunities through user-generated cyberspace the means to create, innovate, and yield a greater voice with expanded freedoms. I have often said that, in this campaign, social media will help us topple the dictatorship of corrupt money in our government.

This would be devastating to the Internet, users, and to freedom generally. Initiatives like this have been implemented by some other countries, but the nature of these bills is akin to anti-freedom Internet policies of Iran and China. These bills (SOPA & PIPA) portend a further diminution of our freedom and democracy, ironically at a time when our government contends it is fighting wars to bring greater freedom and democracy to other nations.”

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein did not write in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act. Instead, she posted the following graphic:

Which approach do you think is more productive?

After a morning rally on the Capitol’s West Lawn, protesters who had come from as far as Nevada and San Diego attempted to enter the Capitol and congressional office buildings.

Let’s change one plural noun and restate that:

After a morning rally on the Capitol’s West Lawn, citizens who had come from as far as Nevada and San Diego attempted to enter the Capitol and congressional office buildings.

How dare they.