Sarah Palin and Joe Heck at RightOnline 2012: Video

Sarah Palin at RightOnline

RightOnline is an annual conference sponsored by Americans for Prosperity that brings together political leaders, political pundits, political bloggers, and others involved in the free-market movement to meet each other, talk about issues, and learn about techniques to improve communication in the online world of both journalism and social media.

This year RightOnline took place at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas.

The the featured speaker on the opening night of the conference, June 15, was former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who was also the 2008 Republican nominee for Vice President.  In the years since Palin resigned mid-term as Alaska's chief executive, she has become a political commentator for Fox News and has also raised a stir with her talent for using social media (particularly Facebook) for promoting her views.

I caught Palin's speech on video and posted it to YouTube after I returned home to Charlottesville from Sin City. Including a brief introduction by AFP president Tim Phillips, the address lasts just about 35 minutes.

The next afternoon, because the conference was occurring in Las Vegas, the local Member of Congress -- U.S. Representative Joe Heck, a physician and Iraq War veteran -- addressed the lunchtime crowd. Congressman Heck spoke about the use of social media by his colleagues (he mentioned the Republican New Media Caucus, which is co-chaired by First District Virginia Representative Rob Wittman).

Here's the video of Joe Heck's speech. He is introduced by AFP vice president Tracy Henke.

Watch this blog for more video from RightOnline 2012.

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Social Media Mischief at The Washington Times?

The Washington Times has an article on its web site about Thursday's Capitol Hill hearing on Don't Ask Don't Tell, the now-repealed policy that prohibits the service of open and honest gay and lesbian Americans in the military.

The headline and subhead read:

Services OK with ending ‘don’t ask’
No ‘push-back,’ brass reports to Capitol Hill

The first paragraph says:

Preparations for repealing the military’s ban on openly homosexual service members have proceeded very well — even among Marines, who have not demonstrated any resistance, the Marine Corps commandant testified Thursday.

If you click to share the story on Facebook, however, the headline reads:

Lawmaker skeptical of repeal of 'don't ask' - Washington Times

And the excerpted first paragraph, designed to appear on Facebook's feed, says:

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said on Thursday that he is troubled by the rushed way the Obama administration is moving to repeal the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the U.S. military.

Similarly, if you click to share on Twitter, you get this retweet:

RT @washtimes Congress skeptical of repeal of military's gay ban - Washington Times http://bit.ly/i1eqHq

However, if you click on a different Twitter icon, you get this:

Services OK with ending 'don't ask' - Washington Times http://t.co/la0otOW via @AddThis

(Note that the shortened URLs are different in the two different Tweets.)

And if you click on a different Facebook button, you get this:

Services OK with ending 'don't ask' - Washington Times
Preparations for repealing the military's ban on openly homosexual service members have proceeded very well — even among Marines, who have not demonstrated any resistance, the Marine Corps commandant testified Thursday.

Confused? I was.

It looks like somebody at the Washington Times -- I don't know who, but it's certainly not the reporter who wrote the story, Shaun Waterman -- is attempting to put a spin on the story through social media that is not borne out by the actual report itself.

I just noticed this by chance.  An important question to ask is, does the Washington Times do this with other articles, or is this a one-off phenomenon?  What are the ethics of changing the headline and the emphasis of a story when spreading it through social media sites?  Is this worthy of criticism?

Your thoughts are welcome in the comments space, below.

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Congressman Rob Wittman at Blogs United

Anticipating by just a couple of hours the appearance of two potential opponents at the Blogs United conference last weekend, U.S. Representative Rob Wittman gave a well-tailored presentation about the "new media" and politics to the participants, who were mostly bloggers and political activists. Wittman represents Virginia's first congressional district, which stretches from the Hampton Roads area in the south to Fredericksburg and its suburbs in the north.

As noted by Anita Kumar of The Washington Post, Wittman is a member of the Republican New Media Caucus.

Wittman spoke for about 20 minutes, followed by about 15 minutes of questions-and-answers with the audience. The video recording of his remarks (including the Q&A) is divided into five segments on YouTube.

In Part I, Congressman Wittman is introduced by J.R. Hoeft of Bearing Drift:

Part II:

Part III:

Part IV:

Part V (Conclusion):

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Books and Authors on Tape

On Tuesday evening, I -- along with hordes of other readers and booklovers -- attended the National Press Club’s 32nd Annual Book Fair and Authors’ Night in Washington. I ended up spending almost $200 on books (some for me, some for gifts) but, even better, I was able to speak with some of the authors and get a few of them on videotape.

I told former National Press Club president Frank Aukofer that I had already read his book, Never a Slow Day: Adventures of a 20th Century Newspaper Reporter, and that I enjoyed it enough that I would like to purchase a new copy with his autograph in it.

In the course of our conversation, I noted our shared history of growing up in Milwaukee. Aukofer is year younger than my father would be, and the two of them lived within about 10 blocks of each other as children, though they attended different schools and had very different careers.

Like me, Aukofer became a transplant from Milwaukee to Washington, where he eventually became bureau chief of The Milwaukee Journal (before it merged with the Milwaukee Sentinel to create a single morning daily and end one of the last afternoon dailies in the country). I mentioned that I live in Charlottesville, and he said his "little sister" lives there, too. It was not until that "V8 moment" that I put two and two together and realized that he meant Claire Aukofer, the theatre critic for the Daily Progress. (I should have figured it out a long time ago, having known that Claire Aukofer attended UWM [University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee], but I simply never made the connection.)

In any case, here is what Frank Aukofer has to say about his memoir:

Speaking about shared histories, I surprised linguist Deborah Tannen when I told her I had read her first book. She thought I meant, That's Not What I Meant!, when in fact I was referring to the book based on her dissertation, Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends. She seemed shocked when I mentioned that I had seen a play, loosely based on that latter book, when it was performed at the Kennedy Center's College Theatre Festival almost 25 years ago.

Tannen was at the National Press Club with her latest book, You Were Always Mom's Favorite!: Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives. In this brief video, she lists her books and the trajectory they took from topic to topic.

One of the most powerful people on Capitol Hill, U.S. Representative Henry Waxman is author (with Joshua Green) of The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works. Here he gives a brief description of the book, and comments on my left-field question about how today's Congress compares to that of the time of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Writing about the third branch of government, legal correspondent Joan Biskupic took some time to chat about her new book, American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Of course, I had to talk to somebody about a representative of the second branch, so I found two.

First, historian Harlow Giles Unger has written a book about our neighbor from Ash Lawn-Highland called The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation's Call to Greatness. Here's what he said:

At the other end of the timeline, veteran journalist Haynes Johnson has written a new book (with Dan Balz) about the election of Barack Obama. It's called The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election and this is what Johnson had to say about it:

Going back much further in history, James Reston, Jr., has written four books -- he calls them a "quartet," I'd call them a tetralogy -- about the clash between Islam and Christianity in the Middle Ages. His latest book, Defenders of the Faith: Charles V, Suleyman the Magnificent, and the Battle for Europe, 1520-1536, was on display.

I asked Reston to describe the sequence of the four books.

After I turned off the camera -- and I am sorry I did that! -- we chatted briefly about what Reston thought about Frost/Nixon, the Peter Morgan play and Ron Howard movie adaptation in which he is a major character. (In real life, James Reston, Jr., was a researcher for David Frost in the months leading up to the famous series of interviews with disgraced President Richard Nixon.) He said both the play and the movie were great experiences for him.

When Richard Nixon resigned, he probably could have used advice about finding a new job. Perhaps he would have found it in a new book by Brad and Debra Shepp called How to Find a Job on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Other Social Networks. Here's what the pair of authors had to say:

Finally, in what is probably the shortest clip I got over the course of the evening -- but no less entertaining for its terse nature -- pundit Ann Coulter offered a few words (including the words "George Soros") to persuade people to read her book, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America. Coulter was signing hardbacks as well as the paperback edition of Guilty, which just came out on November 10.

See her comments for yourself:

There were many other authors at the National Press Club last night, and I wish I could have met and interviewed them all, but I feel satisfied in what I was able to obtain over the course of about 90 minutes of wandering through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd.

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Black Friday Approaches

The day after Thanksgiving is traditionally one of the most active shopping days of the year. The tradition is not new -- even Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the importance of the day to the economy when he moved the date of Thanksgiving in order to expand the Christmas shopping season during the Great Depression. An article on the web site of the FDR Library and Museum explains (under the title, "The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings"):

At the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, Thanksgiving was not a fixed holiday; it was up to the President to issue a Thanksgiving Proclamation to announce what date the holiday would fall on. However, Thanksgiving was always the last Thursday in November because that was the day President Abraham Lincoln observed the holiday when he declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863. Franklin Roosevelt continued that tradition, but he soon found that tradition was difficult to keep in extreme circumstances such as the Great Depression. His first Thanksgiving in office, 1933, fell on November 30th, the last day of the month, because November had five Thursdays that year. Since statistics showed that most people did not do their Christmas shopping until after Thanksgiving, business leaders feared they would lose money, especially during the Depression, because there were only 24 shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They asked Franklin Roosevelt to make Thanksgiving one week earlier. President Roosevelt ignored those concerns in 1933, but when Thanksgiving once again threatened to fall on the last day of November in 1939, FDR reconsidered the request and moved the date of Thanksgiving up one week. Thanksgiving 1939 would be held, President Roosevelt proclaimed, on November 23rd and not November 30th.

Changing the date of Thanksgiving seemed harmless enough, but in actuality proved quite controversial. It was so upsetting that thousands of letters poured into the White House once President Roosevelt announced the date change. Some retailers were pleased because they hoped the extra week of Christmas shopping would increase profits, but smaller businesses complained they would lose business to larger stores. Other companies that depended on Thanksgiving as the last Thursday of November lost money; calendar makers were the worst hit because they printed calendars years in advance and FDR made their calendars out of date for the next two years. Schools were also disrupted by Roosevelt's decision; most schools had already scheduled vacations and annual Thanksgiving Day football games by the time they learned of Thanksgiving's new date and had to decide whether or not to reschedule everything. Moreover, many Americans were angry that Roosevelt tried to alter such a long-standing tradition and American values just to help businesses make more money.*

As opposition grew, some states took matters into their own hands and defied the Presidential Proclamation. Some governors declared November 30th as Thanksgiving. And so, depending upon where one lived, Thanksgiving was celebrated on the 23rd and the 30th.

While "Black Friday" -- a term that seems to date to the 1970s -- has the reputation of being the busiest shopping day of the year, various sources (snopes.com and Wikipedia, among others) note that in recent years, the Saturday before Christmas has taken the title, while the Friday after Thanksgiving is much farther down the list, ranking between the fourth and eighth busiest, depending on the year.

What is more important is that Black Friday tends to be the day on which most retail businesses switch from red ink to black ink on their account books. That is, up until the day after Thanksgiving, most of these businesses have not yet turned a profit, which they can then use to reward their investors or help grow the business for future years.

When the term "Black Friday" first entered the general lexicon, many retailers seemed embarrassed by it, since the term "black" is associated with things sinister, sad, and discomfiting. More recently, however, many businesses have embraced it.

For example, Amazon.com has set up a special web page for Black Friday purposes. Amazon has also created a widget that will update specials throughout the course of the day.

In response to what are perceived as the excesses of Black Friday, anti-consumer activists have created a movement called "Buy Nothing Day," which often involves street theatre, agitprop, and chanting as well as a decision not to purchase anything that day. The origins can be traced to about 15 years ago, according to the official "International Buy Nothing Day" organization:

what is now coming to be firmly known around the planet as the World Buy Nothing Day campaign traces to several initiatives, places and names. The first "No Shop Day" (as it was initially called) that we know of was started in 1992 as a personal initiative by Ted Dave, a Canadian who made his living by working in the advertising world. His idea was to organize a collective protest against the unrelenting calls to overconsume, with the advertising and marketing professions at the core. His original motto was: "Enough is enough!"

And now there is a response to the response. Two different Facebook "events" have appeared, created independently of each other, with tongue-in-cheek but also with a serious purpose in mind.

The first one I found is called "Buy Everything Day" and it explains itself thusly:

On November 23, scores of misguided people will send a message about consumerism by participating in Buy Nothing Day.

Buy Nothing Day likely attracts people of a certain philosophical and political persuasion (read: lefty, pro-worker, anti-corporate, etc, etc, etc); however, paradoxically, those disproportionately affected (theoretically, or course, if persuading the masses to stay out of the shops was possible) would be low-income hourly employees and not corporations.

The idea that consumption is a bad thing is, well, a bad thing. Consumption is inherently good, and buying stuff makes gives us jobs and makes our economy work.

And seriously, since you'll just make up for it the next day, what's the point? Therefore, I respectfully suggest you save up your pennies and on November 23, shop until you drop.

I thought the phrase "Buy Everything Day" was a bit hyperbolic, so I was pleased to find the more (to my mind, at least) modestly named "Buy Something Day," which originated in Sweden (yes, Virginia, there are free-market economic thinkers even in Sweden) and has clear and sustainable goals:

If people keep their money in their mattress, the economy will stagnate and stand still. When money's shifting owners, it creates synergical effects. Of course rich people will also benefit from money moving around - but ultimately, those who have less will gain more.

And fighting poverty must always come before opposing wealth.

Therefore - save what you must save for your family and yourself. But not for no reason. Spend the money you want to spend. When you keep your money in your wallet, you don't protest against Coca-Cola, McDonald's or Nestlé. They don't give a shit. You only protest against your local entrepreneurs and merchants. People who invest their lives in providing you with the stuff you want.

Every day should be the Buy Something Day.

(The date is, however, set to be in correspondence to the stupidest idea ever - at least since the death penalty and the European CAP - "Buy Nothing Day".)

Since the goals of each group are aligned with my own philosophy (see my article, "A Moral Case for Christmas Commercialism," which, I am told, has been "making the rounds of the Internet"), I signed up for both events. I hardly expect to be buying "everything" this Friday, but I do have my eye on at least one "something." As a matter of fact, I decided to put off a purchase until Friday just so I can do my bit. What I have in mind is a VCR/DVD recorder that I will use to archive the home movies my family made in the 1960s and 1970s (at least those that have already been converted to VHS).

Those of you who also want to play their part in "Buy Something Day" might just wander over to my Amazon.com wish list and pick out a Christmas gift for their favorite blogger.

Update: For news about Black Friday 2008 and new (but quirky) gift ideas, check out this Thanksgiving Day post.

Blogs Attract Gay Readers

A survey by Harris Interactive shows that gay and lesbian Internet users visit blogs more often than their straight counterparts by a ratio of about 3 to 1. The same demographic niche seems to be more inclined to use social networking sites like MySpace.

According to a report from The Advocate,

More than one in three LGBT Web users, 36 percent, report visiting their favorite personal blogs daily, compared with 19 percent of straight people, according to a national survey by Harris Interactive.

LGBT online users also visit networking Web sites like Myspace and Friendster more than their straight counterparts, according to the Harris survey.

Twenty-seven percent of LGBT adults in the country who are online said they visit the video-sharing site YouTube.com, compared with 22 percent of heterosexuals. Twenty percent were more likely to visit Craigslist.org, compared with 13 percent of heterosexuals.

The national survey of 2,451 adults over 18 in the United States, conducted Nov. 13-20, 2006, showed that gays spend more overall time online than straight people.

There certainly are a lot of popular blogs that have appeal for gay and lesbian readers. One thinks of Perez Hilton's celebrity gossip blog, Andrew Sullivan's pioneering blog on social and political issues (which, under its title "The Daily Dish," was early on excerpted weekly in The Washington Times), the sometimes controversial Gay Patriot, the alternative views found at the Independent Gay Forum, the arts criticism of Tim Hulsey, and even, for amusement, Black Velvet Bruce Li. There are many more, of course, and I don't wish to discourage visits to other blogs of interest. (Law professor Dale Carpenter listed a number of gay conservative and libertarian blogs in his syndicated column about a year ago.)

In commenting on the Harris Interactive findings, Bob Witeck -- whose consulting firm does research on consumer trends in the gay and lesbian market -- noted:

"Gays and lesbians have shown their need to build and maintain an early and major presence on the Web that translates directly into significant market opportunities. Social networks also appear to be second nature for the gay and lesbian consumer."

It may be worth speculating whether, because of the "outsider" status of most gay men and lesbians -- a part of, but always apart from, the larger society -- they are "early adopters" of new communications technology. I know that I was using AOL as early as 1993 and quickly adapted to the rapidly growing opportunities of the web, at least as a research tool and as a way of keeping in touch with friends and colleagues through email. The Internet has also been a vital element in the capacity of gay youth to overcome the sense of isolation that earlier generations felt. It has been, in many instances, a genuine lifeline for gay and lesbian adolescents, especially those who live far from urban centers and the vibrant gay communities found there.

As with other fashions and fads -- not to say either the Internet or blogging are fads -- and social trends that are initiated in gay enclaves, it will not be long before straight people catch up. By that time, the LGBT folks will be on to something new.

Big Brother's Bots

Part of the fallout of the Mark Foley scandal has been increasing (although, I'd wager, temporary) awareness of the Internet as a means for people to talk to each other, largely under a veil of anonymity, about sex.

This comes at the same time that social networking sites -- MySpace, Facebook, and others -- are coming under increased scrutiny because of the role they have played in a handful of criminal cases. Compared to the hundreds of millions of messages sent via these sites each day and the tens of millions of members they have, the criminal presence on them is minuscule. Still, since many people are both tech- and sex-phobic, the headline-grabbing cases emerging from MySpace and other social networking sites tend to generate hysteria beyond what they deserve.

As someone who has been using instant-messaging technology (that is, IMs) for more than 13 years, I was both bemused and befuddled by the reaction to the instant messages that allegedly were sent by then-Congressman Foley to former congressional pages. It's like millions of Americans had never seen "LOL" or "ttyl" before. (And if they think Foley's language or tone was salacious, these people really need to spend some time on line to find out what lewd is.)

The overreaction, however, came not just from the Foley incident(s). Fear of the Internet has already worked its way into the law of several states and the federal criminal code.

What I was not aware of, in this regard, was the Orwellian nature of the laws that have been put on the books already. This point was really brought home to me in an article by William Saletan, who writes about science and technology for Slate, which appeared in Sunday's Washington Post. Saletan's last few paragraphs are really chilling:

Some states pursue adults with underage sex in mind into cyberspace and outlaw dirty messages. Georgia, for instance, forbids any "Internet contact" with minors involving "explicit verbal descriptions or narrative accounts of sexually explicit nudity" or even of "sexual excitement." The recipient doesn't have to be a minor. He can be anyone "believed . . . to be a child residing in this state." Someone could be charged under this law even if he never went to Georgia or wrote to anyone there. All you would have to do is meet him in a chat room, pose as an Atlanta teenager and wait for him to say something gross.

If a pervert won't act on his words, you can criminalize the words. If he won't utter them, you can prosecute him for writing them. If he won't come to your state, you can go get him. If he has no victim, you can invent one. This is no joke. In almost every state, laws specify that you can be convicted of an Internet sex offense against a child even if you contact no child and commit no physical crime. In fact, the most recently analyzed data, published by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, suggest that more people are arrested on suspicion of using the Internet to solicit what turn out to be cops posing as kids than for using it to initiate relationships with real kids. The unnatural has been surpassed by the artificial.

Cybersex is only getting weirder. Most Canadian college students surveyed by a dating Web site say they've already had sex via instant messages. By year's end, more than 100 million people will be playing online games. Fifteen million webcams are in use; hundreds can be viewed for a fee, and many are pornographic. You can even interact with a "virtual girlfriend" on your cellphone. It's a creepy world of imaginary meetings and deeds. The only thing creepier, perhaps, is to prosecute them like the real thing.

Winston Smith, call your office.

Blogs and More Blogs

Sophrosyne at Nova Townhall Blog takes the bull by the horns and adds a few "best ofs..." to self-submitted selections in this week's Virginia Blog Carnival. Sophrosyne caught my entry about the Virginia sales tax holiday, which I neglected to submit to the Carnival on my own. (Thanks for the plug!)

One of the posts mentioned in the Carnival talks about using MySpace and other social networking sites as a campaign tool. In it, Jason Kenney writes:

On a broader scale, does an interactive internet presence really do anything for a candidate? Blogs have begun to play larger roles since the 2004 cycle and this year will really shows whether or not netroots activism really works. MySpace and other networking sites are just extensions of that, other tools at the netroots activist's disposal. The difference is the potential target audience. People that use MySpace and Facebook are primarily 15-25 year olds, a demographic that rarely determines the outcome of elections (which is a sad fact in and of itself). Blogs, on the other hand, have no set age demographic and are a lot more inviting to people seeking information on a candidate or campaign. They also go a lot farther in lending themselves to the "echo chamber" that drives some of the larger stories and get more traditional media attention.

Could having a MySpace presence hurt a candidate? Potentially. By using MySpace you associate yourself with MySpace's public image baggage. I'm sure MySpace loves campaigns using their site, it gives them a bit more credibility and standing. Perhaps it does more for MySpace than the candidates themselves in that respect.

Speaking of blogs and politics, the Christian Science Monitor reported a couple of weeks ago about a survey of bloggers that seems to show that politics is one of the least likely topics to motivate bloggers to blog.

The article, by Tom Regan, begins:

In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people. When Scottish artist Momus used that phrase back in 1991, he might have had the blogosphere in mind. But even if he didn't, a new report on American bloggers released last Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life shows that he was right on the money.

The study indicates that the average American blogger is not a member of the so-called "pajamahudin" who furiously post a dozen or more comments a day expressing a particular political viewpoint. Instead, most bloggers are people who just want to share their everyday experiences with a relatively small group of family and friends, and perhaps a visitor or two who might surf by and find their writing enjoyable - an "audience of the willing," as head Pew researcher Amanda Lenhart describes it.

In other words, as one pundit put it, the average blogger is a 14-year-old girl writing about her cat.

Those bloggers who care about public policy and about influencing a large number of people are in a distinct minority, according to the Pew study:

Americans, it would seem, yearn to be creative, and blogging provides them with an outlet. Seventy-seven percent of the 233 bloggers who took part in the survey said they write a blog in order to have a place to express themselves creatively.

They are not, in fact, writing to attract a large following; 52 percent said they blog for themselves. Another 37 percent said they did it in order to keep up with family and friends. Most bloggers, 59 percent, said they only spend an hour or two a week on their blogs.

I suspect that a larger sample than 233 bloggers would come up with different conclusions. In fact, I think the reason people blog is a combination of the reasons given in the Pew study. Think about it: Why would somebody "blog for himself"? Someone who writes for him- or herself can simply keep a diary on paper. A blog is a public document. That doesn't mean that some bloggers don't write for an extremely limited audience (family and friends, for instance, or the Neighborhood Watch team). But blogs are by their nature not meant for their creators' eyes only.

At the same time, those of us who write entirely or largely about politics and public policy have to realize that we are, really, in the minority. Most people, for good or ill, simply don't care about the topics that animate us. That's no reason to end the conversation, however. For those of us who do care, talking about politics is educational, challenging, enlightening, and fun. We may be a minority, but we are a dedicated and close-knit one.

Update: The latest Carnival of Liberty is now online, too. The song-filled 57th entry in this series can be found at the Socratic Rhythm Method, explained thusly:

You're enjoying the new Socratic Rhythm Method, a new site from the proprietor of the former New World Man blog. The Socratic Method is a method of instruction involving questioning the student so that the student can arrive at the most defensible, persuasive elements of the truth. Often, Socratic instruction fosters an adversarial relationship between instructor and student, and there are hard feelings. That more or less sums up my relationship with readers. The Rhythm Method is the name of a drum solo by Neil Peart.

I never knew about that drum solo. My knowledge of the Rhythm Method dates to this joke, popular in my Catholic high school:

Q: What do you call people who use the Rhythm Method?
A: Parents.

Times change.

Social Networking: Baby or Bathwater?

Kenton Ngo, as we have come to expect from him, has a perspicacious comment on proposed legislation to force schools and libraries to use filters to ban "social networking" sites from their computers.

As explained in the Allentown Morning Call, a Pennsylvania congressman is leading the effort, although so far he has found few followers:

Bucks County Republican Mike Fitzpatrick is at the fore of an election-year effort in Congress to limit access to popular ''social networking'' Web sites such as MySpace.

Just 15 House colleagues have signed on to Fitzpatrick's bill prohibiting anyone under 18 from accessing the sites on school or library computers.

(According to the "Power Rankings" derived by Knowledgis, Mike Fitzpatrick is the 266th most effective member of Congress, which -- aside from the lack of merit for this bill -- may explain the small number of cosponsors.)

As Kenton correctly points out, this bill is merely feel-good legislation that will not produce the desired effect:

This bill will do nothing to protect stupid teenagers, who are the only ones vulnerable (come on, smart teenagers don’t respond to sexual propositions and post slutty pictures of themselves). Only good parenting and brains will do that, and this legislation does neither. Their solution is to restrict access (which never works) in limited subsector of internet use.

Crazed efforts to parent America’s children from Congress’ election-year pandering will do nothing to protect children, give the illusion that action is being taken, and won’t dissuade the stupid from doing stupid things, such as putting up a pictures, like a Denver teenager who is now being slapped with felony charges, of yourself smoking a bong.

But, more than that, should the legislation pass, it could also have a deleterious effect, essentially throwing out the social networking baby with the putative predator bathwater.

An article by Brian Satterfield on the Digitial Divide Network points out that the numerous social networking sites -- they are not limited to MySpace, which has been getting a bad rap through tabloid TV these days -- are important tools for charities and other non-profit groups to do their good works.

Satterfield, a staff writer at TechSoup, notes:

Social networking platforms give nonprofits a forum for meeting like-minded organizations and potential supporters, and provide a medium for spreading their messages beyond the immediate community, says Alan Rosenblatt, Executive Director of the Internet Advocacy Center.

He explains what "social networking platforms" are:

Online social networking involves connecting and sharing information with other like-minded people via the Web. Internet message boards and Yahoo Groups fall under the general category of social networking, as do social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and Technorati, applications that let users add their own keywords (or tags) to Web pages and blogs. (For more information on tagging and social bookmarking, read TechSoup's article What Is Web 2.0 Anyway?)

On the other hand, friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) social networking sites such as Care2, MySpace, and Friendster are specifically designed to connect individuals and groups directly with others who share common interests and goals.

A typical FOAF network will display a directory of people or topics. When you find someone with similar interests, you can send them a message asking to be added to their contact lists. This in turn allows you to meet other like-minded folks in that person's network, theoretically expanding your organization's contacts more efficiently and quickly than you could in the real world. Your network grows exponentially with each person you add, and you can interact with others using tools such as public and private messages and discussion forums.

There are hundreds of FOAF social networks on the Internet, each with its own user base and communication tools.

He then lists some of the most popular sites (some of which I have not previously encountered): Care2, Flickr, Friendster, Gather, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ryze, and Tribe. (He doesn't mention Facebook in this list, one of the most popular sites among college students.)

Satterfield then points out how these sites are useful to non-profits:

While many people regard social networking tools as a fun diversion, some nonprofits are leveraging them to accomplish serious goals, such as increasing their visibility, helping constituents find jobs, and raising awareness about time-sensitive issues.

For instance, Interplast, a nonprofit that provides free reconstructive surgeries to persons in developing countries, uses Flickr to help publicize its work. Interplast Communications and Technology Coordinator Seth Mazow initially began using Flickr in March 2005 when he was looking for an easy way to add images to Interplast's blog. Through Flickr, he quickly realized the benefits of sharing photos online. "Flickr is a very powerful tool," said Mazow, "one that Interplast uses to spread the message about our life-changing surgeries."

Eventually, Mazow began to experiment with Flickr's tagging feature, which has increased the visibility of Interplast's photos in Google search results. He points out that one of the top results for the search term "cleft baby" is a photo from Interplast's Flickr page. Mazow also started a Flickr group called International NGOs so that persons or organizations interested in international aid could share pictures, stories, and ideas.

I recommend reading all of Satterfield's article, which does not address political efforts to limit access to social networking sites. Given the information he provides, however, it is clear that, should Congressman Fitzpatrick succeed in getting his bill passed, a large number of people and organizations will suffer for it -- especially low-income people who use library computers to seek out assistance from non-profit groups that use social networking platforms to reach out to potential clients (as well as financial contributors).

Fitzpatrick's bill limits not only teenagers and so-called "predators" from access to these sites, but also the type of civil society organizations that make it possible to reduce the size and scope of government -- which, I would think, is Fitzpatrick's goal as a Republican Member of Congress.

But then, reducing the size and scope of government does not seem to have been on the radar screen of the Republican-led Congress in a long, long time.

Update: Vendetta Studios has produced a very funny video about the intersection of MySpace and life. It's called "My Space: The Movie." (You'll need Macromedia Flash to watch it.)