My Barack Obama Website’s Fly is Open

We’ve talked about populist candidates here in the past, and how they seem to attract strange bedfellow alliances of crazies, hate-groups, and kook-pundits – they do it by making speeches full of sweeping general statements without specifics. The attractant is that crazies can see anything they want in the candidate, while a specific stance is not really there; instead you see populist charicature or posture on almost all issues.

Charles at Little Green Footballs has been running a series of posts on hateful, terrorist aligned, and anti-semitic groups that have pages at the official My Barack Obama website, and some of the pages have since come down. Overnight he found more pages, and the wisdom of unmoderated web forums for a presidential candidate is really called into question. Along with all of that the web designers seem to have left their fly open at the site, with everything hanging out.

We’ve talked about populist candidates here in the past, and how they seem to attract strange bedfellow alliances of crazies, hate-groups, and kook-pundits – they do it by making speeches full of sweeping general statements without specifics. The attractant is that crazies can see anything they want in the candidate, while a specific stance is not really there; instead you see populist charicature or posture on almost all issues.

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Laura Bush in Bamiya

Laura Bush revisited Bamiyan province in Afghanistan this weekend to raise more money for reconstruction and to showcase the progress made since her previous trip there. This is her third trip, but the press tends to ignore these calls for aid; doing the requisite one story and not examining in detail what Laura is trying to point out to the world. She’s been highly active in social causes such as education for Afghanistan, Democracy for Myanmar (Burma,) and aid for Africa for much of her stay in the white house, but to the mainstream press she doesn’t exist except for the required one story per event per outlet. Most of the general public has no clue that she’s been to Afghanistan three times. A quote from the story:

In a prelude to her trip to the Afghanistan donors conference this week in Paris, Mrs. Bush visited a construction site of a learning center for youngsters that will double as an orphanage. She marveled at how women, who just a few years ago were being forced by the Taliban to shroud themselves from head-to-toe, are now Afghan National Police trainees. She celebrated the halfway point of a project to pave a road from the airport to the town center in Bamiyan Province