Tag: politics

Bildt Comments

Later today I’m taking off for Brussels, preparing for the monthly meeting of the General Affairs and External Relations Council. GAERC – as is the romantic description of this august body of the 27 foreign ministers of the European Union. When we sit down in the Justus Lipsus building in Brussels tomorrow it will be to a rather heavy agenda dominated by the Balkans and the Middle East, but certainly dealing also with Somalia and Sudan as well as pre-viewing some of the core issues for the upcoming European summit on energy security and climate change.

sweden’s most popular blog is written by the foreign minister

Vermont E-State

As defined in Vermont, e-stateness means cellular and adequate broadband coverage – fixed and mobile – everywhere in the state by 2010. The initial definition of adequate fixed broadband is 3 megabits per second service in at least one direction; but the bill contains a mechanism for ratcheting that up as requirements escalate. It is estimated that this requirement may be as high as 20 megabits in both directions by 2013.

this is way better than the telco act of 1996 that handed free money to the incumbents ($200b) in return for nothing

Obama Myspace

By the time of Obama’s official campaign announcement, Anthony’s Obama profile–which had the valuable url of myspace.com/barackobama–already had more than 30k friends, well more than the other contenders. Over the following weeks, it continued to grow at a rapid pace, generating lots of headlines about Obama winning the “MySpace primary.” Yesterday, the profile had just over 160k friends. Today, that url has only ~12K. And it’s under new ownership. Joe Anthony, one of the super volunteers of the Connected Age, has lost control of the page he started to the professionals on Obama’s staff.

obama staffers are just as clueless about the internet. not a good sign

Darfur default

Google Earth got a whole slew of new layers this morning, one of which stands out — literally. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s layers documenting the genocide in Darfur are turned on by default. It’s an overtly political statement on the part of Google, and one I wholeheartedly applaud. USHMM has been working on bringing this content into Google Earth for a while now, and it is the kind of information that is best published to a geobrowser: Burned villages, photographs, refugee camps, testimonies. All these atrocities happened somewhere, but no longer is this place abstract. Google Earth’s high resolution backdrop makes it all immediate.

kicking ass in politics. now we need one for mr. mugabe too. and for all the nonsense going on elsewhere

Contagious Free trade

The Japanese are concerned about the US-South Korea free trade agreement, and might seek their own trade deal with the United States. The Japanese are afraid of being “left out in the cold.” I’ve also read speculation that a South Korean trade agreement might make Congress look more favorably upon free trade agreements with Latin America. So why might one free trade agreement lead to others?

hopefully, they are. would provide a good counterweight to all the mercantilist and protectionist clowns

McCain Pranked

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site. Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the site, he replaced one that shows contact information with a statement: Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between 2 passionate females.

heh. such an easy target.