2008 Presidential Campaign Contributions from 10021

An article in today's New York Times indicated that 10021 (Marymount Manhattan College) is the top zipcode in the nation when it comes to campaign contributions. Interestingly it is #1 for both democratic and republican in terms of money collected by the 2008 presidential candidates.

You can read/research the FEC's campaign finance reports directly at their website.

Also opensecrets.org provides a wealth of information about past and upcoming (2008) elections.

You can play with a Google mashup of this data here.

Recent article in Wired about China's latest move to limit free speech by blocking the popular blogging website, LiveJournal.

If you're curious about what other sites that are blocked within China, check out greatfirewallofchina.org.

Link courtesy of crushedice.

There is a renewed call for a cultural boycott of Israel. The topic provokes considerable debate. Linda Grant frames boycott as regressive and a form of censorship while Omar Barghouti argues that Israel's transgression of human rights gives boycott a moral imperative.

On a recent posting at losslessvideo, writer John Berger says:

<

blockquote> Boycott is not a principle. When it becomes one, it itself risks to
become exclusive and racist. No boycott, in our sense of the term, should
be directed against an individual, a people, or a nation as such. A boycott

A great open-source documentary about the history of the internet and net-neutrality.

Link from Four Eyed Monsters courtesy of Shelly Tseng.

A new initiative, the Arizona Voter Reward Act, was approved for the ballot in Arizona. If approved, voters would be eligible to win $1 million dollars. Scratch-and-win democracy ... a scary state of civic duty indeed!

Don't forget to vote tomorrow!

Thanks to Jen Javier for the link to the story.

Border Volleyball
Read this account of border volleyball and watch the video - a poetic response to immigration and border related issues.

Here are a few links from around the web regarding our discussion last class in Communication and the Future about why so few US citizens have passports. Reasons for this are clearly complex and hard to analyze.

There are no clear stats as to how many passports are currently in circulation, but the government does release numbers as to how many are issued each year. This site has some interesting estimates and discussion. Some things are for sure: technologies and policies and privacy are changing.