Senator Barack Obama picked up an endorsement today that the campaign undoubtedly hopes will boost his foreign policy cache against Clinton. Zbigniew Brzezinski is a polish born Democratic foreign-policy expert who is often hailed as the left’s answer to Henry Kissinger.

Of Obama over Senator Clinton he said:

“Obama is clearly more effective and has the upper hand” labeling Clinton’s foreign policy ideas as “very conventional,” Brzezinski said. “I don’t think the country needs to go back to what we had eight years ago.”

So why am I going to be skeptical on this?

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If when you signed up for ‘Breaking News’ e-mail alerts you could distinguish between actual news and entertainment news.

Britney Spears, Michael Vick, Lindsay Lohan & Paris Hilton all occupy a place in an industry known as ENTERTAINMENT. Actual news involves people and things that actually impact lives.

If Britney Spears walks into a shopping mall and kills fifty people, OK that might be ‘Breaking News’ because it actually impacts the existence of others. If Britney Spears has sex with someone, I shouldn’t get a message from CNN in my inbox.

Every time I get one of these I open it up thinking the next 9/11 has occurred or the President is stepping down. Then I find out Michael Vick is pleading guilty to dog-fighting charges. I don’t care! That doesn’t matter, you should be ashamed of yourself for even wasting time on this.

I understand CNN is owned by TimeWarner the producer of entertainment products and I understand people tune in to see Paris Hilton in jail. People also buy crack, I don’t see CNN selling it. CNN is still supposed to be a news organization. Cable News Network, see it is right there in their name.

Do you think they still know what real news is?

As a follow-up to a previous post I wrote about logging into democratic candidate sites and logging into republican candidate sites Luigi Montanez from Leftmost Bitwrote me the following:

While I agree with you that all the candidate sites should have a login link
on the frontpage, it’s not as disastrous as it may seem. The reason they
haven’t really bothered is because the frontpage is never a driver to the
actions that require an account (event RSVPs, group joining, blog post
writing). The fact of the matter is that call to action emails are still the
main mode of getting activists to their site, and when they send those
emails they link to a specialized landing page that’s much more
user-friendly than stumbling onto the front page will ever be.

I don’t disagree that the most likely point of entry for those who actively use the accounts is through the action alert e-mails or through their community spaces. With that said I don’t think candidates should ignore the main page. Having a domain name that is easy to remember like barackobama or hillaryclinton.com is valuable because it is easy to remember. If I am on a friends computer or traveling or at the library etc. I should be able to sit down, type in the candidate name and not have to navigate around for what I need.

With that said Luigi highlighted a WONDERFUL point and I wanted to share.

- Republican Sen. John Warner said today he believes the president should send a message to the Iraq government by polling out a number of troops from Iraq by Christmas.

“We must start an orderly, carefully-planned, thought-out redeployment… in my humble judgment, that will get everybody’s attention.”

The White House said the statement and those like it are “inappropriate” but it is a further example of mounting tension between elected GOP officials and the administration.

Though it is a very big symbol of what is going on it is not necessarily a “major development” as little is likely to come from the statement.

- It is being reported by CNN that a major Republican firm with close ties to the White House is actually working to undermine the administration of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Barbour Griffith & Rogers is sending out e-mails criticizing al-Maliki to promite a client former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi as a replacement.

- Yesterday Senator Hillary Clinton called for the ouster of al-Maliki at the displeasure of John Edwards and the Bush administration. Today it is being reported that September’s NIE reportwill criticize the al-Maliki government calling his admin “unable to govern”. The report will reportedly say that the surge has had an impact and will continue to do so if it continues but that violence will continue as will political instability.

- An odd report has come out which states that Iran is distributing leaflets in Kurdish Iraq claiming “The authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran will work on cleansing this area” and that Turkey is working with the nation to plot an attack. The report was denied by Iran and in all honesty the sources seem less than credible.

Reports claim that these leaflets were dropped yesterday by mysterious helicopters in the region. Is this the work of hysteria or propaganda, maybe some kind of psychological warfare? There has been shelling in the region but not clear sign of a larger imminent attack.

This post also appears on the wonderful site techPresident, much thanks to Joshua Levy

Did you read the blog post on the candidate Web site where the blogger gushed over the candidate and outlined the talking points of the campaign? So did I, over and over and over again. I have to be honest, I follow a lot of blogs but I almost never read the blog sections of the candidate’s sites. I cannot imagine most of you do either.

At the very start of this campaign I really railed against the idea of hiring external bloggers. I get the idea. Speechwriters could write for the candidate blogs just as they write for the stump but I understand we are Web 2.0 and that wouldn’t be good enough. We want something personal! So instead of reading a speechwriter veiled as a candidate we are treated to the writing of interns, guest posters & full-time bloggers who try to tell us the candidates story through their story, which is immensely uninteresting and distancing and just sounds like rampant cheerleading.

When I look at the candidate’s blogs I don’t see speechwriting. Instead I see public relations. The average candidate blog post is the following:

I {saw, witnessed, was with} CANDIDATE in {Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina} and it was an {amazing, awe-inspiring, wonderful} time. My {pictures, videos, text messages} are here.

I was particularly struck when CANDIDATE discussed {health care, tort reform, flat tax, abortion, guns, labor unions, lobbying} and made an amazing point. There was a {man, woman} there with an amazingly personal story and I will always remember them. I am so grateful that I am part of this campaign and hope that when CANDIDATE wins and becomes President in 2009 they will follow-up on this issue.

The problem with these blogs isn’t entirely the fault of the bloggers but the premise, which is you take a bunch of people and have them write positively about a campaign. There is no excitement there, no room to grow, no running dialogue other than, candidate is good, candidate is good, candidate is good, vote.

Don’t get me wrong I want to see bloggers get work. I also would LOVE an inside track into the race. I would love to get a sense of what it sounds like and feels like on the ‘inside’. I would love reality TV in a blog, not canned thoughts and comment like we have now.

Frankly I also don’t care what a staffer for the Obama or Clinton campaign’s policy views are. I imagine they believe what the candidate believes, which is why they are with the campaign. I am not voting for the blogger. Same goes for the guest-posts of people talking about why they are voting for the candidate. It isn’t interesting.

There is only one blog I regularly look at, Fred Thompson’s. Now for all I know that is written by a team of speechwriters or bloggers. It says it comes from Fred Thompson’s own hands though, reads like it does and because of that he is 100% accountable for what is written on the page. If he writes a blog post entitled ‘Fifty-Two Reasons We Should Nuke the Moon & Hawaii’, he cannot just pass it off as misinterpreted or some other persons idea.

Blogging to me is an intensely personal thing. It is a writer using a medium to connect with people, to share thoughts, facts, opinions, and in some ways a stream of consciousness which points to music, art, literature, moving pictures and sounds that the author comes in contact with in their daily lives. Bloggers are reporters and are also personalities we connect with, grow with, get to know. Blogs are an awesome tool for a candidate to reach out to people but from what I have seen few if any are really utilizing them.