but Boing Boing has the picture: a Libertarian candidate for Senator drank stuff that has permanently turned his skin blue. The stuff he took was apparently to combat fears he had about the turn of the Millennium.

has also weighed in on the subject in his weblog Omphalos, in a piece called, “Whining and wasting money.” In both cases, be sure to read the comments. They’re illuminating.

By the way, Tara Sue Grubb far from the first Internet candidate. And being an Internet candidate may be a negative, not a positive: as Tip O’Neill famously opined, “All politics is local.”

on the inadequacy and naivety of those who believe supporting a never-been-heard-from Libertarian against a sitting Congressman counts as “doing something.” Hint: it doesn’t, and it’s a very dangerous game. You only have one chance to make a first impression in this milieu. I suspect the EFF hasn’t done it because they understand that it costs a LOT of money and takes a LOT of time to support a political candidate, money and time they don’t have.

about DNA evidence overturning a murder conviction. It’s commonplace now, it’s not even a surprise any more to learn that a person who has been serving time did not commit the crime. As usual, there is some indication that the police made the conviction happen through, umm, creative interrogation techniques. I’m not interested in the basic story however. We know that innocent people are convicted all the time. What’s disturbing is this seeming throwaway line in the story: “Most of the police files had disappeared…” The files always seem to have disappeared, no? I wonder if anyone is responsible for that part of things – I mean really responsible, with at least civil if not criminal penalties for losing the files. Information is power – in some cases, the power to save a falsely-convicted killer’s life. If the files that could exonerate him (or her) are lost, that would seem to me to be a big problem.