The strange vogue in dumping U.S. citizenship
In 2005, a CUNY political science professor named Stanley Renshon compared citizenship without emotional attachment to “the civic equivalent of a one-night stand.”
Michele Bachmann’s fling with Switzerland lasted just 53 days – barely two of them public – before she came running back to Uncle Sam. That was right before Facebook’s co-founder Eduardo Saverin was found to have called it all off with the U.S, possibly for tax reasons.
Bachmann, who came out as Swiss to Politico on Tuesday, made headlines for deciding to split her allegiances – if only on paper – with a gay-friendly, abortion-happy Western European country. Her temporary Swissness made a farce of her fiery patriotic rhetoric, and added a cosmopolitan edge to her down-home image – an image she was counting on for her constituents to vote her back into office this coming term.
Yesterday, Bachmann declared that she had written to the Swiss government and asked them to withdraw her citizenship, which she’d acquired through her husband, Marcus. “I am and always have been 100% committed to our United States Constitution and the United States of America,” she said in a statement. “I took this action because I want to make it perfectly clear: I was born in America and I am a proud American citizen.”
Bachmann’s decision to become Swiss in the first place was a strange one – not because being a dual national is necessarily a bad thing (full disclosure: I have three passports, including one that is Swiss) but because it raised questions about the image Bachmann cultivated for years. She claimed to be naturalizing for her children’s sake, even though Swiss law does not require her to do so in order for them to acquire their own passports. She also put her eligibility for certain types of security clearance at risk, which isn’t a problem for members of Congress, but could pose complications if she ran for higher office.
That Bachmann reneged upon her decision so quickly also speaks to the troubled relationship Americans have with multiple citizenship. As citizenship scholar Peter Spiro has written, dual citizenship has been a contentious issue throughout U.S. history: In 1849, U.S. diplomat George Bancroft likened dual citizenship to polygamy, and Teddy Roosevelt called it “a self-evident absurdity” in 1915. As recently as 2006, Congress held hearings about the constitutionality of dual and birthright citizenship, during which a number of speakers decried it as unpatriotic.
This isn’t an attitude unique to the U.S, though. Europe’s nationalist movements of the 20th century wreaked havoc on the continent, yet in 1930, the League of Nations upheld the view at the Hague Convention that “it is in the interest of the international community to secure that all members should recognize that every person should have a nationality and should have one nationality only.”
Former “start-up” Obama wouldn’t mind being as popular as…SpongeBob
He’s been president of the United States for about two-and-a-half years, but Barack Obama still remembers being a “start-up” — and he wouldn’t mind being as popular as SpongeBob SquarePants.
The Democratic president, who is in the middle of a road show to sell his ideas for cutting the deficit, spent the evening in San Francisco on Wednesday raising money for his campaign, and he targeted tech-savvy donors who had started successful companies of their own.
“Some of you are involved in start-ups, well I was a start-up just not so long ago,” Obama told a dinner fundraiser at the home of Marc Benioff, the chief executive of salesforce.com.
There’s big money in California. Donors paid as much as $35,800 a piece to dine with the president or hear him speak.
Earlier in the day the president held a townhall meeting at the social networking giant Facebook. At a second fundraiser later in the evening, he said he was pleased that his own Facebook page was so popular.
“I’ve got 19 million friends,” he marveled, noting, however, that he was less loved than the cartoon character SpongeBob.
Something to aspire to, he said.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Breyer on Twitter
The U.S. Supreme Court does not have an official Twitter account, but this just in — Justice Stephen Breyer is on Twitter and Facebook. But he is not revealing details of arguments or rulings.
He told a congressional hearing on the Supreme Court’s budget that he has a Twitter account because of his interest in the protests in Iran after the 2009 presidential election. Twitter represented one of the best ways of learning what was happening in that country.
Since then, Breyer said he has received requests to follow him on Twitter, but has turned them down. The same applies to Facebook.
“It’s probably not a good idea,” he said of making public comments on social media sites. Breyer said judges generally should be anonymous and that he only communicates with his children through Twitter and Facebook.
At the hearing, Congressman Steve Womack, a Republican from Arkansas, brought up the issue of social media and asked whether the justices can tweet if they wanted to.
Justice Anthony Kennedy did not answer that question, but said he had the sense that the Supreme Court’s work was discussed in social media. “That’s good,” he said.
Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson, the appropriations subcommittee chairwoman, said the questions showed how the times have changed. “I never thought we would ask Supreme Court justices about their tweeting,” she said as the hearing ended.
from Summit Notebook:
So how plugged in is the SEC chair? (technologically speaking)
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro says her agency has its work cut out to compete with the massive amounts of money that private firms, policed by the SEC, pour into the latest technology.
"Can we keep up with Wall Street? I think we have a fighting chance. We'll never have, under any circumstances, the kind of budgets that would allow us to spend a billion dollars a year on technology as some firms do, I mean that's just not going to happen, and I totally understand that," she said at the Reuters Future Face of Finance Summit.
"If we can build a forensics lab for our enforcement people to be able to download data off of iPhones and iPads and other instruments, then we will be a lot better able to pursue insider trading potentially and other securities law violations," she said.
So how technologically plugged in is the SEC chair personally?
"I have an iPad," Schapiro said.
"No I don't do Twitter, I don't have a Facebook page. You know, in my position it would be complicated," she said with a laugh. "So maybe I'm kind of middling in terms of technology."
Her agency has a Twitter feed and a Facebook page in development.
Tweet like an Egyptian — Hillary Clinton tries it out
Young Egyptians, who famously used Internet services like Facebook and Twitter to launch their recent revolution, turned their focus to Hillary Clinton on Wednesday. They peppered the top U.S. diplomat with skeptical questions about longtime U.S. support for former President Hosni Mubarak and what many felt was its slow embrace of the movement to topple him.
Clinton, taking a personal spin at what she has called “21st Century Statecraft”, fielded a selection of some 6,500 questions that young Egyptians posed through Twitter, Facebook and the Arabic-language website www.masrawy.com — and many reflected deep suspicions about the U.S. role in Egypt.
“My question is: Does America really support democracy? If yes indeed, why the U.S. was late in its support of the Egyptian revolution?” one questioner asked Clinton.
“The attitude of the U.S. during the Egyptian revolution was to support the Egyptian regime first. Then, when the revolution turned successful, the U.S. switched sides and supported the Egyptian youth and the youth revolution, and the U.S. said that we learn from Egyptian youth. Why was such delay?” another wondered.
Clinton gamely took them on, stressing that the United States used its influence in Egypt to help press for a peaceful resolution to the crisis and the launch of a reform process that would lead to “an Egyptian model of democracy.”
“So I think that we were walking a balance, because we wanted to be sure that our messages did not push anyone into doing something that we disagreed with, namely violence, which we tried to, in every way possible, prevent,” Clinton said.
Young people think they are invulnerable. They do not understand that if we had moved in too fast it could have triggered a response not only from Mubarak & company but also from other Dictators such as Iran.
from MediaFile:
Obama tech dinner photos offer fodder for Silicon Valley Kremlinologists
It’s Kremlinology day in Silicon Valley as industry-watchers pore over the details of the two photographs released by the White House of President Obama’s big dinner with the lords of the tech world.
Who sat where, who was drinking what, and what does it all signify, were among the top questions under debate the morning after the commander-in-chief and fourteen guests broke bread at the house of venture capitalist John Doerr.
If proximity to the president is the key measure of clout, then Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Steve Jobs won top honors, with both executives flanking Obama at the dinner table, as can be seen in this picture.
The White House denied press photographers access to the event, so Reuters and several other media outlets are not publishing the photos. But you can find them here.
Whether the White House's official dinner-table photo was deliberately shot from an angle to show only Jobs’ back was a subject of speculation, coming a day after the National Enquirer published photos which seemed to show Jobs -- who is currently on medical leave from Apple -- outside a cancer center looking particularly frail.
Also widely noted was the fact that 26-year old Facebook founder Zuckerberg, known for a firm attachment to sporting a “hoodie” sweatshirt at all times, saw fit to don a suit for the occasion.
And what to make of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was seated all the way at the end of the table? Schmidt of course serves on Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, so he may simply have thought it courteous to let others have some time with the prez.
Meg Whitman’s Facebook ad nets 20,000 clicks — and a message about jobs
Republican Meg Whitman’s campaign says the results are in from her innovative Facebook “polling ads,” which asked Californians to choose the issue most important to them. The message came back loud and clear: Jobs.
The Whitman campaign said its poll, which ran from July 27 to July 31, drew 20,000 Facebook respondents — with 42 percent of them saying that jobs were their number one priority in the 2010 governor’s race. Not surprising at all in a state with double-digit unemployment.
Another 32 percent voted for fixing education in California, with 26 percent saying that cutting state spending was most critical. Whitman, who has said that putting Californians back to work is the number one goal of her campaign, released the poll results in a Facebook video.
Whitman’s campaign says she is the first to use polling ads on Facebook, which engage users more than traditional TV or Internet spots and target those often elusive younger voters.
And while Whitman and Democrat Jerry Brown slug it out in their race for governor in 2010, the blogosphere has been abuzz with rumors that at least one potential candidate, Representative Loretta Sanchez, is already thinking about 2014.
The source of the speculation is a report in the Sacramento Bee newspaper that Sanchez, a Democrat representing the 47th congressional district, has filed paperwork that would allow her to raise money for a 2014 gubernatorial bid.
“With over 2 million unemployed Californians, even Rep. Loretta Sanchez knows that Jerry Brown doesn’t have a plan to turn around California and that it’s time to abandon his campaign,” the Republican National Committee said in an emailed statement. “Rep. Sanchez has just reminded her constituents that she cares more about her own political ambitions than working to create jobs and improve the economy.”
Meg Whitman breaks new virtual ground with Facebook ‘polling’ ads
In 2010 a candidate would be ill-advised to ignore the Internet, especially if he or she wants to reach younger voters who aren’t paying attention to more traditional campaigns — or, even worse, are tuning out politics entirely.
And Republican Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO who is running for California governor against Democrat Jerry Brown, certainly isn’t the first candidate to advertise on Facebook in hopes of tapping into its nearly 500 million users.
But Whitman’s campaign says she has become the first political candidate to use “polling ads” on Facebook — or spots that engage users, asking them to decide which issues they want to hear the candidate address.
Campaign spokeswoman Sarah Pompei says the first polling ad went live last night, popping up on the Facebook pages of Californians over 18 and asking them to choose one of three issues facing California: creating jobs, cutting state spending or fixing education.
When the votes are tallied in about a week, she said, Whitman will address it in a videotaped speech to the Facebook audience.
“The Facebook ads play an important role in our strategy to build community support and engage younger voters in the campaign,” Pompei said. “We’re using these innovative campaign tools to build the groundswell of support for Meg’s agenda, and this is just the latest example.”
Well I can say that Meg is getting me to do something I swore I would never do after the whole Gray Davis debacle which is vote for a democrat. I could never in good conscious vote for someone that didn’t even bother to vote for 28 years. Someone that will give illegal immigrants privileges that most Californian’s can’t even get. As for jobs get serious why would I trust someone that outsourced jobs to another country when they ran Ebay. Oh not to mention the fact she has ZERO respect for the United States Constitution.
Schumer vs. Facebook
Charles Schumer, the senior senator from New York, is concerned about the protection of private information people give to Facebook and other social networking websites. And the Democrat wants new federal guidelines to help members of these online communities keep control over how their personal details “can be shared or disseminated to third parties.”
Schumer (or someone posting on his behalf) says so on his Facebook page. He also posted a press release on his page and echoed concerns about privacy on social networking sites on Sunday at a news conference in his Manhattan office.
Schumer told reporters he wants to make sure private information isn’t given away without the user’s permission.
He said he was prompted to appeal to the Federal Trade Commission after word last week of new Facebook features that allow the sharing of members’ personal information with outside websites.
“Now all of sudden, with rules changing, there are lots of things that you may have never wanted to go beyond your family and friends but do,” Schumer told reporters.
He wants the FTC to set new rules for how sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter can and cannot use all of that personal information submitted by members.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg deflected privacy questions at a news conference last week, saying the changes did not mean that any more information was being shared than before.
The tweets of your life, now archived at the Library of Congress
Did you tweet what you had for breakfast today? If so, that bagel and coffee are now immortalized, sort of, as the Library of Congress has acquired the entire Twitter archive. Billions of 140-character musings, some 55 million tweets a day, just waiting to be read. You may wonder if anyone reads your tweets, but at least they’ll be in good company.
Even though Twitter has only been around since 2006, there are tweets that will live in history, such as Barack Obama’s message when he won the presidency in 2008: “We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion. All of this happened because of you. Thanks” — a pretty big message for 140 characters, and yet gets the story told.
The library announced the move on Twitter, of course. Twitter unveiled it on its blog from Chirp, the official Twitter Developer Conference in San Francisco.
The Twitter folks said they were pleased to donate the entire archive to what started out at Thomas Jefferson’s book collection. The vast majority of tweets will be publicly available; only a small fraction are protected, Twitter said on its blog.
The Library of Congress said on its Facebook page this venerable institution has been gathering materials from the Web since 2000, when it trolled through congressional and presidential campaign Web sites. It now has more than 167 terabytes of Web-based information.
But this all begs the question of what figures in American history would have tweeted if they could have. Would Abraham Lincoln have tapped in the whole Gettysburg Address, tweet by tweet, or would he have shortened “Four score and seven years ago” to 87?
Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have had plenty of room to spare with “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” And what about Neil Armstrong, tweeting laconically from the lunar surface, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
If savarin wants to leave, dont let the door hit him in the behind. i’m sure he could live a very comfortable and safe life in singapore.