fundrace

I don't actually remember where I read about Fundrace.org (Ok, it looks like it was Interesting times), but it's popped up on the radar a couple of times this past week. It's...interesting. SHR IM'd me about it; he said he found my donation -- my first contribution to a political candidate, actually. I suppose that says something about me. Or the state of the country. Or both. (A former fencing student of mine who supported Nader in the last election wrote about how he thought a Bush presidency would spur people to action. I think he was right, but at what cost?) Anyway, I looked again. It was a little weird to see my name right there, complete with occupation, company name and full home address (it wasn't there last time); but I didn't think too much of it at the time. I did wonder how low-profile celebrities would feel about it, but I suppose that information is already a matter of public record and any fanboy (or fangirl) worth their mettle would have already figured it out anyway.

When I first played with it, I did a search of my neighborhood and the first thing that struck me was how the few Bush donations (Massachusetts, duh) all seemed to be pegged at the $2000 maximum. I had planned on writing about that, but upon further inspection, I found a few donations in the $200 range which blew away my premise. And I found the rankings page did the work for me anyway. I found it interesting to see that, although W was actually the FatCats leader just 2 weeks ago, Kerry had jumped in front sometime last week. It's interesting that W is 2nd in the Grassroots index, just behind Howard Dean.

Anyway, Betsy Devine makes a good point, riffing off of Scott Johnson's original post. And now it's more than interesting; it also feels a little scary. I don't know. Maybe we do need to just get over it. It's already public. And the internet has a long memory. I was reminded of this when I discovered old archives of this blog with my real name on it (even though I updated the template a while ago) and, of course, links to my old personal homepage. The world continues to move on. Just hopefully not so fast that we (personally and as a society) can't keep up with it.