Some visually creative counter-programming.

"I am a proud progressive senator from Minnesota. I am a proud liberal senator. I am a labor senator. I am an environmentalist senator. I am an education senator. I am a civil rights senator. And that's how we win this election. That's the politics that wins this year."

The Nation earlier this year: Paul Wellstone is a hunted man. Minnesota's senior senator is not just another Democrat on White House political czar Karl Rove's target list, in an election year when the Senate balance of power could be decided by the voters of a single state. Rather, getting rid of Wellstone is a passion for Rove, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the special-interest lobbies that fund the most sophisticated political operation ever assembled by a presidential administration. "There are people in the White House who wake up in the morning thinking about how they will defeat Paul Wellstone," a senior Republican aide confides. "This one is political and personal for them."

Read Wellstone's The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda.  

Who stands to benefit from Wellstone's death?

What interests are desperate to control the U.S. Senate?

Who benefits from a war in Iraq, which Wellstone strongly opposed?

Who did Wellstone offend?

Is this rock and roll mythology, death in a plane crash?

Is there a curse on midwest Senate candidates? A small plane crash killed Gov. Mel Carnahan of Missouri, the Democratic Senate nominee, shortly before Election Day in 2000. Or is this just an assassin's m.o.?  

Is this life imitating art? Fox Broadcasting's 24 spent a year detailing an assassination attempt on a Senator running for President. 24 starts its new season Tuesday.

My conspiracy ears are tingling. Or maybe I'm just sad.

[a klog apart Obituaries a la Blog]

The hype machine is on full blast when investment letters priced for the average Forbes reader target nanotechnology startups. I don't know why Josh Wolfe's Nanotech Report shouldn't be wonderful, but the advertising hyperbole is a little much for this stage of the industry.

[a klog apart  technology]

RSS Explorer Beta is a Radio UserLand tool that

• opens RSS subscription lists from other people's web sites,
• shows them to you,
• checks if you are already subscribed to the same feeds, and 
• makes it subscribe to the found feeds.

A classic case of navigating through a social information space.

Well done!

I want more. 6 more features.

1. Look at the site associated with each feed. Check for its own mySubscriptions.opml file. If there, let me launch through that person's subscriptions.
2. Add my own mySubscriptions.opml file to the list, so I can start crawling through the subscriptions of my trusted sources.
3. Make it easy to type new mySubscription.opml urls into the page.
4. Show when the mySubscriptions.opml file was last updated.
5. A button to Subscribe to All.
6. Check each of the feeds for last updated date, and show it. I may not want to subscribe to dead or stale sources.

More great work from Dave's fevered brow.

[a klog apart  Blue Sky Radio]