Which politician is dominating chatter on the social-media networks in the run-up to the mid-terms, now just five days away? 

Surprise: It’s Christine O’Donnell.  

And though Delaware senate candidate O’Donnell trails opponent Chris Coons markedly in real-world opinion polls, her outlandish statements on the 1st Amendment, witchcraft and masturbation have generated online publicity that even California’s Meg Whitman can’t buy. 

It’s important to preface the latest online study on social-media trends by marketing firm Alterian by noting that voters’ behavior online bears little resemblance to real-world activity. We’ve noted before the wide disparity between gubernatorial candidate Whitman’s number of Facebook followers and her opponent Jerry Brown’s -- a nearly 75,000 difference -- yet Whitman still trails Brown in the latest polls of likely voters by a wide and increasing margin. 

The social-media study tracked online comments, or “chatter,” on senate races in Illinois, California, Florida, Delaware, Connecticut, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nevada, Ohio and Pennsylvania; and gubernatorial races in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Texas, Pennsylvania and New York.  The study gleaned its results from blogs, social media sites, mainstream media comments pages and online message boards. 

The data were collected from Sept. 18 to Oct. 25. The volume of traffic increased steadily as the elections neared, with a decrease in “chatter” at the weekends.

In number of  mentions of senate candidates, O’Donnell  of Delaware led nearest candidate ...

Facebook has privacy issues. But it’s not what you think. 

The leading online social-media site that’s prone to very public privacy snafus very quietly lobbied California lawmakers on the passage of a state Senate bill concerning online privacy, according to a state senator.

The Palo Alto company spent $6,600 in its efforts to fight passage of the Social Networking Privacy Act, according to filings with the California Secretary of State’s office.  The bill, introduced by state Sen. Ellen Corbett (D-San Leandro) in February, would restrict social-networking sites from displaying the addresses and phone numbers of minors.

The bill passed the Senate 25-4, but floundered in the state Assembly. 

Corbett told Marketwatch: “By the time it got to the Assembly, the opposition lobbying had begun. It appears they just worked in the background, to kill the bill.”  Facebook did not comment on the Marketwatch story. 

The average child gains a digital footprint at the age of 6 months, the Ticket recently reported, while 7% of babies have Facebook pages set up for them by  parents  guardians, according to a study.

Facebook's guide to privacy is here.  But we didn't tell you that, right?

-- Craig Howie

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 Image credit: Facebook

Gravitas. Webster's dictionary says that gravitas means "high seriousness (as in a person's bearing or in the treatment of a subject)." One of its examples is "The new leader has an air of gravitas that commands respect."

Former Bush advisor Karl Rove thinks the new(ish) leader and hockey mom Sarah Palin might have many things, but gravitas isn't on the top of the list.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the man affectionately known as Turd Blossom said the former Alaska governor was fine as Sen. John McCain's running mate in 2008, but being commander-in-chief is a different story.

"Being the vice presidential nominee on the ticket is different from saying, 'I want to be the person at the top of the ticket,' " Rove told the British newspaper. "There are high standards that the American people have for [the presidency] and they require a certain level of gravitas, and they want to look at the candidate and say, 'That candidate is doing things that give me confidence that they are up to the most demanding job in the world.'"

And strangely, palling around with wild grizzlies and fishing in the Alaskan wilderness for a cable TV series doesn't impress Bush's Brain either when it comes to thinking about the next Republican nominee for president.

“With all due candor, appearing on your own reality show on the Discovery Channel, I am not certain how that fits in the American calculus of 'that helps me see you in the Oval Office,'" Rove said.

The biggest laughs from President Obama's visit to Comedy Central's "Daily Show" were not the yucks he had probably hoped for.

Instead of being the jokey mensch host Jon Stewart can sometimes be in New York, when in the presence of the commander-in-chief in Washington, the slightly more serious political critic emerged.

"Is the difficulty that you have here the distance between what you ran on and what you delivered?" Stewart asked Obama. "You ran with such, if I may, audacity. Yet legislatively it has felt timid at times," Stewart said, referring to the compromises the Obama administration made to pass healthcare reform.

In a riveting exchange, the president began his defense by saying he "loved" the show and didn't want to lump Stewart in with other pundits and talk show hosts, but that Stewart was wrong -- very wrong.

"What happens is it gets discounted because the assumption is, 'we didn't get 100% of what we wanted, we only got 90% of what we wanted -- so let's focus on the 10% we didn't get,'" the president said quite seriously and seemingly a bit perturbed.

"You've got 30 million people who are going to get health insurance as a consequence of this," Obama continued. "You've got a patient's bill of rights that makes sure insurance companies can't drop you when you get sick if you've been paying premiums, that makes sure there aren't lifetime limits, that makes sure kids who don't have health insurance can stay on their parents' insurance until they are 26. And cuts the deficit by over a trillion dollars. This is, what I think most people would say, is as significant a piece of legislation as we have seen in this country's history."

As usual, the Washington-wise Howard Kurtz has produced another cogent analysis of communications in the nation's capital -- "White House goes into bunker mode."

According to Kurtz over at his new Daily Beast online domicile, as the S.S. Obama cruises toward its midnight rendezvous with a gigantic electoral iceberg on Nov. 2, the president's communications aides are running around on deck, frustrated that their alternative storyline isn't gaining traction in the cacophonous world of modern political babble.

It's like "spitting in the ocean," White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer complains to Kurtz.

There can't be more than two or three breathing Americans who haven't heard ...

Has inveterate baseball gambler and mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsom lost his nerve?

Following triumphant bets with mayors of major American cities as the Giants have progressed to the World Series to face the Texas Rangers, the mayor has some critics grumbling that he’s significantly lowered his stakes.

Previously, he’d won bets with Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed that included flying the winning team’s flag above the opponent’s city hall. 

Now he’s bet  Robert Cluck, the mayor of Arlington, Texas, a Bay Area specialty dinner of Dungeness crab on the outcome of the World Series, which begins right about now.

The bet is so paltry, he didn’t even announce it on Twitter. But someone else announced theirs.

Welcome to the table, Meg Whitman. The California gubernatorial candidate took to Twitter on Wednesday to announce her own bet with incumbent Texas governor Rick Perry:

On phone w/ TX @GovernorPerry to place World Series wager. CA surfboard up against TX cowboy boots! Go @SFGiants! http://twitpic.com/31dcyt

No word yet from Perry, but Whitman clearly hopes she can march those cowboy boots into Sacramento like her predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, famously did.

If the Giants win, Newsom gets flown a box of Texas BBQ. High steaks indeed. 

-- Craig Howie

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Image credit: Meg Whitman's Twitter feed.

Reassuring news today for those who worried that the Obama administration's Department of Justice and Attorney General Eric Holder had been overwhelmed by their workload:

Dropping the Black Panther voter intimidation case.

Not closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Suing Arizona for trying to do the federal job of securing the porous Mexican border against drug and human smugglers.

Fighting in federal court to uphold the Don't Ask, Don't Tell law on gays in the military that Obama often says he really, really opposes and will certainly change someday on his watch.

Ditto for the department's ongoing legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Even though top Obama aide Valerie Jarrett got caught on an interview video recently kinda letting the cat out of the bag about the White House view of gay being a lifestyle choice.

But she apologized for the revelation.

The nation's top law enforcement officer has never seen a podium he couldn't use.

Somehow in his otherwise crippling schedule that took him to China last month, Holder managed to squeeze in time to preside today over another of his department's awards ceremonies.

There was even one unconfirmed report that Holder got caught smiling. But only for a moment.

The awards list is impressive, including some exceptional heroism awards for brave anti-drug folks dangerously deployed in Afghanistan where the gunfire is worse even than in Washington, D.C..

There were more than 300 awards.

They involved included employees honored for distinguished service, lifetime service, exceptional service, cooperative service, excellence in legal advice, information technology, management, handling of legislation, appeals services, asset forfeiture, fraud fighting, legal services, dispute resolution and for being a good new employee.

The president himself could not make the ceremony. He was doing what this president chooses to do five days before midterm elections -- go on Comedy Central, since all the nation's other problems are so well under control.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo: Associated Press; Department of Justice; Liu Jin / AFP / Getty Images.

When word got out that Joy Behar of the daytime talk show "The View" called Nevada Senate hopeful Sharron Angle a "bitch", the Angle campaign received $150,000 of online support. To thank her for her indirect inspiration, the Republican sent Behar a lovely bouquet of flowers.

After reading the note Angle wrote that accompanied the roses, lilies and other flowers, Behar looked into the camera Wednesday morning and snipped, "I'd like to point out that those flowers were picked by illegal immigrants, and they're not voting for you, bitch!"

Host and creator of "The View", Barbara Walters, posed to Behar that the spike in fundraising might be looked as a reaction from those who felt offended by Behar's statements. "You criticize them, they raise money," Walters said to Behar.

Christine O'Donnell is still having trouble understanding that pesky 1st Amendment.

After a 20-minute radio interview with an AM station in Wilmington, Del., on Tuesday, a representative of the Republican nominee for Senate demanded that the station turn over a video that had been made of the interview so it could be destroyed.

O'Donnell's campaign manager, Matt Moran, called the station, WDEL, and threatened to "crush" the broadcaster with a lawsuit if the unauthorized video wasn't released to the "tea party" darling, the station reported.

WDEL's attorney told the O'Donnell campaign's law firm that no prior authorization was required to record the interview on video or post it online because the station's actions were protected by the 1st Amendment as free speech, according to a story posted online by WDEL.

"After seeing the video the attorney for the O'Donnell campaign contacted WDEL's counsel again to apologize for charges made by their campaign manager," the station wrote. "The attorney agreed that there was no legal issue with the video and expressed regret for the incident."

"There is no threat to sue D-E-L," O'Donnell's press secretary Doug Satchel told the radio station, on video, Wednesday, apparently putting the matter behind them.

When asked if the campaign likes the video, which is posted on WDEL's Facebook page, the press secretary seemed happy with it.  "We think the video shows Christine to be a strong candidate that went toe-to-toe with a strong talk show host," Satchel said.

Tim Profitt, the admitted Kentucky head-stomper and Rand Paul volunteer, wants his victim to apologize to him.

"I don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Profitt told WKYT television Tuesday in Lexington, Ky. regarding the controversy surrounding his violent reaction to Lauren Valle attempting to pose with a sign next to the Republican nominee for Senate. "I would like for her to apologize to me, to be honest with you."

Before the incident, Profitt was the Bourbon County coordinator for Paul. On Tuesday, the campaign distanced itself from Profitt and relieved him of his duties. Quite a turnaround considering that, the day before, Profitt's name was included on a full-page newspaper ad that included Paul supporters.

How many times do you reckon Barack Obama's absentee ballot will be counted back in Chicago next Tuesday?

The Cook County Democratic Party machine does have an enduring reputation for finding ballot support in unusual places, which helps explain its enduring ruling presence atop the political pinnacle in the Windy City, political birthplace of the United States' 44th president.

Obama, the onetime state senator and South Sider, voted Tuesday, among other things, for the House of Representatives, for governor and for the U.S. Senate seat he once occupied. It must be strange this time to be unable to vote for yourself for a change.

Obama's choice in the tight race is between five-term Republican Rep. Mark Kirk and Democratic state treasurer Alexi Giannoulias. You might not be surprised to learn that Obama voted for Giannoulias, despite the failure of the state treasurer's family's Broadway Bank over bad loans made, among other things, to convicted felons.

The bank's April failure cost the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, meaning Americans, about $394 million. The full FDIC report was due last month, but for some strange reason it will not be released until about 10 days after the Nov. 2 election.

Coincidentally, candidate Giannoulias was a senior loan officer for the failed bank. He has blamed the failure on loans in a depressed economy. And some may recall Obama has previously mentioned whose fault that is.

The current Senate seat holder is Roland Burris, a party veteran, former comptroller and attorney general who was awarded the vacant chair by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, whose chair was, in turn, vacated upon his impeachment and removal by the Illinois Legislature after he was charged with a couple dozen federal counts alleging, among other things, extortion, lying, wire fraud and bribery -- in effect, that he conspired to auction off his nomination to the Senate seat.

The Illinois politician awaits a retrial after the jury deadlocked on every charge except one -- lying to federal agents.

Obama's initial White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who used to hold the city's North Side House seat that Blagojevich used to hold, has returned to Chicago to seek the party's nomination to succeed Mayor Richard M. Daley, the son of Mayor Richard J. Daley, who also ruled the city for a long time.

In fact, this winter's mayoral vote is the first open race without an incumbent in 64 years, since 1947, the year before the historic "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline.

Emanuel will face some spirited competition in the Feb. 22 mayoral election to become possibly the city's first Jewish mayor. Obama can also vote absentee in that election. The candidate filing window for the February election is Nov. 15-22.

The city holds its municipal elections at the most inhospitable seasonal times to avoid saving money on loyal poll workers by combining ballot days with federal elections. Wintry February elections also help hold down voter turnout to those obedient Chicagoans who should be voting. If no candidate receives 50% plus 1 of the votes cast, a two-candidate runoff will be held April 5 to allow sufficient recovery time from St. Patrick's Day.

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-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo: Pete Souza / White House via CBS Radio's Mark Knoller; the respective offices of Rep. Kirk, right, and Giannoulias.

Much has been made in recent weeks over the videotaped late-night verbal indiscretions of a certain Republican senatorial candidate from Delaware, who claims to have dabbled in idle witchcraft, communed with a deity and been opposed to a certain private pastime.

Meanwhile, on the left coast, the ubiquitous online provoacteur Andrew Breitbart has uncovered a videotape of a certain Democrat named Jerry Brown, who re-aspires to be governor of the nation's most populous state. The 72-year-old seeks a third term as governor, 27 years after his first two expired back when the big hit movies were "American Graffiti" and "Jesus Christ Superstar."

Here's a 1992 videotape of a CNN interview with Brown in which he admits he lied during his first gubernatorial campaign:

"It’s all a lie," Brown says. "You’re pretending there’s a plan ....

Frank Sesno: What did you lie about?

Brown: You run for office and the assumption is "Oh, I know what to do." You don’t. I didn’t have a plan for California. Clinton doesn’t have a plan. Bush doesn’t have a plan .... You say you’re going to lower taxes, you’re going to put people to work, you’re gonna improve the schools, you’re going to stop crime … crime is up, schools are worse, taxes are higher. I mean, be real!"

Now here's a recent videotape of Brown and his Republican opponent Meg Whitman describing their plans to right the financially troubled state.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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