Cyber Sunday

Stowe Boyd points to the Attention Profiling Mark-up Language experiment and Josh Marshall gathers information on Republican Mark Foley’s homoerotic email advances toward an underage congressional page boy. Until his resignation Foley was Chair of the Republican House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. These people give irony a bad name.

As fun as it is to watch the likes of Reynolds and Hinderaker acknowledge the shame of it all while pinching their noses and ignoring the stink of corruption that rises from their party like a dead mouse rotting in the forced air vent, I’m more interested in this APML thing and how we might have used that to head off the Republican child abuse. What if public servants provided attention logs so the public could review their interests, their foibles? At worst this would keep them on the job and away from the Internet. At best it might provide a correlation between inner lives and outer lives of political figures, a way to cut through the public relations bullshit and see the real people. I guess we’d need some kind of RFID authentication so we could be sure the keyboarding wasn’t passed off to an intern. Or a page.

Foley was returned to office six times, a remarkable record that shows the public makes little connection between private behavior and public utterance. APML could give us the data we need to make that connection.