Politics spins a wider Web of concerns -Knight Ridder

[Rose Siding]

This piece is running in a dozen mid-market locals

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - In the brave new world of cyberspace, which is rapidly transforming American politics - reinvigorating democracy as well as potentially degrading it - here's an instructive sample of what's happening these days:

Veteran conservative activist Mark Krempasky, an expert on Internet Web logs (commonly known as blogs), has posted an online warning to political candidates everywhere: "You cannot and will not hide anything anymore," because some citizen sleuth, armed only with a laptop and a search engine, "will ferret it out, just for fun."

J.M. Ivler, a liberal California computer engineer who believes that Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman is insufficiently liberal, has launched a money-raising drive online in the hopes of enticing a liberal candidate to challenge Lieberman next year in a Democratic primary. No takers yet, but Ivler just raised $12,000 in his first week.
...
But perhaps the most telling development occurred in Daschle's reelection loss to John Thune. Some observers believe that the South Dakota "blog offensive" could be replicated next year in other races. Two bloggers, launching ostensibly independent sites titled South Dakota Politics and Daschle v. Thune, hammered Daschle relentlessly; they also attacked the state's flagship newspaper, which they deemed pro-Daschle. The bloggers received payments from the Thune campaign ($35,000 overall) for their work, but they didn't reveal that on their sites.

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