With all eyes on Fred Thompson as he gives a keynote speech tonight (11:30PM EST), I was reminded of a scheme I hatched a couple weeks ago to create a parallel campaign for Arthur Branch for President.  Branch, Thompson’s Law & Order alter ego, is probably the way most of America knows Thompson now.  With that in mind, I thought that if I could confuse the electorate with an Arthur Branch campaign, whenever they saw Thompson speak, they would think they were watching Branch.  Then when voters went to the polls looking to vote for Branch, they wouldn’t find him on the ballot, just this unfamiliar Fred Thompson.

I did a quick search on Google for "President 2008" hoping to find a collection of links to the major candidates. After all, some people think the campaign has already started. But instead of finding Hillary, Rudy, Barack, John, and the gang at the top of the free links, I found MyDD, the Polling Report, Walken 2008, and Draft Hillary atop that list, while John, Mitt, and Bill (Richardson) showed up in the sponsored links (Hillary did, too, but not her official site).

Now, while some of you may ask why the official candidate websites don't rank higher, I am stunned that Walken 2008 ranks third on this list.

Walken.

That's Christopher Walken.

I tend to be more interested in "how the web is using them" than "how the candidates are using the web" in this site's mission. So of course I'm fascinated by the John Edwards Is Good website. I like the ambiguity of this slogan. Does it mean Edwards is good... looking, for America, at billiards? It could be any of the above.

When I saw first these 80's-inspired t-shirts popping up during the 2004 campaign, I took them for nothing more than a smarmy remark on Edwards' looks from some overly-clever college students. However, it seems that this meme has blossomed into a full-on campaign. While the goal was previously to market the shirt and take pictures of people wearing it in funny places, now the site seems to be semi-seriously promoting the election of John Edwards.