Round ups of the conservative blogosphere make it clear that the GOP contest is wide open; Ron Paul supporters may be getting the shaft on Digg and PayPal; Ars Technica decides the New Hampshire vote controversy isn't a big deal; Google announces Checkout for Political Contributions; and John Edwards' ad contest yields pretty creative entries.

The Republican CNN/YouTube debate is this Wednesday, and certain videos are getting "weeded out"; one writer suggests that we could be in a "banner moment for unmediated political action"; Jersey City's WFMU launches a Rudy 9/11 remix contest; pro-Hilary bloggers launch (and close) and ill-fated program to pay pro-Clinton commenters; Ron Paul beats Mike Huckabee at the "money bomb" game; another Paul haul is planned for Dec. 16; Digg lanuches a Digg the Canddiates page; Amy Schatz writes about Ron Paul supporters' aggressive tactics with the media, ensures hundreds of angry emails; the Clinton campaign gets cozy with Drudge; picking apart the candidates' email strategies; and two videos that might help you forget it's Monday.

Karl Rove joins Markos Moulitsas at Newsweek, dogs and cats live together; does Media Matters favor Hiillary Clinton over the other dems?; the Iowa Independent predicts the winners of the Iowa caucuses; a video from Brave New Films criticizing Fox News gets banned on Digg; John McCain is up next in the MTV/MySpace Presidential Dialogue series; bloggers galore at the 2008 Democratic convention; get yourself a "We Look Like Facebook" t-shirt today!; and Barack Obama's tech policy is up in super-accessible HTML format.

Ron Paul and Mike Gravel are the dark horses of their respective parties. They raise a ruckus during debates and forums, they hold radical positions at odds with their parties' leadership, and they poll very low (Paul polls between one and three percent in all national polls; Gravel polls even lower). Not surprisingly, news coverage of them is scarce. So fired-up, web-savvy voters, tired of gatekeepers failing to mention more than half of debate participants in their post-mortems, are trying to influence media coverage and public opinion in the most straightforward way they know -- by writing and editing Wikipedia entries and Digging sympathetic news articles.

I'm not sure how far we should take this analogy, but Ron Paul is to the Republicans of 2008 as Howard Dean was to the Democrats of 2004: the one candidate speaking out prominently against the war when his colleagues were silent or supportive. Since politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, we shouldn't be surprised that he's starting to take off online.

The Web on the Candidates

More on the Ron Paul madness: although Paul barely registers in nationwide polls about the Republican presidential contenders, he actually won ABC's online poll following last week's Republican debate, garnering more than 9,400 of 11,000 votes as of mid-day Monday. ABC News, which apparently feels like it's been punk'd, chalks it up to "Paul supporters [who] have mastered the art of 'viral marketing,' using Internet savvy and blog postings to create at least the perception of momentum for his long-shot presidential bid." Meanwhile, Todd Zeigler has a more lengthy analysis of why Paul is so hot on Digg, noting that, in the absence of mainstream coverage, Paul's supporters are turning to Digg (Democrat Mike Gravel is also starting to get dugg), and Digg readers have been receptive. The result? A submission trying to get Paul on the Daily Show has attracted over 5,500 diggs.

DomeNation, the bi-partisan Internet TV project started by MyDD's Jerome Armstrong TechPresident's David All, posted its first interview yesterday, with Senator John Kerry. Kerry was open and friendly during the interview, in which, among other things, he discussed YouTube and the role of the Internet in politics. He talked about posting on Firedoglake and name-checked an impressive array of bloggers. "They're the new medium, the new ways of communicating with people... they've been a terrific truth and accountability squad," he said.

TechPresident reader Patrick Rodriguez sent in a chart he compiled showing which presidential candidates are hot on Digg, and whose stories are most frequently buried (hidden by users).

One of the things I love about blogging and the web is that if you have a halfway decent idea and it gets noticed by a few sites that function like giant switching stations, very quickly all kinds of other good people pop up and get in touch with their own good ideas and content. So, in just the last day, since being tapped by both TechCrunch and TalkingPointsMemo, here are some of the cool sites and posts that I've encountered: