Here's an article Jason is sure to enjoy, Digg's failing democracy.  I agree mostly, Digg was novel at first, but now for every potentially interesting story on any page, there are 10 others that are a waste of time. Here's a telling fact: slashdot is still in my feed reader, while digg's feed was removed long ago. Maybe I'm just getting old, but going to digg feels like jumping into a room full of geek-wanna-be's with ADD.

How could this happen? Have diggers simply stopped caring about their own community?Aside from mindlessly digging everything that hits the front page, diggers no longer have any noticeable impact on their own website. They are a shadow of their former fired-up-federalist selves. Like all good "voters" they simply vote for the so-called top tier candidates, unaware of/uninterested in the process by which those candidates were placed before them. These days the reality is that most successful digg stories need exposure on a high traffic website to push the link over the hump and onto the front page.

Philippe Legrain, who despite his first name is apparently British not French, is an economist/journalist who offers a perspective on immigration that you don't hear lately. The case against immigration in the US is based on fear, and racisim/xenophobia, covered in a veneer of economic half-truths. Legrain spent six months researching immigration policies, and his book on the subject has been nominated for Financial Times/Goldman Sacks Business Book of the Year Award.  Melissa Lafsy interviews him on The Case for Open Immigration: A Q&A With Philippe Legrain:

Those who claim that tougher laws and restrictions could stop immigration are peddling a false prospectus. Even if, at a huge cost, the U.S. built a wall along its vast border with Mexico, deployed an armada to patrol its shores, searched every arriving vehicle and vessel, denied visas altogether to people from developing countries, and enforced stringent internal checks on people's right to remain here, migrants would get through --- documents can be forged or stolen, people smuggled, officials bribed. And by trying to protect the country from the phantom menace of immigration, officials could end up turning the U.S. into a police state.

For so many of us, soccer can take on a quasi-religious aspect in our lives. Many times, just in the way we talk about the game, or how we came to be a fan of the game. A dead easy way to start a conversation with a soccer fan is to ask him when they had their "on the road to Damascus" moment. John Kass had his moment from soccer-dad to soccer-fan and is now preaching the good word:\

But if I ever find out that Gore is a true soccer fan, my politics will change radically. I'll beg him to run for president because America needs a leader capable of using the awesome power of big government to forcibly impose soccer on the rest of you, for your own good.