Mark Sanford’s admission of an affair has sent ripples throughout the political world, and have given the folks at the Huffington Post an excuse to accuse Republicans of hypocrisy for having affairs while the publicly promote marriage, life, low taxes, and fiscal responsibility.  (What all those have to do with being an utter scumbag, I’m not 100% sure.)

But there are a couple reasons why the timing of the story is good.  For as staunch an opponent of stimulus spending as he was, Stanford was not the next Republican standard bearer.  For a party which needs regional diversity, a southern white guy is not the best choice.

Second, although the twin scandals of John Ensign and Mark Sanford are shots to Republican efforts to rebuild, the 2010 elections are a year and a half away and the 2012 elections (which will represent much better opportunities to regain seats in the Senate) are three and a half years away.  Getting a scandal out of the way early makes Sanford’s political suicide a non-issue when it really matters.

All that is fine from a messaging standpoint, but Stanford obviously has bigger things to worry about.  Political parties swing into and out of power with regularity; families are much tougher to rebuild.

The Associated Press is warning its employees: watch what you post on Facebook.  The company that gives us all the fourth-grade-reading-level news that’s fit to print wants to make sure its reputation isn’t tarnished by the private lives of its employees.

Given current realities, this is probably a good idea: AP’s value as a company is based on its credibility.  As private lives become more public in digital environments, the chances of something extremely offensive or embarassing being posted increases.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said for transparency.  Mashable mentioned on a recent post about journalism and new media that reporters’ social network presences allow us to see their personal biases, which in turn gives us the grain of salt we need to take along with anything they write.

As I was heading out the door on Friday afternoon, a colleague brought my attention to Peggy Noonan’s Friday column in the Wall Street Journal – especially the final few paragraphs, which discuss the role of technology in the Iran election protests:

“Some ask if the impact of the new technology is exaggerated. No. Twittering and YouTubing made the story take hold and take off. But did the technology create the rebellion? No, it encouraged what was there. If they Twittered and liveblogged the French Revolution, it still would have been the French Revolution: “this aft 3pm @ the bastille.” It all still would have happened, perhaps with marginally greater support. Revolutions are revolutions and rebellions are rebellions; they don’t work unless the people are for it. In Iran, Twitter reported and encouraged. But the conviction must be there to be encouraged.”

That’s noteworthy advice for anyone trying to build an online political movement: it won’t work without offline excitement and action.

Mashable has another story of the role of media in Iran – the disturbing video of a young woman, Neda Soltani, dying on the street from a gunshot wound.  Blogger Pete Cashmore asks, “Among the myriad Tweets and Facebook messages, could it be that a YouTube video becomes the galvanizing moment in Iran’s troubled election?”  I’m surprised that he sounds surprised – in crisis situations video will always be the most powerful means of communication.  Videos of the human effect will create a connection with events which simply cannot be duplicated by a 140-word Twitter post.

Technology is giving us a better picture of what is happening in Iran, but it isn’t causing it.  The rules of revolution don’t change, only how we watch them.

With media blackouts and even cell phone service disrupted, American news agencies are a-twitter about… well, Twitter.  The live feed of information from Iranian citizens certainly offer a compelling look at the internal issues Iran is facing – enough that the State Department asked the microblogging service not to shut their site down for routine maintenance.  (If they could only get rid of the fail whale…)

This is a big democratization movement indeed, but maybe not in Iran.  Lost in the assumptions of a stolen election is the compelling possibility that Mahmoud Ahmedinejad actually won – or that the outcome of the election would not result in much of a policy shift, anyway.

Much more indicative of lasting change is the way Twitter allowed some in the US to pick up on the upheaval in Iran despite more traditional media services being a bit slow on the uptake.  The real change that comes out of Tehran may be in how the media get the news they pass on to us.

A friend sent me a link to an advocacy campaign being waged by FedEx.  FedEx is fighting obscure language in an regulatory bill that they say would force them to change their labor practices – and give UPS a better chance to compete.

I see online advocacy campaigns like this all the time, but this one has a few flaws.  For instance, the advocacy tool will help generate mass emails to elected officials, but that’s not a particularly effective method of getting a point across.  Congressional offices are staffed at the same levels as they were in the 1970s – but they receive much more communication through platforms that were unfathomably three decades ago.  Mass emails get counted and deleted, so their real effect is dubious.

Further, the video on the site is smart, but it’s hosted in a custom video player.  That makes it harder to share.  The web development team could have saved bandwidth and money byembedding a video hosted on YouTube.

In fact,the video on the site apparently hasn’t even been posted on YouTube by the Brown Bailout campaign – only(inexplicably) by one of their critics.

The creative team behind the Brown Bailout site is certainly funny; but like any clever message they need a good strategy to spread it – and make it have an impact where it matters.