While I am the first to admit I’m a little on the cranky side, it actually takes quite a lot to trip my moral outrage switch.

But GoDaddy has tripped it in spectacular style.

The well-known blogger Hoder is a dual Canadian/Iranian citizen who is generally considered to be the daddy of Iranian blogging. He has written passionately about politics and censorship, been published in mainstream publications including the Guardian, and visited Israel in 2007 as a citizen journalist and peace activist.

On November 1, 2008 (almost exactly a year ago), Hoder was arrested while visiting his family in Tehran, probably because of that visit to Israel. He has since spent at least ten months in solitary confinement, and has been repeatedly beaten and tortured. He may still be facing the death penalty.

His domain is registered at GoDaddy. Hoder.com, and thus the site housing the online archive of his writing, expires in 21 days. Many, many  members of MetaFilter, where Hoder is also a member, are more than willing to fork over the renewal fee to preserve his domain while he’s imprisoned. GoDaddy’s response to this request has been thus:

They refused citing security issues. However, if any of Hoder’s family can provide his password or the last 6 digits of the credit card used to register, the company will allow renewal, even with a different CC.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

Would GoDaddy like the Iranian police to beat that Visa number out of Hoder? Perhaps his family should stop their efforts to get their son released and instead expend energy requesting he be “interviewed” to get his GoDaddy password?

This attitude is frankly beyond indifferent and appalling and into territory previously uncharted by my vocabulary. I am literally at a loss to find the adjectives to describe how stunning this is.

This is a problem that is very easily solved by simply crediting Hoder’s hosting and domain account, and would already be solved by any company that hadn’t had its last ounce of human decency sucked out of its mindless, bureaucratic soul. This requires nothing more than a little ordinary customer service in an extraordinary situation.

There appear to be actual people behind the @GoDaddyGuy account on Twitter. Let us hope that Twitter requests to renew #hoder’s domain registration will be treated with vastly more compassion than GoDaddy has shown to date.

They could hardly show less.

Quite honestly, I wept last night. More than once.

I never thought I would live to see this. This is so much more than a Democratic win; this is a turning point in American history. I honestly thought the US was too divided, too suspicious, too protectionist to elect a black man to the presidency in my lifetime.

I was wrong. After eight long years, I was willing and ready to elect any democratic candidate; the DNC gave me my dream candidate. But I never, for one minute, believed that he’d be elected. I loved him, I supported him, I donated to him, and God did I ever want change, but I simply did not believe the US had changed enough in the last 40 years to put this worthy man in the White House.

It has. And though he ran on a promise of change, the fact that America was willing to elect him – to donate, to campaign, to phone bank, to canvass, to work, to fight, to vote to elect him – means the change has already begun.

No matter what he does in his presidency, the impact of that change will reverberate for generations. For millions of children, the literally unimaginable barrier has been broken. And if he can, they can.

And I am so very, very happy he did.

Pat Phelan has a post up over at his blog in which people have been discussing boundaries and blogger ethics in terms of full disclosure. This kicked me up the arse to go and do something I’ve been meaning to do since Day 1: add a Disclosures page to my site.

There are some cases that are cut and dried, like the instance Pat is highlighting. If you’re being paid by Flixwagon, using Flixwagon on your site, demoing Flixwagon, and/or writing about Flixwagon in your own space or others, you need to disclose that you have a financial relationship with Flixwagon.

And then it gets muddy. Because by paid, I mean any exchange with a monetary value attached to it. If I got free hosting from Blacknight (which I do, although not for this blog) and wrote about Blacknight and how awesome they are (which I have), I would be ethically obligated to disclose in my post that I get free hosting from Blacknight (which I did, just for the record).

Furthermore, were I interviewed by a journalist about blog hosting and mentioned that I send all my clients to Blacknight, I would also be ethically obligated to disclose to said journalist that I have an existing financial relationship with them in that I get free hosting.

After that, it’s up to the journalist to put that fact in the piece or not, but I think they should. If they didn’t, you better believe I’d be right here in your browser (or RSS reader, as the case may be) disclosing that myself as soon as the article was published.

Why? Because the fact that I am either getting money or getting freebies by its very nature colours my perception of whoever is giving them to me. Tom Raftery hates them, and I know this. I, however, love them – in part because I’ve never had an issue with them, but also in part because they have given me something that makes me happy. I feel special, warm and fuzzy about Blacknight because they give me stuff, and the fact that they give me stuff slants my opinion of them.

Therefore, when a journalist asks me “What is the best blog hosting?” and I say “Blacknight,” this is not based on an survey of the market or even on my experience as a typical customer. My opinion is no longer impartial because I have an extra relationship with them, and it’s one that involves money, goods or services.

And if that’s true of €33 worth of free hosting for a tiny site that isn’t even running, it’s exponentially more true as the numbers and visibility go up. The web is incredibly powerful in forming opinion, and to not reveal a paid relationship when you endorse or evangelise about a company, product or service is an abuse of readers and viewers. It harms – and can potentially destroy – credibility.

Which, before you ever pull a referral, ship a product or sell a service, is the most important thing anyone has online.

A couple of weeks ago I took the early morning train up to Dublin to renew my accidentally expired passport. The US Embassy in Dublin is open for approximately 3 hours each morning, 4 days a week, so this meant getting on the very first train from Cork and I still barely made it before they closed for what is presumably a 21 hour lunch.

Entering the compound one might politely describe as The Ugliest Building in Dublin was a very bizarre experience. In the US, I’m used to armed police on the streets, metal detectors in schools and heavy security at shopping malls. In Ireland, none of that happens. So it is extremely disconcerting to find ones self in Ballsbridge, entering an already freaky compound through something that very closely approximates airport security complete with uniformed guards, a metal detector, an x-ray belt for my handbag, and the requirement to leave both my phone and my nail scissors at the checkpoint. I spent more than a moment wondering if I was being shielded from a potential hostage situation or actually be taken hostage.

Neither event came to pass and everyone was exceedingly nice, from the guards to the cashier to the lovely French woman who helped me complete my application. My new passport was required for our mortgage paperwork, so I was anxious to get it back as soon as possible and minimise any delays. When the form asked for my email address, I provided it willingly so that the consulate could have one more way of contacting me if there were any issues.

There was no opt in/opt out checkbox and no disclaimer or fine print of any kind, so I naturally assumed my email address would be used only for purposes pertaining to the application on which I provided it.

Today, three days after the prompt delivery of my shiny new passport, I received an email from wardendublin@state.gov – something long and rambling to do with absentee ballots and Minnesota. Here it is in all its spammy glory:

First of all, I have no idea what they’re on about, nor do I care. I have never lived in Minnesota and doubt I could locate it on a map if challenged to do so. I have certainly never voted in Minnesota, and voting information specific to Minnesota is irrelevant to me – as it is to every other US expat in Ireland who is from any of the 49 states not named Minnesota.

Second of all, and far more irritating, is the following:

• I have no idea what this list is. It is not identified in any way in the footer. The sender, likewise, is unidentified.
• I did not ask to be on this list, and at no point was I told that my information would be used for what amounts to federal spam.
• Most importantly, there is no mechanism provided for me to opt out of this list now that I’m on it.

I am, to say the least, irate. I have an immediate need to drop someone’s trousers and hand out a suitably painful, lesson-instilling spanking. I am absolutely positive that this practice must break a US or EU spam law, and I am old and crotchety and spoiling for a law suit.

I don’t want to write a letter to some dusty office in Dublin, Brussels or Minnesota; I want to haul someone into court and beat them up for their pocket change, because I am exactly that pissed off.

So tell me, dear interpipes, who do I sue? Seriously.

The last two days were a completely unexpected whirlwind. While it’s been a peculiar flavour of fun, it’s also been exhausting and more than a little weird. Not to mention more than a little drunk.

The exhausting part was entirely my fault. I sent out a press release on Wednesday at around 10 PM, figuring it would be a good thing to have in journalists’ Inboxes first thing in the morning. They started calling 5 minutes later. When Newstalk then rang and asked if I could go on air the next morning, I started to get half a clue that Two Tits and a Vote might catch more attention than I had anticipated. So as soon as I got off the last call at midnight, I hastily convened an emergency IM meeting with the fabulous Suzy, who helped me develop my talking points and message list for radio shows. We pow-wowed until 3 AM, though I have to say the time invested was completely worth it.

What Thursday brought was, first of all, a damn early wake-up call when a regional paper rang at 7 AM. From there the phone pretty much rang straight through until noon. It was so full on that when the Independent rang at 12 to ask if they could send a photographer down now, I told them I needed an hour because I had not yet had a chance to pee, shower or brush my teeth and was still in my pajamas.

I also wanted to *cry* because I’d had 4 hours of sleep, and as you may have seen in your paper du jour, looked like the back end of a bus that had been run over by another bus.

After an hour of having various hideous photos of me taken by a very nice man, I jumped in a cab to Cork Station, grabbed a cold noodle salad from the newsagent’s, and with sixty seconds to spare made the 2:30 Dublin train. Where my master plan of grabbing some sleep was promptly thwarted by a hen party from Mallow. A very large, very loud hen party that in a Patton-esque triumph of tactical resource planning, managed to distribute itself across every available carriage.

In Dublin, I was graciously rescued by Ellybabes, which may be cosmological proof that there is a God because at this point I was so exhausted I couldn’t move under my own steam without walking into a lamp post. We arrived at the Odessa Club just in time for me to do a radio interview at 6 PM, after which… I made a huge, moronic, critical error.

I had a glass of wine.

It wasn’t until about 10 minutes later that I noticed I could no longer properly form words. I pulled my empty lunch container out of my bag, read the back, and realised that my complete food intake for the day had consisted of a grand total of 180 calories. And I was now absolutely, irretrievably BOMBED OUT OF MY TREE.

There is a reason I never, ever, ever drink. The reason is that I am spectacularly bad at it, even under the most auspicious circumstances. And I think we can all agree that four hours of sleep, five cups of coffee, and 180 calories worth of food do not make for auspicious circumstances.

At this point we migrated upstairs to join the throngs at the the tremendously successful TechLudd event (Anton Mannering: Tech Crowd Hero!), where I had another glass of wine because whatever shards of judgment with which I am normally endowed were now firmly locked in a cask labeled Sauvignon Blanc. I then proceeded to play nicely with some people whilst being borderline abusive to a number of others – people to whom I would sincerely apologise if only I could remember who they were.

The only blessing was that I had to leave at 8:30 PM to catch the last train back to Cork, limiting both my alcohol intake and my exposure to other humans. When the train left the station and the announcement was made that there would be no food service, I think I actually wept before keeling over and finally, finally falling asleep. Or possibly just passing out.

Friday morning I was suitably punished for my sins by an incredibly early call from a radio station ringing to slot me into their morning show in a few hours. After that, my hangover (yes, from two glasses of wine) and I went out to get the morning papers from the newsagent over the road and with 9 hours of sleep in two days, started all over again.

The media attention for Two Tits and a Vote was of course completely worth it and utterly delightful. I was so, so glad for the press bump; the interest level was just amazing and very gratifying.

Almost as gratifying, though, was waking up this morning at 7 am not because the phone had rung at an ungodly hour for the third straight day, but because the dog had stepped on my face. Press coverage is great, but I’m no kind of media maven. And after the last 48 hours, being able to pee without three calls stacking up on my mobile is its own kind of thrill.

A campaign website to help Irish women leverage their tax euros and their votes to demand better access to breast health care. The site features quick online activities (online petition, downloadable campaign letters and postcards for purchase) to lobby politicians, and received extensive media coverage.

Very quickly from what has in the last 24 hours become an insane asylum:

TwoTitsandaVote.com is getting a lot of attention. I owe a serious pint to bloggers who helped get the word out online and to the people who shared their press contacts and who helped prep me for media interviews. It worked:

• Irish Independent – Page 10
• Irish Daily Mirror – Page 27
• The Star – Page 20

I have also had a landline and a mobile pinned to my ear since 4 am yesterday (more on that later!) and have done a bunch of taped interviews, now rolling out live interviews (updating this list as they are booked):

• 9.05 Radio Kerry (Dierdra Walsh was brilliant)
• 10:15 Cork 103 FM (David absolutely smashing)
• 10.45 LMFM Drogheda (Michael a little chilly)
• 11.05 TiperraryFM (Seamus Martin very engaged)
• 11:30 Midlands 103 (Shorter than I’d hoped given region)
• 1.00 Spin 103.8 FM Dublin (Team very clued in, rock)
• Monday at 9:05 Ocean FM in Sligo (note to self: DO NOT forget)
• Tuesday at 16:55 The Last Word on Today FM
• Thursday at 3 pm, Inside Out also via podcast!

Newstalk, who canceled yesterday, are also trying to confirm for Life with Orla Berry for today somewhere from 12 to 12:30 so hopefully that will work out as well! Bummer.

This is nuts. I’m exhausted. I’m also thrilled. Totally, totally thrilled.

I’m delighted to announce the launch of TwoTitsandaVote.com – yes, seriously.

Two Tits and a Vote is a political action campaign, designed to get women to use their muscle as voters to take action around a single issue at a time. Men are very welcome to take part; the platform is merely aimed at mobilising women.

It’s built around the concept of “armchair activism.” Armchair activism enjoys reasonable take-up online, but is often decried as ultimately being rather useless because it rarely translates into the real world. I started to think a lot about how to merge all of the good stuff about armchair activism – it’s fast, it’s accessible, it’s not a big ask, and it delivers a feel-good factor to the participant – with actions that could actually take form in the real world.

After a lot of thought, I came up with a couple of ideas that are basically being piloted for this first campaign:

• An online petition, which will actually be printed off and delivered to Mary Harney’s office.
• Letter templates, which you can personalise or just print off and mail in.
• Postcards you can buy and fill out online that will be mailed (by me) to the HSE.

I have to admit that the postcards are my favourite. They arrived today and they look fantastic. I am completely smitten by the idea of these turning up in the Mary Harney’s post box. Undoubtedly, they will cheer up her postie, too.

The name actually didn’t take that much thought. I used it as a blog entry titles away back, and it stuck in my head. Is it slightly shocking? Sure. A four month waiting list for a breast scan, however, is much more shocking. It’s memorable, and it should work to grab attention. I suppose I’ll find out just how attention grabbing it is after round one of the press releases is done.

Anyway, needless to say, I would appreciate any links to the site anyone might be able to provide. I do sincerely believe that with enough people taking part, campaigns like this can have an impact. It’s all about the numbers, though, and I’m really keen to get to critical mass on the first campaign so we have a nice body of people to help propel people forward for future campaigns.

You know you want to send a postcard…

I love reading the comments over at Twenty Major, mostly because I can sit on the couch shrieking “Have you seen what these people are saying?” while my husband rolls his eyes at me under his breath and passes me another gin and valium cocktail.

I used to be self-righteous. Now I’m just addicted to tranquillisers.

Anyway, yesterday’s attack of the vapours was brought on by Twenty’s response to Green minister John Gormley’s announcement of a battery disposal scheme:

The directive makes producers responsible for the financing of the collection, treatment and safe disposal of batteries.

Twenty Major, who takes crankiness to height even I have to admire, comments:

There’s simply no question the Greens are making the most of being in government and really addressing the serious issues that affect Irish people today.

OK whatever. If we’d paid a little more attention to our hairspray back in the day, we wouldn’t be in the position we’re in now. We’re just starting to see a groundswell of change today that may reap substantial benefits 20 years from now. Personally, assuming we make it that long, I’d prefer not to be swallowing down Cadmium from battery contaminated groundwater in my drinking glass when we get there.

However, not one to stand on the sidelines and throw stones, I’ve found an environmental campaign right up Twenty’s alley. I think he’ll be able to get behind this concept and will just love lobbying Gormley to take it to the EU. Hours of fun for the whole entourage!

Women in the UK can recycle their vibrators with Love Honey’s Rabbit Amnesty program. So far, Love Honey has collected, processed and recycled nearly a ton of loved to death rabbit vibes. Sure I can mail my vibrators over there, but this is New Ireland, dammit, I should be able to recycle my sex toys right here at home. Preferably in a drop box at my local Tesco or Green Party office, even. In fact, there should be a government sponsored project like this in every country in the EU, don’t you think?

Until he has legislation in place, though, I think I’ll be sending my old rabbits to Twenty, just to keep him hopping.

Now bring mama a gin. And some batteries.

Here is a comparative example of how breast cancer assessment, diagnosis and treatment is supposed to work in a first world country, and yet utterly fails in Ireland:

On Wednesday, December 5th, American Susan Reynolds found a mass in her breast. In her own words,

When I discovered a very thick area in my breast I called the doctor. The next day I was in her office. A half hour after that I was in the diagnostic radiologist’s. A full afternoon and multiple stab wounds later we had a variety of samples of malignant tentacles of tissue that were on their way to the lab.

Yesterday, the 21st of December, 16 days later, Susan Reynolds was in surgery. Yesterday, SIXTY FOUR DAYS after first calling her GP about a lump in her breast, Al finally had access to the first step in assessment, a diagnostic ultrasound. And that was after an Irish blogstorm, radio talkshow coverage, local political intervention and a question to Mary Harney, the Minister for Health, in the Dail.

Susan Reynold’s internet support comes from friends and friends of friends, all Twitter users, who have started The Frozen Pea Fund to raise money for breast cancer research in Susan’s name. She didn’t need bloggers to get an appointment; she didn’t need a radio show to get testing; she didn’t need a congressional inquiry to get treatment. Her friends are free to show their support through fund raising for a charity that isn’t Susan Reynolds because Susan simply had access to the care and treatment she needed when she needed it.

At the rate we’re going here in Ireland, we won’t ever be raising goodwill funds as an act of support for someone’s cancer diagnosis. We’ll be raising lifesaving funds to send them abroad so they can get prompt and appropriate treatment.

I wish the best to both of these women. But the fact I am more confident about the long term prospects for the woman having a mastectomy in America than the woman having an ultrasound in Ireland speaks volumes – volumes – about the state of the HSE. This simply has to change. We can do better than this. We have to.