There were a flurry of stories over the weekend about the electoral dreams of former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman and former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina. Whitman is the current Republican front-runner in the race to be be the next governor of California. Fiorina has formed a committee to mull a run against Barbara Boxer for a U.S. Senate seat. Both are supposed to bring financial savvy to the government roles they seek, although both left amid serious questions about their job performance.

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While former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman mulls a run for the Republican nomination for governor of California, eBay Chairman and founder and venture investor Pierre Omidyar has cropped up in an SEC filing listed as an executive for a secretive start-up officially known as Peer News Inc. but operating a service under the name Ginx. PE Hub blogger Dan Primack dug out the SEC filing that mentions Omidyar, which also notes that the company has so far raised $2 million.

There’s not much info on the Ginx.com Web site; the blog ReadWriteWeb.com theorizes that Ginx is “a Twitter management service that recommends news items and other users you should meet, based on your interests.” He notes that Ginx is being used as a URL shortener on Twitter by some people, including Omidyar himself.

You can find hints of what’s happening here by searching for Pierre and Ginx.com on Google. For instance, here’s an example where Omidyar points people to how a Google (GOOG) search for “chimp” triggers a link to a site called BushorChimp.com.

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Campaign promises are one thing, a proven track record is another matter entirely. Unlike any other candidate in the race for the White House–Republican or Democrat–John McCain’s long U.S. Senate career leaves little doubt about the technology direction of a McCain presidency.

With 20 years of service in the Senate, the 70-year-old Arizona Republican has spent much of that time as a member of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, where the majority of technology bills originate. Over the course of his congressional career, McCain has cast votes on tech-related bills since the early days of dial-up Internet connections.

With votes on tech bills and issues going to back to 1986, McCain has staked out clear positions on network neutrality, H-1B visas, free trade and Internet taxes. While he has long cultivated an image as a maverick, when it comes to technology issues, he rarely strays from the GOP tech policy position books.

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By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s Technology Voters’ Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP. That’s probably okay with Barack Obama: Biden likely got the nod because of his foreign policy knowledge. The Delaware politician is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee who voted for the war in Iraq, and is reasonably well-known nationally after his presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2008.

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It began with a twitter from one of Capitol Hill’s best-known technophiles.

“I just learned the Dems are trying to censor Congressmen’s ability to use Twitter Qik YouTube Utterz etc–outrageous and I will fight them,” Representative John Culberson, Republican of Texas, wrote last Tuesday on his personal page on the online text-messaging site Twitter, where he posts a daily, rapid-fire log of his thoughts. Messages on Twitter are called tweets.

A few hours after he posted his first complaint (always 140 characters or less when twittering), Mr. Culberson logged back on: “Before I could post a Tweet I would have to get approval of the twits that run the House!” And an hour later: “The Dems will do this unless the Internet community stops them.”

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How was the first Republican CNN-YouTube debate? So exciting I fell asleep! I missed the last six questions and had to catch them in YouTube’s helpful playlist from the night. There’s also live-blogging coverage from the New York Times, ABC News and Mahalo.

There were no melting-snowman questions to trivialize Mitt Romney’s participation, but there was some goofiness, like this homemade candidate roundup ditty. As for content, CNN’s efforts to make sure the questions weren’t too left-leaning–a.k.a. “weed[ing] out the obvious sort of Democratic gotcha grenades”–meant that things like health care and climate change weren’t even mentioned.

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