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Political Pop-ups, and Follow the Money
finelinebob writes "Now we know why Bush wants broadband for everyone: The Republican National Committee plans on bringing the campaign to Internet pop-up ads. From the article: 'Internet experts said that Republicans have entered a new realm of campaigning. Pop-up and pop-under ads of any variety haven't been around long, and little data exist to suggest how voters might respond to uninvited interruptions.' Okay, folks -- get your pop-up blocking browsers now!" While you're waiting for your first pop-up, pop on over to a website that tracks campaign contributions: vVF4N writes "Fundrace 2004 lets you enter any street address and see what people at or near that location have contributed to a presidential candidate, along with their addresses and occupations. The data is based on reports that campaigns regularly file with the Federal Election Commission. You can also look up a name and get the same information. The Washington Post (registration required) has more. Find out who your friends and neighbors are contributing to."
So instead of using the Internet to rally and energize the American public into voting for them, they are going to use it to furthor alienate and annoy us with pop-ups? Are they that out of touch that they believe pop-ups are actualy going to give them some sort of edge?
stuff
An oppertunity for the republicans to annoy everyone. That's what I like to see.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
As if pr0n pop-ups werent enough, we'll now have Dubya and others popping up and asking to vote for them. :-)
Wonder if the internet usage policy will classify Dubya with his silly grin as "distasteful, objectionable content"
http://efil.blogspot.com/
If this means I get "Vote for Bush" popups in Australia I'm going to be very upset.
I'd prefer a 12" penis any day!
Soon, we'll find that John F. Kerry tries to counter this with 30 second flash intros. Listen to that thumping techno beat and kick ass effects!
Oh, what about Nader, you ask? He won't use computers. Apparently they pollute or something. He wants monitors banned because of their adverse health effects, too. But, his rumbling will be heard across the world anyways, so don't you worry!
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Under provision 911.666 of the PATRIOT II act, any method of circumventing the delivery of any advertisement form is considered an act of terrorism, punishable by life imprisonment in a forest labour camp, or summary execution. RFID signals broadcast from advertisements will be used in conjunction with the RFID tags now secretly being placed in your contact lenses to permit 24 hour total penis enlargement awareness.
And he donated the max ($2000) Geeze I guess times we're *that* tough this year.
cia: there are weapons of mass destruction in iraq!
bush: okay!
cia: and americans love pop-up ads!
bush: okay!
Looks like he'll be doing the first useful thing in his presidential career...
:)
Giving people a reason to ditch IE and run Firefox!
Still he's not getting my vote, well as I'm English I couldn't anyway!
Why would you want to do that when you can get the cross platform Firefox that doesn't have the inbuilt holes that anything that embeds IE has.
Also IMO Firefox has a nicer interface.
Note: MyIE2 does also support the Gecko engine in recent versions but enabling it isn't obvious and there's a few bugs in the integration.
v.ote for b.ush!!
asfhjku hdsjhkf hdfhbio
looks to me like a very interesting graphical representation of voter contributions, it seems a little scary though that I can access the name and address of everyone in my zipcode who contributed x amount of money to x candidate; I can see why it is necessary to keep these records public, but I can also see some potential for mis-use. Anyone else have this thought?
-ashot
Wasn't there some discussion about provisions in the CAN-SPAM act to exempt "informative" political messages?
:)
At that level, I wouldn't be surprised if popup blockers and filters against political spam were somehow to run afoul of DMCA (circumvention devices!) and friends. You MUST view this popup, we're checking! Honest!
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
You do realize, right, that the point of using Mozilla Firefox is not just popup blocking. In fact, it's going to be hard to market Firefox on the aspect of pop-up blocking when you have options like you mentioned and the Google toolbar.
For me, the point of using Firefox is having a browser that I don't need to worry about. When I use IE, I'm not sure whether the next link will take me to an exploit. Or some annoying script. I don't really have that worry with Firefox....not yet..
Extensive reading, but just read line by line.
Of course, though, we know that the GOP has done better in communicating their message, while the Democrats continue to fail Influence 101...a sad sight.
Single popups are bad enough, but just wait until the Republicans try those rapid-fire take-over-your-screen can't-hit-the-X-fast-enough popups. "Terrorists might be hiding under your bed!" "Democrats are Liberal Liberal Liberal!" "Weapons of Mass Destruction!" "Our Enemies are EEEEVILLLLL!" "Yellow Alert No, Orange Alert! No, Yellow Alert!" "Pink Alert - Gay People Might Destroy Your Marriage Unless You let Us Repeal The Constitution!" "Don't Vote Democrat or Terrorists Will Squish This Hamster!" "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid!" "Don't Worry, Republicans Will Protect You!" "Pay No Attention to the Web Bug Behind This Window!" "CLick the Dancing Osama To Fight Terrorism!" "Click the Dancing Osama to Vote Republican!" "If you Don't see the Fnords, they won't eat you!" "Homeland Security works if We All Cooperate!"
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Governor John Bush only gave his brother $1000?
Zing!
So here in California, the Republicans already have lots of practice annoying Internet users. Let's hope they keep it up!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But it won't list the $10000/plate campaign dinners though will it?
See my journal, I write things there
Pop-up and pop-under ads of any variety haven't been around long ... ???
They've been around TOO long. More specifically, they have been around, period.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Vote for Bush, vote for the DMCA.
Nader ran against the DMCA in 2000, I can't see why he'd change his mind in 2004.
Kucinich, too, ran against the DMCA. Pity nobody cared.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
I had a knee-jerk reaction to browsing this database filled with no less than a dozen of my friends', families', and aquaintances' political affiliations with corresponding addresses. My inner-self cried "INVASION OF PRIVACY! ABORT! ABORT!"
I then took a mental step back, collected my wits, and clicked the "Privacy" link. lo and behold:
Upon further investigation it becomes apparent that this site is a Very Good Thing(tm). It is a bastion of democracy.
Fundrace, I salute you.
@ASP.NET's parent-teacher meeting: "Little Johnny.NET is very bright, but he doesn't play well with others."
There's potential for mis-use, but talk about an eye-opener. How many average citizens would take the time to request this data from the FEC?
A quick lookup of my street address was extremely insightful. I recognized many of the names from my years in the business community and guess what? Most of the Republican donors are owners and officers of companies who have been laying off workers (and outsourcing their work) with most contributing $2000 checks from every person in their household. The Dems, on the other hand, had more contributors, but they were much smaller contributions ($50 - $500) and mostly from small business owners and average Joe's -- many retirees.
Now I can see for myself why the Bushies have over $100M at their disposal, while Kerry's only at $22M or so. Knowing where the money is coming from helps show where government will be going -- and if Bush wins, it will be going into Big Business's back pocket.
"Republicans, appealing to the lowest common denominator since 1978."
Democrats do the same. Most politicians within this two-party system do the same. They appeal to the lowest common denominator.
I used to feel that my intelligence was insulted everytime I heard a politician speak on an issue. Over time, I have realized that politicians must appeal to their bases: people who are fanatical about the political party to which they belong, which makes them too blind to examine the issues beyond taking their candidates proclamations as gospel and people who are too dumb to examine the issues in any way, shape or form and vote for a particular party because that's what they've always done. The rest of the electorate is forever voting for the lesser of two evils.
yes its a bug... but then again, FireFox is not YET v1.0
If you download an extension/theme, you have to immeadiately restart the browser to clear the install queue.
Otherwise when you download the next one, you will get *TWO" restart messages (and increasing each time)
This bug WILL be fixed by 1.0, and is hardly what you call serious, and better by far than IE, which requires to you restart the system at times.
Have a nice day!
In an article about pop-ups, three sponsored links to pop-up blockers ... and a pop-up!
Ho hum...
It doesn't list the Bin Laden family contributions???
If you want us to stop.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Certainly do not use popup blockers for this, on the contrary, bring them up, click, bring'em up again and click click until you're tired -- it'll cost them money for each click... I reckon we could even have a "Click The Bush" campaign in which good net citizens would click on those ads several times a day to help rid the world of this pestilence :)
Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives.
you think either the Republicans or Democrats are that concerned about where the money comes from.
Now that's optimistic! If you've got a prostitution ring in Thailand that specializes in the anal rape of baby monk seals, you just have to launder the money before you buy the politician.
Randomly enough. They admit this is an experiment and they don't know what they're doing, but they've got, and I shit you not, so much money, that it makes it a perfect time to run the experiment. That's their actual, said it to the camera, position. It doesn't matter how much they piss people off, they've got enough extra money to fix it.
But I'd check the outrage if I were a European. The Republicans couldn't by a better publicist than the EU. Remember, if you look like you hate America, anything that pisses you off looks like a good idea. If you want Ohio and it's electoral votes to go to the red team in November, keep it up.
Jane works in a law firm. Jane likes dennis kucinich. Jane's boss, a partner, likes GW Bush.
Jane's boss can only contribute up to the maximum personal limit of $2000 or whatever it is. But, he can strongly suggest to jane and others that it might be in jane's career interest to do the same.
now, the boss can check up on jane with this handy web site. of course, nobody has forced jane to do anything, but still, the boss can check up to see what kind of 'team player' she is.
this is TRULY scary. do a search of your loal neighborhood and see how many lawyers' names come up.
Alienating the Americans ? How about alienating the Swiss ?
Each couple of month, in Switzerland we're supposed to vote about a dozen of laws, laws change and other subjects.
Just imagine the desktop mess if swiss politician start to make pop-up like the american : not just two pop-ups for two candidate, but dozens of pop-ups about pro and cons for each subjet.
Now THAT'S going to make a big wreckage on the desktop ! I think people will start to hate democracy... or make Mozilla the official nationnal browser for it's ad-blocking...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That's the point. They are sending pop-ups for their opponents, stupid!
Yes. Under campaign finance laws, any person or corporation can donate a maximum of $2000 to one candidate.
How sad is it that I, in Canada, know this, yet all these Americans don't?
Gee, this Fundrace thing is fun...and kinda scary. Especially if you normally don't want people to know your home address. Here's some of the giving habits of our favorite cast of characters:
Bill Gates - CEO Microsoft - Republican
Steve Ballmer - President Microsoft - Republican
Hilary Rosen - Consultant & President RIAA - Democrat
Jack Valenti - President MPAA - Democrat
Darl McBride - President SCO Group - Thankless Bastard
Ruby on Rails Screencast
It's funny..
If you look at all the people who donated to Bush from Microsoft, its all VP's and high level management that get paid the big bucks and donated the max of $2000, but most the ones that contributed to other candidates are all lower paid blue-collar from programmers to trainers and could only donate $200-$500 dollars..
What does that tell you about a "bush" economy.. other than those that are benefiting are the ones that are already able to retire..
I'll be glad to see bush go.. not that I'm a Kerry supporter.. but I'm just tired of all the crap.
SCO attacks IBM w/o proof.. Bush attacks Iraq w/o Proof... which one do you think will get away with it, without any consequences?
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
...and click-on, and click-on, and click-on, and click-on.
I Promise to single-handedly make any web site feeding a Bush pop-up rich beyond their wildest dreams with click-thru revenue.
Of course, I'll vote for Anybody But Bush.
I'll waste his money and put him out of a job just like he wastes my money and keeps me out of a job.
That's the only way we can stop political pop-ups: No Return On Investment. Let's give them some 'hard data' to show them it's not worth it!