Best Super Tuesday Candidate for Technology?

Petey_Alchemist writes "With Super Tuesday coming up and the political field somewhat winnowed down, the process of picking the nominees for the next American President is well underway. At the same time, the Internet is bustling through a period of legal questions like Copyright infringement, net neutrality, wireless spectrum, content filtering, broadband deployment. All of these are just a few of the host of issues that the next President will be pressured to weigh in on during his or her tenure. Who do you think would be the best (or worst) candidate on Internet issues?"

Comments

A Good Reference

[longacre]

Popular Mechanics' Geek The Vote '08 has a nice rundown of each candidate's tech policies.

Check the candidate web sites

[polin8]

I was impressed by Obama's technology issues page:

http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/

The summary points are:

        * Ensure an open Internet.
        * Create a transparent and connected democracy.
        * Encourage a modern communications infrastructure.
        * Employ technology to solve our nation's most pressing problems.
        * Improve America's competitiveness.

The list is pretty much "policy speak" but the detailed initiatives indicate a good grasp of the issues and a reasonable stance on the direction we need to move.

Re:Check the candidate web sites

[cduffy]

Lack of universal, affordable health care [...] Is Obama going to toss out the HMOs?

No, but he's going to give them competition. Private healthcare plans will remain available, but a publicly funded healthcare plan will be available in addition, providing competition. Individuals will be able to get rebates based on their income level to help pay for whichever healthcare system (be it a private company or the public one) they choose. This may not be "tossing out" the HMOs, but it's surely not going to make them happy.

Foreign policy in a shambles

Yup, it's a mess. However, Obama has a great deal of credibility in the foreign press, and being a relative newcomer to national politics (having most of his experience state-level and below) helps him disassociate himself (and his administration) from the US's disastrous policies of late. Indeed, his stated intention to avoid some of the US's more longstanding and counterproductive policies (like refusing to even talk to folks we disagree with) is likely to do some good.

As for economic issues -- yes, the US economy is a mess. Obama has a plan, of course -- every serious candidate claims they do, after all -- but I haven't looked at the details well enough to support it here.

Obama good, Huckabee bad

[abburdlen]

If Obama is good enough for xkcd then he's good enough for me.

I imagine Huckabee is the worst on technology issues unless of course they were mentioned in the bible.

Re:Al Gore

[Daniel Dvorkin]

And Vint Cerf agrees with him.

Re:None of them

[cduffy]

Support IRV and there really will be no such thing as a wasted vote. Right now, however, the spoiler effect is very very real.

Re:None of them

[7-Vodka]

You know, I'll bite on your cointelpro bullshit.
Nothing that Ron Paul has ever said or done is in anyway supportive of racism. He has for many decades supported individual Freedoms and Liberty which are concepts that are diametrically opposed to racism. Racism cannot exist when you have Freedom ideals that treat individuals as such and not as part of a group. Racism comes from creating groups of people and judging likewise.

Furthermore, Ron Paul is the republican candidate with the most support from minorities. It has been pointed out time and time again and unless you start accusing non-caucasians of throwing their support behind a racist candidate in some uninformed way (yeah right) you have no argument.

Everything that Dr. Paul has ever done and all the ideals he stands for seek the end of racism. The entire accusation was constructed by professional counterintelligence personel. The same types who run scenarios on stealing elections and what would happen if they were to assassinate Ron Paul.

Unfortunately for them anyone who actually looks into it or even just hears his side of the story will realize it's a joke.

Also, calling a respectable candidate who's served in congress for 20 years and has a respectable record a "batshit crazy racist loon" is quite possibly the worst ad hominem attack I have ever heard in my life. It shows you have no ground to stand on to debate his views without distorting them and have to focus on attacking the man.

But it's ok, the vast majority of people see through your games little cointelpro agent and we'll be knocking on your door soon demanding you pay your dues to our society.

Re:Check the candidate web sites -- and web hosts

[rjamestaylor]

As the AC pointed out, it's BARACK (not BARAK) OBAMA.

Registered at GoDaddy, hosted by Pair, running Server: Apache/1.3.37 to redirect http://barackobama.com/ to http://www.barakobamaa.com/ which is running Server: PWS/1.2.18.

PWS is supposedly Win98's Personal Web Server... which probably means Barack's web admins have a rich sense of humor.

Re:Barack Obama

[tomhudson]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2461415.ece

Economists have been critical of Greenspans 2003 decision to cut interest rates which, they argue, helped create the housing bubble, the collapse of which provoked this summers banking crisis.

So Bush wasn't president at that time?

Or here back in 2004: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/overcoming_the_bubble_economy.php

The damage from the overvalued dollar threatens to be even more dangerous. With President Bush largely maintaining the high dollar policy, the trade deficit and foreign debt have continued to rise at a rapid pace. The current account deficit hit an incredible $660 billion in the most recent quarter, more than 5.7 percent of GDP. This deficit will push total foreign debt to more than $3 trillion by the end of this year. On its current path, it will exceed $7 trillionapproximately 50 percent of GDPby 2009.

The deficit is actually $9 trillion, not $7 trillion, and that's a full year ahead of schedule. What ever happened to "the buck stops here?"

And I guess Bush never said this back in 2002, which was the signal to lower loan standards http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020618-1.html - my comments in italics ...

But I believe owning something is a part of the American Dream, as well. I believe when somebody owns their own home, they're realizing the American Dream. They can say it's my home, it's nobody else's home. (Applause.) And we saw that yesterday in Atlanta, when we went to the new homes of the new homeowners. And I saw with pride firsthand, the man say, welcome to my home. He didn't say, welcome to government's home; he didn't say, welcome to my neighbor's home; he said, welcome to my home. I own the home, and you're welcome to come in the home, and I appreciate it. (Applause.) He was a proud man. He was proud that he owns the property. And I was proud for him. And I want that pride to extend all throughout our country.

One of the things that we've got to do is to address problems straight on and deal with them in a way that helps us meet goals. And so I want to talk about a couple of goals and -- one goal and a problem.

The goal is, everybody who wants to own a home has got a shot at doing so. The problem is we have what we call a homeownership gap in America. Three-quarters of Anglos own their homes, and yet less than 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanics own homes. That ownership gap signals that something might be wrong in the land of plenty. And we need to do something about it.

We now know that not everyone who wants a home should be able to get one just because they can fog a mirror.

We are here in Washington, D.C. to address problems. So I've set this goal for the country. We want 5.5 million more homeowners by 2010 -- million more minority homeowners by 2010. (Applause.) Five-and-a-half million families by 2010 will own a home. That is our goal. It is a realistic goal. But it's going to mean we're going to have to work hard to achieve the goal, all of us. And by all of us, I mean not only the federal government, but the private sector, as well.

this was the initial go-ahead by Bush for the private sector to eas up on lending standards for mortgages

And so I want to, one, encourage you to do everything you can to work in a realistic, smart way to get this done. I repeat, we're here for a reason. And part of the reason is to make this dream extend everywhere.

so the mortgage industry came out with all sorts of snake-oil financial schemes, to extend the "dream" everywhere - ev