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McCain Asks Supporters To Campaign On Blogs
Vote McCain in 2000! writes "McCain is not the stranger to technology some think him to be. McCain is now asking supporters to stump for him on blogs. Republican Web 2.0 consultant David All was effluent with praise for this outreach, calling it 'smart' and 'unique.' McCain's blogger outreach section has a handy list of political blogs which might be interested in hearing about McCain, such as the DailyKos, Crooks and Liars, and Think Progress. You can even report your posts to the campaign and 'receive points for your success,' though the page doesn't say what exactly the points are good for." Slashdot is not on their suggested blogs list. Can't imagine why.
I think not. The old fart can go stump for himself.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
I don't know who this "John McCain" is today, but he's definitely not that man I supported in 2000. I never thought I would see a John McCain who backed Bush, supported unprovoked preemptive wars, wanted to cut taxes at a time when the country is $9 *TRILLION* in debt, and sucked up to the religious right. But above all else, I NEVER NEVER NEVER thought I would see a man who was a torture victim and POW stand up and support that very torture by HIS OWN COUNTRY.
I was obviously naive to believe in him in 2000, to believe he was anything more than just another hyper-ambitious Washington scumbag who would sacrifice anything to win. I won't ever make that mistake again.
I guess he wants to hear from supporters. But this FORMER supporter wanted to chime in too.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
This is a terrifying job title.
"Life has improved immeasurably since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously." - Hunter S. Thompson
McCain has supporters who have blogs? Clearly the Internet belongs to Ron Paul, and we don't take too kindly to flippy-floppy neocons around these parts.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Because /. is neither primarily political, nor a blog, while the mentioned sites are both? Because there aren't a lot of disgruntled Hillary supporters here?
C'mon, Taco, you have lived through the careers of Lee Atwater, James Carville, Bill Clinton, and Karl Rove. Have you learned nothing about political strategy from the best in the business?
Sending McCain's supporters into the DailyKos is like sending lambs to the slaughter.
"Spam lefty blogs with righty ranting to win points!" -- it's like someone created Internet Troll: The MMOG.
Does anyone really believe that he came up with the idea himself?
to have bloggers write about you. It just happens. It's like trying to be cool. You either are, or you aren't. No amount of effort can change the fact your a nerd (or in this case, not a nerd).
He'll just end up coming across as creepy and forceful.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
It depends on how many disaffected Hillary voters still lurk there. DKos has been none too kind to Hillary supporters, and the general tone there towards them is one of incredible condescension at best, and mouth-frothing vitriol at worst. Most Hillary supporters have left the site, but it's worth putting forth a modicum of effort to find them there, nonetheless.
I think it's a smart move: get moderate Hillary supporters to believe that McCain wants their vote more than Obama does. You saw shades of this in the praise McCain heaped on Hillary in the weeks running up to her exit. It could also be enough to give him the election in November.
He would do the blogging himself but his wife doesn't have the time to help him with the puter. McCainlol
McCain is not the stranger to technology some think him to be.
Yes he is: McCain Admits He Doesn't Know How to Use a Computer.
Uh, effluent?
"Republican Web 2.0 consultant David All was effluent with praise"
From the MacOSX Dictionary:
liquid waste or sewage discharged into a river or the sea : the bay was contaminated the effluent from an industrial plant.
See also:
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+effluent
Oh, wait. Politician talking about a propaganda plan. I guess effluent is the correct word then. Carry on.
I can certainly help him blog and get his name out there and what he stands for:
John McCain is a 'miserable failure', much like George W Bush. (Google take note, please) McCain wants to continue tax cuts for wealthy Americans and corporations at a time of huge national debt and rising unemployment. He wants to continue giving $2 billion/week to Iraq instead of spending that money in the US to fix infrastructure or develop mass transit to reduce use of fossil fuel. He supports torture of terror suspects. He does NOT support a new GI bill to give money for college education to veterans. He stated that he wants terrorists to see him as "their worst nightmare" (stated in an interview on the Daily Show).
I'm happy to help him get his name out there. The more people understand what he's now running for (instead of 8 years ago), the better.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Encouraging people to use a medium doesn't indicate you "get" that medium. You need to immerse yourself in it and really grok it's ins and outs, as well as it's pitfalls and strengths.
If he really got the web, he'd know better than to turn a bunch of anonymous trolls loose with permission to bandy about his name.
People who "get" the web understand that communities need to be groomed by moderators.
but then again, commenting on a katz story is almost as self-serving as the katz story itself. -tensionboy
Every single negative stereotype you can think of about Democrats/liberals is exemplified by some of the comments on that site. Pulling out words like "racist" or "homophobe" in the middle of a conversation because someone has a principled disagreement with you. I asked once upon a time why that was any better than Republicans who pull out words like "cut and run" if you disagree with them -- needless to say that didn't win me many friends and I got about 30 replies explaining why it was "different" when Democrats do it as opposed to Republicans.
I consider myself a staunch Democrat and a liberal/progressive in most areas and that site still seems to extreme even for me. Half of the people that contribute there seem more interested in punishing the Republicans for the last seven years then they do in moving forward. They all seem to be extremely pro-Obama yet none of them pay anymore than lip service to the part of his message about disagreeing without being disagreeable and ending the partisan rancor in Washington.
I'm particularly concerned with the O'Reillyization of our political discourse. The manufactured anger. The one-sided reporting. Automatically assuming the absolute worst intentions of your opponents instead of assuming that they just have a principled disagreement with you. I flirted with Dailykos for about two weeks before my head started to hurt and I couldn't take it any longer. Ditto for Keith Olbermann. Tried watching him -- eventually came to the conclusion that he is little better than a left-wing version of Bill O'Reilly.
I would love to see a site where people on the left, right and center could come together to discuss the issues in a calm and principled manner. Hell for that matter, I'd love to see some real journalism that didn't slant to one side or the other. Closest thing I can come up with is the Newshour on PBS.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
If I was McCain, I wouldn't worry, Obama may have his "blogs", but McCain has an ENTIRE NETWORK! http://www.foxnews.com/
On tech issues, he's entirely wrong?
Obama is getting money in torrents from IP people from Hollywood to Silicon Valley precisely because he is a strong proponent of doing everything with intellectual property that many slashdotters would virulently oppose. Ultimately, this issue trumps, economically, every issue that influences humanity more than even the war in Iraq or even global warming. Then, to top it all off, he wants to chop NASA's budget. Do the people on slashdot who support him actually read his "Issues" section on his web site, or do they just stop at "Yes we can."
This is my sig.
due to the Incumbent Re-election Act of 2002 (also known as McCain/Feingold Campaign Finance Reform), blogging about John "Wipe my ass with the first amendment" McCain within 60 days of an election is illegal.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Aren't you glad that the faker in 2000 who's got a new scam in 2008 didn't get all the power in 2000 that Bush got, and then showed everyone he's a fake in 2000, just like Bush did? OK, maybe you're not glad that Bush got those powers, but aren't you glad that McCain didn't lie his way into them the same way?
Does anyone think it's just a coincidence that both McCain and Bush have become wastefully spending warmongers, now that the 2000 election is over? Maybe you should think about how they're just spokesmodel puppets for a Republican Party that cannot be stopped from wasting American lives and money destroying our government that interferes with corporate rule.
--
make install -not war
People actually wrote little journal entries on wooden logs and then would roll them down a hill or street. Eh, that's the best I could come up with. Someone else give it a try.
I think it's a smart move: get moderate Hillary supporters to believe that McCain wants their vote more than Obama does
This election has come down to race, sex, and oil.
Obama won the nomination because he won every state that had a large black population, and they overwhelmingly voted for him, and then, he split the white vote with Hillary. So now, McCain is reaching out to those white voters and po'd women that probably won't for Obama.
The PO'd women is a huge factor. If McCain picked a woman as his VP - say, Kay Hutchinson, then, that would be a smart move on his part, as, every time Obama attacked McCain on his age, it would serve to remind Hillary supporters that if McCain dies, a woman becomes president.
All McCain has to do now is flip flop a bit on drilling ANWR and off the coasts, and he can attack the Dems on supply. Let Obama defend not drilling for oil, or not supporting coal to liquids, when the price of gasoline hits $5/gal this November, and when diesel hits $6/gal. He'll make the AGW proponents happy, but no one else, and that's not enough to win an election.
McCain wins easily, carrying 40+ states.
This is my sig.
'Moderation' to me means a willingness to at least listen to other ideas with an open mind. This is not exemplified by Dailykos.
'Moderation' to me means disagreeing with your opponents without being disagreeable. This is not an example of treating your opponent respectfully and trying to encourage a meaningful dialog.
They're mainstream American liberal, which is what the rest of the world calls moderate since the American conservative party is so far right of center.No, I'm sorry, they aren't 'mainstream American liberal'. They are far-left on the American political spectrum. There's nothing inherently wrong with that and they are certainly entitled to air their opinions -- but I wouldn't call them mainstream.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Done correctly, conservative comments on liberal blogs like Kos could draw firey responses which could then be held up as examples of the mainstream left.
Crooks and Liars? Really?
I mean, look at a few carefully cherry-picked blog posts from there:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/06/11/would-mccain-want-cheney-in-his-cabinet-hell-yeah/
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/06/12/john-mccain-wont-let-the-war-stop-him-from-golfing/
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/06/11/new-moveonorg-ad-featuring-john-cusack-take-the-bushmccain-pop-quiz/
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/06/11/mccain-showcases-his-foreign-policy-expertise/
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/06/11/mccains-evangelical-problem/
I didn't have to hunt far to find those, and I knew I'd find them even before looking, having seen a few posts from C&L in the past. Maybe McCain's old friend Putin, the president of Germany, tipped them off about that site.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
So if they're issuing points for trolling lefty forums and keeping score, what score is necessary to earn an appointment to some position in some agency where I'm completely incompetent, yet responsible for nothing; I enjoy a very impressive title and $230,000 a year in salary as well as the best pension and benefits befitting the last remaining superpower nation?
Or is that on a different scale, like gold stars?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"McCain's blogger outreach section has a handy list of political blogs which might be interested in hearing about McCain, such as the DailyKos, Crooks and Liars, and Think Progress."
I don't know Think Progress, but DailyKos and Crooks and Liars are prominent left-of-centre blogs. People who post there are probably quite familiar with Mr. McCain already, though that familiarity wouldn't be the kind his campaign might like.
This sounds to me like it isn't really about campaigning for John McCain, though. It's about setting a bunch of true believers loose to swamp sites that offer opposing viewpoints with trolls. If what I've seen is any indication, these blogs can soon expect to be flooded with posts that feature all caps and lots of pure, unadulterated nonsense.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
And? So we should torture to?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
which makes him one of the most pro-human-rights republicans in the Senate. I wish he was just a bit stronger.
I think we need to stop defining other parties in terms of our own definitions of what human rights are.
I mean, what if, instead of arguing over Democratic visions of human rights - redistribution of wealth, freedom of the press, and rights for minorities, and combined that with the Republican view of rights for entreprenuers, rights to keep and bear and arms, dispose of ones land as one sees fit, and so forth?
It seems to me that if we had a society where some folks could, gasp, put up with a manger and an xmas tree in a public square, and others could gasp, accept gay marriages, then, jeez, we might have a country where people respect each other more. Hell, we might even be all "growed up and stuff".
This is my sig.
This is pretty much the opposite of a grassroots movement.
Grassroots: people spontaneously talk about you, support you. Their actions are unpredictable, because, well, they are people and are not guided by a central authority.
Monolithic: top-down approach where policritter issues organizational guidelines and tells people what to do.
Looks like McCain is using the monolithic model here. Oops.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Maybe because /. makes the DailyKos look moderate at times?
Look, for the last time, the fantasies you have while masturbating after dropping acid do not count as "at times".
The enemies of Democracy are
It's not just him - all "Web 2.0 consultants" are effluent clogging the 'tubes
Effluent == raw sewage, which makes sense becase most politics is like a septic tank - the big chunks float to the top.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Considering throughout the primary season Obama survived attacks from both McCain AND the Clintons (who, if you forgot, were esentially the leaders of the Democratic party for over a decade) I would say he can handle it.
Not to mention that he was more or less unknown to most people until this year. Hell, I had never even HEARD of him until late 2007...while I wouldn't say I'm politics obsessed, I do tend to keep up with things on a daily basis.
Living With a Nerd
There's already a word for faked grassroots movement: astroturfing. You know, after the brand of fake turf.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
http://www.facingup.org/image/entitlements-spending
Have a look at the chart comparing 1970 to today. Look at how much entitlements have consumed the federal budget.
This is my sig.
I think there are quite a few paid Republican Trolls - especially on the Washington Post (I mean aside from the editorial staff) - there was quite a drumbeat of posts that looked very similiar of people claiming to be Clinton supporters who would never vote for Obama, and then any article about Bush gets some Bushbots in high gear. Isn't this kind of disturbing? - I was told once that at Italian Opera houses people would be paid to go to the opera and applaud (loudly) at the end - on the one hand it is sad republican have to pay people to say good things about them, but it is really kind of fascist in the way they try and manufacture consent and make it appear there is general support for really unpopular positions....
This post is misleading and, I suspect, factually incorrect.
/. crowd.
Barack Obama explicitly supports Net Neutrality ("I will take a back seat to no one when it comes to Network Neutrality"), media decentralization, and universal broadband access. He supports universal file/data formats ("we will put government data online in universally accessible formats"); and he understands the inherent risks to privacy created by our new technology ("Dramatic increases in computing power, decreases in storage costs and huge flows of information that characterize the digital age bring enormous benefits, but also create risk of abuse."). And if Obama advocates reducing the NASA budget (and I have no specific information about this, it would be nice if tjstork would provide a reference), such defunding would be a re-prioritization of spending only, as he "supports doubling federal funding for basic [scientific] research."
Furthermore, Barack Obama's policy regarding technology reflects a thorough and deep understanding of the underlying issues pertinent to technology and information. John McCain will never have any personal involvement in creating a technology policy promulgated by his administration; instead he will rely on his staff, who will inevitably rely on lobbyists. The fact is that John McCain knows very very little about these issues, and that he has also shown consistently that he has no problem giving industry lobbyists free reign in his campaign. Barack Obama understands technology, and won't compromise on the central issues.
Barack Obama's technology policy is located here on barackobama.com.
Another relevant link is a talk Obama gave at Googe, where he touches on many of these issues, here.
Finally, to conclude from the fact that Barack Obama has accepted money from the most consistently-Democratic industrial block in the US that he will necessarily back its most outrageous demands is logically spurious. tjstork writes that "he is a strong proponent of doing everything with IP that many slashdotters would virulently oppose." I do not have any information supporting such a claim, and I would ask tjstork to provide a reference. The fact is that slashdotters are very willing to balance the interests of IP "owners" against the interests of the general public and the interests of innovation. As long as Obama recognizes that there is a balance to be struck, and is willing to *act* knowing that things are currently out of balance, I am happy to support his positions on IP. If there is anything that Barack Obama is about, it is about creating a fair and informed balance between competing interests.
It seems to me that Barack Obama is almost, if not quite, the ideal candidate for the
That's as bad as not knowing how to use a telephone! That should say something about his attitude towards technology in general! The guy is literally COMPUTER-ILLITERATE! Just let that sink in. He is either too inept or too old to be doing anything as important as running a country, take your pick. A computer-illiterate person should not run a country in the year 2008! Hell, what jobs can you get nowadays without even some basic computer skills!?
That's my opinion, it's not a flame, it's just a very serious well-deserved dissing. Donate karma to this post, the neocon squad's on the way.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Actually not. I'm probably going to vote for Bob Barr, and no, I'm not a Ron Paul nut. Still, I find it interesting that you're accusing me of being a troll, when there's someone who goes and moderates everything you post just based on your past record.
And judging from many of your comments, you are the shining example for trolls everywhere.
Still, it's funny that the leftists have no problems with the antisemites within their ranks. That used to be something that was so rich, white northeastern Republican chic. Not anymore.