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McCain Campaign Uses Spider/Diff Against Obama
Vote McCain in 2008! writes "McCain's campaign is doing everything it can to erase Obama's online advantage, this time they ambushed Obama by detecting edits to his website when he updated some of his policy positions. This isn't the first time the Republicans have shown up the Democrats with their web savvy — you may remember the previous reports about the Republican Web 2.0 Consultants and their online campaigning game. This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks." Assuming the spider adheres to robots.txt, this is clever and well done.
Okay, you can mod me OT if you want, but as the submitter chose to call himself Vote McCain in 2008! I'm taking license here. Apologies to those who still find it OT...
/soapbox rant
I hear one definition of insanity is repeating the same action while expecting a different result each time. How many times have we thrown our votes away on the major party candidates only to get the same old status quo, regardless of the promises made? It's high time we the people just say no to the corrupt two party system. It's time we got off our lazy asses and learn about the alternatives available outside the corporate-approved "choice" spoon-fed to us by Big Media. Oh sure, probably we'll get either McCain or Obama this time, but if enough people vote outside the box it will encourage others to do the same. Maybe we can even take back our government at some point. But it'll never happen by voting for one of the two "approved" candidates. We need a new meme -- don't throw your vote away. Don't waste your vote on the Republicrats!
Caveat Utilitor
Here are the goods from TFA:
The Friday, July 11 version of the page says:
"at great cost our troops have helped reduce violence in some areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006."
The Monday, July 14 version spidered by Versionista says:
"Our troops have heroically helped reduce civilian casualties in Iraq to early 2006 levels. This is a testament to our military's hard work, improved counterinsurgency tactics, and enormous sacrifice by our troops and military families."
I personally favor the Fingerlicans...
...although, the Tastycrats do make a good point about that titanium tax...
This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks.
Are you kidding? The Republicans have been embarrassingly behind the times when it comes to IT stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole spider/diff issue came from some college Intern with initiative, working on his own.
Normally I'd say something positive to balance my post out, but this election is look god-awful for both parties. I just don't give a damn.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Perhaps old Republicans should learn that Czechoslovakia hasn't existed since the early 1990s before we deem them worthy of learning new tricks?
McCain Camp:
So through the course of our research we've found that you've modified some of the sections on your policy positions...
*coughs (and that you have twenty times the traffic we do)
robots.txt is idiotic in this context, except to steer spiders away from forms that shouldn't be submitted or triggering infinite loops. Suppose you find something like:
Don't you think that's going to be the first place to look? Again, robots.txt is to avoiding causing site meltdowns or stupid behavior. It's not to hide information.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Why is changing what you have to say a bad thing? If you have a different set of facts or a change in thought, why is it bad to change your opinions?
And are the edits that the Obama campaign making really significant? I had a look at the differences highlighted in the linked Wired article, and they didn't really look like a significant change in substance.
So fucking what? Are we really this stupid in our politics that it's now a game of crying "flip-flopper" when you just say more or less the same thing, maybe with a different emphasis?
what'd be nice is if politicians adhered to theconstitution.txt
It's high time we the people just say no to the corrupt two party system. It's time we got off our lazy asses and learn about the alternatives available outside the corporate-approved "choice" spoon-fed to us by Big Media. Oh sure, probably we'll get either McCain or Obama this time, but if enough people vote outside the box it will encourage others to do the same.
Just three weeks ago I would have argued with you about this. Then Obama flip-flopped on FISA and voted for a bill containing telecom immunity. In so doing he lost my vote and my support. The only thing I would dispute is that the third parties really offer a better alternative. Consider:
Bob Barr: Witch-burning religious lunatic that led the impeachment of Bill Clinton and somehow gets to masquerade as a libertarian. Could they really do no better than this guy?
Ralph Nader: Left-wing crazy that thinks we should nationalize the energy industries (even I don't lean this far to the left) and expand the nanny state.
McKinney: Don't know a lot about her yet but the initial reading is not very promising. Seems to have a huge chip on her shoulder and is probably at least as far to the left as Nader is.
I won't be voting for Obama or McCain but I don't see how I can support any of these crazies either. I'll sign their petitions for ballot access if asked but I fear that my vote for POTUS may wind up being blank this year :( I'd love the chance to meet Bob Barr and ask him directly if he's changed his tune on wiccans/neo-pagans -- a satisfactory answer might get him my vote. The others don't stand a chance though.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Hello, where have you been the last 7 years ? Changing what you say makes you a flip-flopper. Real men stay the course.
...that someone spending almost all their time going across the country talking to people about different issues actually changed his mind about where he stands on certain topics. As Republicans, this is foreign to us, and upsetting to think about.
"The enemy knows the system" --Claude Shannon
The article concludes:
This is like comparing two drafts of James Joyce's Ulysses, noting that changes were made, and concluding, "If anything, the changes simply reflect that Joyce is just another writer." Keeping in mind that as it happens Obama is also a talented, best-selling author, we should be surprised that he prepares more than on draft, or releases more than one edition of his work?
In other news, the detection of edits in the latest kernel release prompted a clever Wired hack to print, "If nothing, the changes simply reflect that Torvalds is just another coder."
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Or to put it another way:
"I may be a fucking moron, but at least I'm consistantly a fucking moron".
Yes, Obama is editing his web site and fine-tuning his message. BFD. That's what web sites are for. I don't see anything greatly inconsistent in what Obama is doing.
What is really going on is that McCain has a lousy record: he has been flip-flopping on positions and has a lot of history that he needs to hide from. This is a huge problem for the Republican party establishment, who probably would have preferred any candidate other than McCain.
So, what does McCain do? He tries to go on the offensive so that he can say "well, it's OK if I flip-flop because the other guy edits his web site, too".
Don't let McCain get away with this bullshit. McCain is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of both conservative Republicans and moderates in terms of his actual positions and record.
Who came up with the Marshall Plan again ?
So fucking what? Are we really this stupid in our politics that it's now a game of crying "flip-flopper" when you just say more or less the same thing, maybe with a different emphasis?
New words scare people. Just a couple weeks ago, Obama said in a press conference that he'd be willing to "refine" his Iraq policy during his visit there, and a combination of the media and the McCain campaign jumped all over him for "flip-flopping" on Iraq. They were pretending that he had said that he was going to change his stance on the war, and so he had to give a second press conference later that day to emphasize that he had said nothing of the sort.
The media is trying to have a repeat of 2004 by painting the Democrat as a flip-flopper, when he has only waffled, as all politicians do. Even Obama's worst flip-flop, on the FISA legislation, wasn't a complete reversal: though he voted the final bill, he still voted to strip the immunity provision. He said that he thought the bill had more good than bad in it, and while we might disagree, that's just a matter of priority, not of position.
Meanwhile, McCain directly contradicts himself time and time again, and he has so far gotten off scot-free. We don't have a liberal media or a conservative media, we have a sensationalist media that caters to the lowest common denominator by trying to place the candidates into a pre-defined mold that has existed for the better part of three decades.
Everybody knows that if you're fighting an asymmetric war, you make your moves at the time when you can strike and minimize your losses, and you wait patiently at all other times. Anyone who thinks the violence against US targets isn't going to go back up as soon as the surge ends OR it becomes clear by observing US political and military statements and operations that the "surge" is permanent, is kidding themselves.
I'd also like to point out that it is very unfair and biased to measure violence "in the form of attacks, and the number of US casualties in Iraq" - what about Iraqi causalities? Civilian casualties? Shouldn't those be at least as important, if not more important, now that it's clear the war isn't being fought for WMDs?
-bugg
John McCain has had his share of flip flops, as document in this Keith Olbermann clip. It's pretty hilarious because the clip ends by reading a statement from McCain that his viewpoints are evolving, and then noting that McCain was for evolution, and now against evolution. It is pretty well done.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Depressing situation isn't it? Conservatism made the Republican Party an actual party rather than the me-tooism of the 40s and 50s. They win the House and Senate for the first time in forty years while running on an unapologetically conservative platform. Bush wins while running as some weird bleeding heart conservative.
So what do we get?
Vast increase in federal spending!
Vast increase in federal power!
They morphed into a me-too-but-more party.
When you vote for president, you get far more than a president.
Behind the POTUS candidate comes a legion of people who will set the policy and tone of the nation for years to come. Supreme Court justices, Cabinet members, hundreds of others at every level of government.
Dont forget what happened at NASA, the EPA, the Justice Department, DHS, etc. All hit the headlines the last few years with major scandals brought on by POTUS-appointed bureaucrats.
Point being, presidential elections arent about single issues or a single candidate, but a change in national leadership for all issues at all levels. Sometimes you have to hold your nose and vote for the party most closely aligned with the future you desire. Any party will bring in some crazies, its unavoidable.
Vast increase in federal spending!
That's bad enough but you forgot "while reducing Federal income by slashing taxes" at the end.
They morphed into a me-too-but-more party.
Indeed. To quote a friend of mine: I'd rather be a tax and spend Liberal than a borrow and spend Republican. At least the Dems are pretending to have a way to pay for their proposals -- the Republicans just want to put it on the national credit card.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Now all we need is a cable channel called MTV to start playing music videos for the first time, and we will be all set.
I'm pretty sure that federal revenue goes up when taxes are cut.
Who came up with the Marshall Plan again
Democrats did, and here's the thing. Most of the "Reagan Republicans" and their intellectual descendants fondly remember when Democrats actually did embark on big visions and big crusade to try and make the world a place for free trade, free from tyranny. That old, old conservative isolationist wing of the Republican Party is basically a small minority.
What really happened is that Democrats completely lost their nerve after Viet Nam. Instead of looking at the war, and saying that they made some mistakes in its execution, and in fact, had actually started to turn things around once Westmoreland was replaced by Abrams, they have instead enshrined an ethic that lacks any sort of faith in the very government to do anything other than redistribute wealth.
I mean, Democrats are to be forever saluted for what they did from the 1940s through the 1960s. A lot of their ideas didn't work, but some did, and, we got the victory in World War II, built a national infrastructure that we've been living off of for 50 years, and put a man on the moon. They built a framework to stand against Soviet aggression and deftly avoided a world war without undermining American resolve. But, today's Democrats tend to reject a lot of that. Back in the 1960s, the Democrats who wanted NASA cut to pay for the poor were squelched, now they run the show. Today, the very idea of going to the moon, let alone mars, is considered to be just a handout, when it really, it is a project that harnesses the finest minds of the country towards a peaceful, momentus, national goal.
I would be willing to bet that if, in fact, a more muscular foreign policy candidate, one who really could articulate the American vision of free trade through Pax Americana, expansively, in the way that FDR and his ideological descendant, Reagan could, I would certainly support them, and, in fact, just about every Republican I know -would-. But instead today's Democratic party is consumed with identity politics and redistribution, sorta trying to divvying up the spoils but without the old Dems that still saw a need to get spoils to divvy.
Unfortunately though, through a catastrophe of party rules, Dems have a process that continually nominates the candidate who kowtows to a group of people that are in the minority. Republicans have a similar problem too, but, they at least have the sense to tend to set aside other policy differences so long as the free trade expansionist vision stands.
This is my sig.
As a fellow Brit, it's almost ontopic to reply here :p
I wrote a JE a while back, asking people to vote third or fourth party, even if they could "make do" with one of the "main" parties. The interesting thing is that reasons to do so do not rely upon faith!
A number a years back, I did some campaigning for the Liberal Democrats; I no longer consider myself to be party political, but their campaign techniques were interesting. The most interesting was the "reverse squeeze". The way that that works is that the Lib Dems would go after either Labour or the Tories, whichever had the fewest votes in the seat. Once their support went down, the numbers voting for the other team would come down in roughly equal numbers.
In other words, one vote fewer for one of the main parties implies approximately one fewer votes for the other one. Because voters can sense the political equilibrium, your own decision to deny the main parties your vote for a better personal choice is essentially costless! Better still, your vote is amplified (although they might instead choose to vote for another small party).
Not only is your change of vote essentially costless, but also you get to send a signal both to voters and to your future representative. The voters get to see a change in the support of your chosen party which is bigger than the signal would have been if cast for one of the main ones. Your representive receives a signal as to how best to win your vote the next time around.
The only reasons not to vote for a smaller party are if you are better represented by one of the main parties, or else if you think that competition is a harmful force in politics, and would rather give a clearer "mandate" to the winner. American voters seem to act like this, with later voters preferring to strengthen the early vote, and it can even make a kind of sense if a "strong nation" is more important to you than democracy.
The flip side to the last observation is that if you're in the US, vote early. Others will then copy your vote, so in a sense, you get to "vote early, vote often".
Wikileaks, no DNS
Ugh. No. You're so wrong I don't know where to start.
Slavery is anathema to libertarian ideology, because it allows one person to impinge on the rights of another. That's a fundamentally Bad Thing; in fact the whole point of libertarianism is the maximization of personal freedom, up to the point where your freedom to do something starts impinging on someone else's.
Basically you've constructed a straw man and then proceeded to tear it down; congratulations. It's a good argument except that it has nothing to do with any actual libertarians that I've ever met, nor the positions of either the Libertarian party or the other similar state-level parties.
If you want to criticize libertarian theory, that's fine -- there are many valid critiques of it. But saying that it advocates or legitimizes slavery is just false and stupid, and a great way of advertising your own ignorance.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You would certainly be able to indenture yourself, if you choose to — to anyone, who would want such a thing from you.
Serfdom (and the outright slavery) disappeared, not because of laws or regulations, but because it was inefficient. Re-read your Marx-volume. As the means of production evolve, the uninterested slaves' labor falls further and further behind in value — despite being cheaper — than that of motivated free workers.
So stop this "slavery" fear-mongering, and smears. For decades the country's policy-makers have been moving away from Libertarianism despite most Americans being in the Libertarian corner of the politics. The results, to name the most obvious are:
And all you can say against that is nonsense like: "Libertarians want to bring back slavery"?.. Pathetic...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Qwest's legal problems predate the NSA's circulating access requests to the telcos in the Fall of 2001.
The insider case that Nacchio, Qwest's CEO, claims he's being punished for, goes back to the dot-com bust when Qwest execs realized they weren't going to hit revenue projections. They started dumping stock and fraudulently shifting revenue to cover up the shortfall. Again, this all happened prior to the NSA asking for data.
The company has a history of engaging in illegal activity. In 2001, they paid an additional $350,000 fine on top of the June, 2000 $1.5 million fine they paid the FCC for slamming users. The slamming complaints started in the 90's.
Nacchio's blowing smoke by playing the role of NSA's victim.
Isn't it a valid criticism that if you're free to "voluntarily" indenture yourself, you're also open to being coerced? If someone says "be my slave and tell everyone it's voluntary, or I'll kill your family," what will you do?
Whereas currently, if the government sees that you're not getting proper wages for your work, it's taken out of your hands. You don't have the right to give up your rights - they're "inalienable."
Sometimes taking away certain freedoms actually protect others. If I travel abroad with an aid organization, and they have a policy to never negotiate with terrorists, and I'm kidnapped, my supervisors don't have the freedom to negotiate. On the other hand, this policy will probably prevent many kidnappings, increasing the actual freedom of life and limb for our staff.