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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."
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?
Sadly, everyone's gonna end up voting for the Brain Slug Party... again.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
...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
Then Obama flip-flopped on FISA and voted for a bill containing telecom immunity.
You know, I still don't get the huge deal with the telecom immunity. Yes the telecoms should be punished, at least as a preventative measure so that in the future companies think twice before following illegal government orders. And yet, the truly guilty party are the government officials who made those orders. Why are we so intend to lynch their stooges when the masterminds are getting away scot-free? Are we just settling because we know they're above the law? Isn't there a bit of a double standard here?
Just try thinking of it from the company's point of view. The government orders them to hand over records. The government obviously shows a disdain for the constitution and considers anyone who stands in their way to be terrorist accomplices. What's going to happen to you when you say 'No'?
ALL HAIL PRESIDENT HYPNOTOAD.
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
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.
Just try thinking of it from the company's point of view. The government orders them to hand over records. The government obviously shows a disdain for the constitution and considers anyone who stands in their way to be terrorist accomplices. What's going to happen to you when you say 'No'?
Congratulations, you have just outlined very concisely why fascism worked. Because everyone made that calculations for themselves, came up with the answer that compliance is the only rational choice, and complied with a system they knew to be evil.
Well, almost everyone. The rest got killed or exiled by people who were "just following orders".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Qwest said "no".
Qwest actually said, "This is not what a warrant looks like; come back when you have a real warrant."
It was pretty much the most impressive piece of corporate ballsiness I can recall in recent history.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
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.
I'm not American, so I don't know all that much about the whole thing. However, isn't part of the complaint against telecom immunity due to the fact that it may sabotage any effort to investigate and prosecute government officials?
You don't want the stooges to have immunity because you want to be able to apply pressure so they incriminate their masters.
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.
Because for the first time in 40 years there is a contender who isn't a rich old white guy. For the first time EVER there is a real contender who isn't white.
If you can't see that this is an astonishing departure from the status quo, then you really are blind. I'm not sure what kind of candidate it would take to impress people like you, short of a 35-year old gay atheist inuit liberatarian
If you think superficial factors make him a better candidate for president, then you're every bit as damned stupid as the racists who think that they automatically make him worse. Most of us recognize that the color of his skin is irrelevant. We judge him by his merits as a candidate. Or, as Martin Luther King, Jr., would have said, we judge him not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. And I, personally, have judged him by his worth as a candidate, and found him no different than any other politician. A lot of talk, nothing to back it up. Just look at the damn FISA bill if you want evidence. If that doesn't convince you that Obama is the same breed, just with a different skin tone, nothing will.
There's this idiotic attitude that is starting to pervade our society, where people figure that because a group of people was oppressed in the past, now they should get special regard. That's every bit as immoral and insulting as oppressing them in the first place! Judge them as the person they are, not as the color of their skin, whether positively or negatively.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
I'm pretty sure that federal revenue goes up when taxes are cut.
We should judge a candidate by their positions not their race. As far as I can tell in this regard Obama is 'just another democrat'. After listening to one of his speaches I discovered that (1) he is a very good rhetorician (that can be a good or bad thing), (2) he talks a lot about 'change' but never says from what to what, and (3) the few positions that he actually stated where just standard democratic positions.
I would be willing to stand corrected, but on the issues Obama looks like any other democrat. He talks slick, but that is about it.
Wow, you are one arrogant piece of shit aren't you?
Definitely a Republican.
Ahh, making elitist judgement calls as to the character of another without examining someone in depth. Definitely a Democrat.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Yeah, but at least they lie about it.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
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.