If the executive management teams are signing paychecks, as well as hiring and firing journalists, you tell me who has more influence over the stories that get printed?
We are not talking about a choice of news stories, we are talking about the editorial page. That's the place where (mostly liberal) newspaper editors are paid to give their opinion. A casual survey of opinion pages will demonstrate that newspaper editors, who are usually very pro-Democrat Party, have total control over what shows up there.
By way of example, I come from the Twin Cities. We have two major newspapers, the Star Tribune (which is owned by Gannett), and the St. Paul Pioneer Press (owned by Knight-Ridder.) The editorial pages of both papers are very slanted towards modern liberalism, both papers endorsed Gore last time, both papers will endorse Kerry this time.
Like I said, a newspaper endorsing a Democrat is never a surprising story to anybody with the slightest bit of awareness of who makes these endorsement decisions.
By the way, the paper in question is not even published in Crawford, and most of their editors don't live there.
I'll take the US edition of the OED over Webster's any day.
a word formed from the initial letters of other words (e.g. laser, Aids).
-- ORIGIN from Greek akron 'end, tip' + onoma 'name'.
The second use listed by Webster's in incorrect slang. That's the trouble with m-w.com. They are far too quick to add word definitions when misuse becomes a little commonplace, and they seldom take the trouble to point it out when they are reporting a slang usage or regional dialect.
The language evolves fast enough without a major dictionary justifying poor English skills.
Next, I suppose Webster's will be adding "stategery" and "boxen" to their dictionary.
No matter where it's from, the word you are looking for is not "ironic." The correct word is "typical."
Polls of journalists have shown that newsmen are consistently more likely to vote Democrat than Republican, and newspaper journalists even more than journalists in other media.
So, a newspaper in a small town of Texas where Bush owns land (even though it's not his home town of Midland, TX), is strictly a "Dog Bites Man" story.
Now, the Democrat mayor of the capitol city of Minnesota announcing that he was endorsing George Bush this year - THAT was "Man Bites Dog."
He owns a ranch in Crawford currently, so people there like to call it his "adopted" home town, but he grew up in Midland.
Also, the people in both towns overwhelmingly favor Bush. This is one newspaper with a more liberal position than its readers. No news here, and certainly no irony.
I'm voting for Bush, but I'm not sure I agree. Sure, there are a lot of conservative blogs, but both this new section of/. and the gang at Fark seem to lean slightly leftwards, and they are two of the most popular sites of this sort out there. Also, moveon.org has been a massive money-raising machine, even after their favorite guy (Howard Dean) freaked out and abruptly ended his candidacy. It's still a site which draws a lot of attention compared to the freepers (at least, until the Dan Rather story.)
the more obvious thing is that the attack isn't logically sound. An ad hominem isn't a persuasive argument.
Ad hominem is only falacious if you are arguing about an issue by "attacking the man" who opposes your viewpoint. Presidential debates are all about getting people to decide that you are the better person for the job, so the man is the issue.
This isn't Lincoln and Douglas arguing about slavery, it's Bush and Kerry arguing about who would be the better president for 2005-2008.
Just as not everybody who posts on Slashdot considers Microsoft to be an Evil Empire, not everybody who posts on Little Green Footbals is a fan of the President. I think the idea here is to answer Bush's critics in a forum where they are most likely to catch an audience of people who are leaning towards Bush, and doing so on web sites where they will have a choir of die-hard supporters cheering them on.
After all, for all the talk about capturing swing voters, getting your base motivated is also extremely important.
Well, if you read my comments elsewhere, it's pretty plain that I'm no Kerry cheerleader, but I think the concern here is that the "War Room" might really be just a tool for astroturfing the blogs, and that seems like a reasonable suspicion to me.
You've basically got a whole army of spin-doctors who are going to seed all the conservative blogs (and maybe others, such as here at politics.slashdot.org) with RNC talking points.
If that is the direction they choose to go, I think it's a bad idea for the same reason why it was a bad idea when Microsoft did it. For years after Microsoft got caught doing this sort of thing, nearly every pro-MS post (or FUD post about Linux or Apple) was suspected of coming from a Redmond employee, and how could anybody argue that it wasn't, once it was known that Microsoft actually did that sort of thing? It made it almost impossible for a fan of some NT feature, or a hater of some Linux build, to say anything without getting credibly accused of being a paid shill.
If this "War Room" is used to respond to questions while carefully identifying themselves as Bush spokespeople, then it might be a neat new idea... but if they try astroturfing, then people like me had better get used to being accused of drawing a paycheck from Karl Rove every time we express the opinion that Bush was right to go into Iraq, because that's how it's gonna be from then until Election Day.
Thank you for being the first here to point out that third party candidates who are not kooks with less than 3% of the vote are not invited to debates, but real candidates are not shut out.
Don't get me wrong, I love thrid-party kooks, and would hate to see an America where they didn't exist... but let's give up the pretense that any of them expect to be elected president. The debates are for those who might actually get elected.
Frankly, I'm all for keeping the 527s around. If it were up to me, all campaign spending and speech would be completely unregulated, with the exception that the source of funding be openly revealed at all times.
I just find it odd that some people hate 527s when they are for the other guy, but love them to pieces when they bash a candidate they don't like.
Maybe "odd" is the wrong word. Hmmm... "Typical" is probably better.
The Florida elections are being run mostly by Democrats (as they were in 2000), and the current Chief Justice who ruled in Nader's favor was also one of the strongest advocates for the Gore recount four years ago.
You can put your tin-foil hat back into storage.
Oh, and speaking of Carter, can anybody name an election or two which he oversaw for the UN that ended up being fair and democratic? He seems to be very good at helping thrid-world despots win elections. I wish he would go back to building houses with Habitat for Humanity. As former Presidents go, he's a fantastic carpenter.
"While the group isn't officially endorsing Kerry, Dr. Cerf points out it's pretty obvious what their goal is."
Yes, it is obvious. They are circumventing campaign finance laws by campaigning for Senator Kerry, and against President Bush, in the guise of an issue advocacy group.
I thought we all decided 527s were evil and borderline-illegal ever since the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth started airing out Senator Kerry's dirty laundry. I guess they are a good thing this week.
It's a list of the most influencial, not the coolest, the most innovative, or the most visionary.
The guy who is "only there because he owns a monopoly large enough that it can bastardize standards" obviously wields lots and lots of influence. There's a reason why Microsoft has been called the "800 pound gorilla" of the industry for the last 15 years or so.
So why doesn't Cobb just run for state representative, governor, or even a position on the school board, where he can make a real difference, instead of pretending he's running for president, when it's clear that he's not really even in pursuit of the job?
I'm all for thrid-party involvement in local politics. I'm also a Minnesotan, and we've always been proud of our defiance of the two big parties.
I think you Greens made a mistake in letting go of Nader. While the Democrats seem determined to torpedo his candidacy this time around, he dragged your party from the obscurity of a bizarre alliance of enviro-terrorists and pot-heads into a viable alternative for progressive liberals and even some small-L libertarians. Post-2000, your party is taken seriously and attracting conventional left-wing thinkers. Pre-2000, it was a haven for fringe whackos. Ralph Nader deserves most of the credit for this turn-around, and had you stuck with him, you might have grown and developped the party even farther.
(How do I know so much about the history of the greens? A member of my family has the same last name and first initial as one of their major candidates from the 1980s. You should have heard the nut-job phone calls we got from people who looked up the name in the phone book. It was spooky.)
Then how do you explain how Minnesota elected a Reform Party (later "Independence Party) governor?
If everybody in America who was planning on voting for John Kerry simply because "Nader has no chance in the two-party system" were to go ahead and vote for Nader, I bet the Nader vote would come out ahead of the Kerry vote, and 20 years from now people might be complaining about the Republican/Green two-party system which doesn't seem to give anybody else a fair shake.
The two party system has certain structures supporting it, but nothing props it up more reliably than the outright lie of "my opponent is such a scarey villain that you have no choice but to vote for me and my big party (which is really almost exactly the same as the eeeevil party we're running against), or else you will help elect the guy I just talked you into hating."
Now, how much for a phone that's just a reliable phone?
I look around, and nobody seems to want to sell me one. They all have entry level pieces of shit, but if you want something that is smaller than a brick and gets a signal indoors, you gotta buy their $1350 "camera/talk-along/MP3/IM/GPS/vital signs monitor/car diagnostics/marital aid/electric toothbrush/GameBoy/television/PDA" phones.
I've gone through four mobile phones in six years, and I've yet to be happy with a single one of them.
For pity's sake, just sell me a phone that fits in my jeans pocket, costs less than a car payment, gets a descent signal in metro areas, and last for more than a year or two. That's all I ask!
I believe he's already on record as saying if you're in a swing state, vote Kerry. Because, even though he's not much better on some issues, Bush is a disaster. Heard this on NPR following Nader's failed bid to get on as the Green candidate
If that's his opinion, then he's not running to win, in which case, he's not a real candidate at all, and just using the pretense of "running for president" to stand on a slightly taller soapbox while speaking about his ideas.
He has that right, but I see no reason at all why I should pay any more attention to this guy than any other spokesman of progressive/liberal issues.
When Ross Perot ran for president, he was running for president. He was actually gaining enough ground to look like he had a real shot at it, too, until he let a little too much "crazy talk" enter into his rhetoric.
When Jesse Ventura ran for governor of Minnesota, he ran to win, and did so.
These are examples of real third-party candidates. They actually wanted to hold the offices they were seeking.
Anybody who says "don't vote for me" to the people of certain states is not a real candidate, and so I'm not even going to bother to submit a question, because I have no plans to read his answers when they are published in a few days.
He's not running for president. He's pretending to run for the sake of the attention. I say, let's not give it to him.
Am I the only person in the world who thought that Ninja Scroll sucked?
No. You are not.
I'm an anime junkie, but Ninja Scroll has very little going for it. I guess for 12-year old kids it would make a pretty thrilling double-feature with the original "Heavy Metal."
Jesse the Governor, however, surrounded himself with socialists from the Democrat wing of the boot-on-your-neck party.
"Socialists" like his top advisor, Tim Penny!?
You do know that Penny, while a life-long Democrat, is also a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and has co-written libertarian books with Major Garrett, right?
Ventura failed to make the kind of cuts that he promised, and let himself get talked into the light rail fiasco, but he actually governed more conservatively, and more closely to libertarian ideals, than Norm Coleman (the Republican he ran against) probably would have.
Exactly. Who cares about a "performance hit" when you are running games that were designed for a system that runs at a small fraction of the speed of the new one? It will be like assigning mundane chores to Marvin the Paranoid Android.
"Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they only want me to run HALO in two-player split-screen mode with the frame-rate of an old nVidia2 card. God, I'm so depressed..."
Slashdot Mirror
If the executive management teams are signing paychecks, as well as hiring and firing journalists, you tell me who has more influence over the stories that get printed?
We are not talking about a choice of news stories, we are talking about the editorial page. That's the place where (mostly liberal) newspaper editors are paid to give their opinion. A casual survey of opinion pages will demonstrate that newspaper editors, who are usually very pro-Democrat Party, have total control over what shows up there.
By way of example, I come from the Twin Cities. We have two major newspapers, the Star Tribune (which is owned by Gannett), and the St. Paul Pioneer Press (owned by Knight-Ridder.) The editorial pages of both papers are very slanted towards modern liberalism, both papers endorsed Gore last time, both papers will endorse Kerry this time.
Like I said, a newspaper endorsing a Democrat is never a surprising story to anybody with the slightest bit of awareness of who makes these endorsement decisions.
By the way, the paper in question is not even published in Crawford, and most of their editors don't live there.
I'll take the US edition of the OED over Webster's any day.
a word formed from the initial letters of other words (e.g. laser, Aids).
-- ORIGIN from Greek akron 'end, tip' + onoma 'name'.
The second use listed by Webster's in incorrect slang. That's the trouble with m-w.com. They are far too quick to add word definitions when misuse becomes a little commonplace, and they seldom take the trouble to point it out when they are reporting a slang usage or regional dialect.
The language evolves fast enough without a major dictionary justifying poor English skills.
Next, I suppose Webster's will be adding "stategery" and "boxen" to their dictionary.
A newspaper endorses Kerry?
No matter where it's from, the word you are looking for is not "ironic." The correct word is "typical."
Polls of journalists have shown that newsmen are consistently more likely to vote Democrat than Republican, and newspaper journalists even more than journalists in other media.
So, a newspaper in a small town of Texas where Bush owns land (even though it's not his home town of Midland, TX), is strictly a "Dog Bites Man" story.
Now, the Democrat mayor of the capitol city of Minnesota announcing that he was endorsing George Bush this year - THAT was "Man Bites Dog."
Too bad that Bush comes from Midland.
He owns a ranch in Crawford currently, so people there like to call it his "adopted" home town, but he grew up in Midland.
Also, the people in both towns overwhelmingly favor Bush. This is one newspaper with a more liberal position than its readers. No news here, and certainly no irony.
Ah, the classic Nuremberg Defense. "I vas only following orders!!!"
It didn't wash then, and it doesn't wash now.
I'm voting for Bush, but I'm not sure I agree. Sure, there are a lot of conservative blogs, but both this new section of /. and the gang at Fark seem to lean slightly leftwards, and they are two of the most popular sites of this sort out there. Also, moveon.org has been a massive money-raising machine, even after their favorite guy (Howard Dean) freaked out and abruptly ended his candidacy. It's still a site which draws a lot of attention compared to the freepers (at least, until the Dan Rather story.)
the more obvious thing is that the attack isn't logically sound. An ad hominem isn't a persuasive argument.
Ad hominem is only falacious if you are arguing about an issue by "attacking the man" who opposes your viewpoint. Presidential debates are all about getting people to decide that you are the better person for the job, so the man is the issue.
This isn't Lincoln and Douglas arguing about slavery, it's Bush and Kerry arguing about who would be the better president for 2005-2008.
Just as not everybody who posts on Slashdot considers Microsoft to be an Evil Empire, not everybody who posts on Little Green Footbals is a fan of the President. I think the idea here is to answer Bush's critics in a forum where they are most likely to catch an audience of people who are leaning towards Bush, and doing so on web sites where they will have a choir of die-hard supporters cheering them on.
After all, for all the talk about capturing swing voters, getting your base motivated is also extremely important.
Well, if you read my comments elsewhere, it's pretty plain that I'm no Kerry cheerleader, but I think the concern here is that the "War Room" might really be just a tool for astroturfing the blogs, and that seems like a reasonable suspicion to me.
You've basically got a whole army of spin-doctors who are going to seed all the conservative blogs (and maybe others, such as here at politics.slashdot.org) with RNC talking points.
If that is the direction they choose to go, I think it's a bad idea for the same reason why it was a bad idea when Microsoft did it. For years after Microsoft got caught doing this sort of thing, nearly every pro-MS post (or FUD post about Linux or Apple) was suspected of coming from a Redmond employee, and how could anybody argue that it wasn't, once it was known that Microsoft actually did that sort of thing? It made it almost impossible for a fan of some NT feature, or a hater of some Linux build, to say anything without getting credibly accused of being a paid shill.
If this "War Room" is used to respond to questions while carefully identifying themselves as Bush spokespeople, then it might be a neat new idea... but if they try astroturfing, then people like me had better get used to being accused of drawing a paycheck from Karl Rove every time we express the opinion that Bush was right to go into Iraq, because that's how it's gonna be from then until Election Day.
We all want to influence the process. It doesn't mean we get to be on TV with the President and his leading opposition.
Thank you for being the first here to point out that third party candidates who are not kooks with less than 3% of the vote are not invited to debates, but real candidates are not shut out.
Don't get me wrong, I love thrid-party kooks, and would hate to see an America where they didn't exist... but let's give up the pretense that any of them expect to be elected president. The debates are for those who might actually get elected.
Right, because ACT, moveon.org, and CBS News would never ever consider lying about the other guy.
Well, maybe they do spew out obvious lies but that's different, because they... um... are the Good Guys.
It's all becoming clear.
Frankly, I'm all for keeping the 527s around. If it were up to me, all campaign spending and speech would be completely unregulated, with the exception that the source of funding be openly revealed at all times.
I just find it odd that some people hate 527s when they are for the other guy, but love them to pieces when they bash a candidate they don't like.
Maybe "odd" is the wrong word. Hmmm... "Typical" is probably better.
The Florida elections are being run mostly by Democrats (as they were in 2000), and the current Chief Justice who ruled in Nader's favor was also one of the strongest advocates for the Gore recount four years ago.
You can put your tin-foil hat back into storage.
Oh, and speaking of Carter, can anybody name an election or two which he oversaw for the UN that ended up being fair and democratic? He seems to be very good at helping thrid-world despots win elections. I wish he would go back to building houses with Habitat for Humanity. As former Presidents go, he's a fantastic carpenter.
"While the group isn't officially endorsing Kerry, Dr. Cerf points out it's pretty obvious what their goal is."
Yes, it is obvious. They are circumventing campaign finance laws by campaigning for Senator Kerry, and against President Bush, in the guise of an issue advocacy group.
I thought we all decided 527s were evil and borderline-illegal ever since the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth started airing out Senator Kerry's dirty laundry. I guess they are a good thing this week.
It's a list of the most influencial, not the coolest, the most innovative, or the most visionary.
The guy who is "only there because he owns a monopoly large enough that it can bastardize standards" obviously wields lots and lots of influence. There's a reason why Microsoft has been called the "800 pound gorilla" of the industry for the last 15 years or so.
Likewise.
So why doesn't Cobb just run for state representative, governor, or even a position on the school board, where he can make a real difference, instead of pretending he's running for president, when it's clear that he's not really even in pursuit of the job?
I'm all for thrid-party involvement in local politics. I'm also a Minnesotan, and we've always been proud of our defiance of the two big parties.
I think you Greens made a mistake in letting go of Nader. While the Democrats seem determined to torpedo his candidacy this time around, he dragged your party from the obscurity of a bizarre alliance of enviro-terrorists and pot-heads into a viable alternative for progressive liberals and even some small-L libertarians. Post-2000, your party is taken seriously and attracting conventional left-wing thinkers. Pre-2000, it was a haven for fringe whackos. Ralph Nader deserves most of the credit for this turn-around, and had you stuck with him, you might have grown and developped the party even farther.
(How do I know so much about the history of the greens? A member of my family has the same last name and first initial as one of their major candidates from the 1980s. You should have heard the nut-job phone calls we got from people who looked up the name in the phone book. It was spooky.)
Then how do you explain how Minnesota elected a Reform Party (later "Independence Party) governor?
If everybody in America who was planning on voting for John Kerry simply because "Nader has no chance in the two-party system" were to go ahead and vote for Nader, I bet the Nader vote would come out ahead of the Kerry vote, and 20 years from now people might be complaining about the Republican/Green two-party system which doesn't seem to give anybody else a fair shake.
The two party system has certain structures supporting it, but nothing props it up more reliably than the outright lie of "my opponent is such a scarey villain that you have no choice but to vote for me and my big party (which is really almost exactly the same as the eeeevil party we're running against), or else you will help elect the guy I just talked you into hating."
Sounds spiffy.
Now, how much for a phone that's just a reliable phone?
I look around, and nobody seems to want to sell me one. They all have entry level pieces of shit, but if you want something that is smaller than a brick and gets a signal indoors, you gotta buy their $1350 "camera/talk-along/MP3/IM/GPS/vital signs monitor/car diagnostics/marital aid/electric toothbrush/GameBoy/television/PDA" phones.
I've gone through four mobile phones in six years, and I've yet to be happy with a single one of them.
For pity's sake, just sell me a phone that fits in my jeans pocket, costs less than a car payment, gets a descent signal in metro areas, and last for more than a year or two. That's all I ask!
I believe he's already on record as saying if you're in a swing state, vote Kerry. Because, even though he's not much better on some issues, Bush is a disaster. Heard this on NPR following Nader's failed bid to get on as the Green candidate
If that's his opinion, then he's not running to win, in which case, he's not a real candidate at all, and just using the pretense of "running for president" to stand on a slightly taller soapbox while speaking about his ideas.
He has that right, but I see no reason at all why I should pay any more attention to this guy than any other spokesman of progressive/liberal issues.
When Ross Perot ran for president, he was running for president. He was actually gaining enough ground to look like he had a real shot at it, too, until he let a little too much "crazy talk" enter into his rhetoric.
When Jesse Ventura ran for governor of Minnesota, he ran to win, and did so.
These are examples of real third-party candidates. They actually wanted to hold the offices they were seeking.
Anybody who says "don't vote for me" to the people of certain states is not a real candidate, and so I'm not even going to bother to submit a question, because I have no plans to read his answers when they are published in a few days.
He's not running for president. He's pretending to run for the sake of the attention. I say, let's not give it to him.
Am I the only person in the world who thought that Ninja Scroll sucked?
No. You are not.
I'm an anime junkie, but Ninja Scroll has very little going for it. I guess for 12-year old kids it would make a pretty thrilling double-feature with the original "Heavy Metal."
Don't exaggerate. Minneapolis is smaller than 750,000. Way smaller. Two theaters showing it there (one downtown, one out in the suburbs.)
Jesse the Governor, however, surrounded himself with socialists from the Democrat wing of the boot-on-your-neck party.
"Socialists" like his top advisor, Tim Penny!?
You do know that Penny, while a life-long Democrat, is also a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and has co-written libertarian books with Major Garrett, right?
Ventura failed to make the kind of cuts that he promised, and let himself get talked into the light rail fiasco, but he actually governed more conservatively, and more closely to libertarian ideals, than Norm Coleman (the Republican he ran against) probably would have.
Exactly. Who cares about a "performance hit" when you are running games that were designed for a system that runs at a small fraction of the speed of the new one? It will be like assigning mundane chores to Marvin the Paranoid Android.
"Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they only want me to run HALO in two-player split-screen mode with the frame-rate of an old nVidia2 card. God, I'm so depressed..."