A lot has happened

Posted November 12th, 2008 at 12:56 AM in Journalism, Politics, Technology

This blog, which I had vowed to maintain, fell asleep as work got busy, and it stayed asleep as the election heated up.

Bad timing, I know.

Sen. Barack Obama defeated Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential race a week ago. It was truly moving to watch, even for a cynic like me. It seems like only yesterday that I had actually seen Obama so much in person — in high school multipurpose rooms and at moderately priced hotel conference centers — that I was tired of him. Now he is the President-elect.

Change is coming to the country, and it is coming to this blog. My specified mission here — to examine and document intersections between politics, journalism, and technology — remains unchanged, but I plan to pay more attention to the technology piece. I will try to offer some practical advice based on my experience retooling and subsequently maintaining several high-traffic news sites for the day job.

I promise not to abandon politics, which is still my favorite thing to talk about in real life, but frankly, there is less politics to talk about these days.

Here’s to better days. I promise, if you subscribe to my RSS feed now, you won’t regret it.

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McCain campaign still not vetting names on press releases

Posted July 9th, 2008 at 12:51 PM in Journalism, Politics

John McCain’s presidential campaign has been embarassed several times for associating itself — ususally in tangential ways — with individuals who end up, in one way or another, embarassing the Arizona senator. Usually it’s something petty, like an anti-semitic pastor, a former lobbyist for state sponsors of terrorism, etc.

This week, it’s 300 economists, whom McCain got to sign on to his economic plan. But to get the signatures, he had to leave some of the more politically important pieces of his plan out. And it turns out not all of the signatories are even supporters of his. Politico got the story:

The endorsement could hardly have been stronger. On Monday, John McCain’s campaign released a statement signed by 300 economists who “enthusiastically support” his “Jobs for America” economic plan, providing a heavyweight testimonial to the presumptive Republican nominee’s “broad and powerful economic agenda.”

There’s just one problem. Upon closer inspection, it seems a good many of those economists don’t actually support the whole of McCain’s economic agenda. And at least one doesn’t even support McCain for president.

Read the rest here.

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Dept. of "refighting the same fights"

Posted July 8th, 2008 at 7:07 PM in Politics

If one fact of Barack Obama’s candidacy sent a tingle up my leg, it was the possibility that for the first time in my lifetime, a presidential election might not come down to a fight between those who fought in Vietnam and those who burned their draft cards. For somebody who lived through that era, maybe this dynamic of every presidential race I can remember is hardly noticeable, but for me it has become tiresome.

For John McCain, it might be salvation. This is his new ad, which spends five seconds trying to imply that Obama would have burned his draft card, if only he had been there. Will it be enough?

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Who benefits from the pro-Hillary, anti-Obama movement online?

Posted July 7th, 2008 at 11:41 PM in Politics, Technology

There has been a lot of chatter about the supposedly large contingent of Hillary Clinton supporters who refuse to back Barack Obama in the 2008 general election. They’re a vocal group, but it turns out some of them might have ulterior motives.

Yesterday, I happened upon IOwnMyVote.com, one of the many online petition sites organized around the anti-Obama Clinton supporters. The petition asks for basic contact information, just as all online petitions do, becuase online petitions are really only useful to organizations insofar as they help build up an email list. (For more on that, see below.)

But the petition’s owner doesn’t keep the contact information for himself; he or she forwards it to the presidential campaigns. Sounds like it’s supposed to be nonpartisan and honest, right? Wrong. Only one of the candidates — John McCain — stands to gain anything from the arrangement. Read the rest of this entry »

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