Politics

Creator of cURL Denied Entry to U.S.

Daniel Stenberg, a Mozilla senior network engineer and the creator of the cURL open source library, has been denied entry to the United States, he revealed early Tuesday morning in a tweet. Stenberg was coming for business to All Hands, a twice-yearly Mozilla conference bringing together staff and volunteers that began Monday. An hour after tweeting, "On my way to San Francisco and Mozilla," he said this: That took an unexpected turn. I'm denied entry by ESTA out of the blue. So ... no trip for ... (read more)

2017/06/27

Jake Tapper Asks Trump 7 Straight Horse Race Questions

I began watching the Sunday talk shows again last weekend because of Antonin Scalia's death, which propelled the U.S. into an exceptional time in our history. We'll be living with the consequences of how the next Supreme Court appointment is made for a long time. Watching one of the shows today reminded me of how terrible political reporting on television can be. On CNN's State of the Union, host Jake Tapper asked Donald Trump 10 questions: Mr. Trump, congratulations on your victory. What do ... (read more)

2016/02/21

Marsha Blackburn Writes Mozilla on Do-Not-Track

During last year's trip to D.C. with the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Long Tail Alliance, I met Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and a staffer who assists her on issues related to the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. At some offices we had to explain basic stuff like cookies, but Blackburn and her staffer were well-versed on the subjects of ad tracking, contextual ads and privacy concerns. We talked to the Congresswoman about do-not-track and how small publishers think it ... (read more)

2013/06/04

Mr. Cadenhead Goes to Washington

I'm in Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Congress on Tuesday to advocate against legislative changes that would affect independent web publishers whose sites are funded by ads. The primary concern over the years has been that Congress would pass legislation to require a do-not-track setting to be turned on by default in all web browsers, a move that would prevent contextual ad services such as Google AdSense from tailoring ads to a user's interests. As someone who published ad-supported ... (read more)

2013/06/03

Step Right Up and Win Some Crap

I'm running a presidential prediction contest on the Drudge Retort today: President Obama will win re-election even though Mercury is in retrograde, claims Psychic Nikki. See if you can do better than this observer of the spirit world and enter the Drudge Retort's presidential prediction contest. The winner will receive a $50 Amazon.Com gift certificate and a life-size cardboard Joe Biden. To enter, post a comment here predicting the percentage of the vote that President Obama, Mitt Romney and ... (read more)

2012/11/05

Glenn Kessler's Fact Checking is for the Birds

Glenn Kessler, the fact-checking columnist of the Washington Post, often employs logic that's more factually dubious than the claim he's covering. Here's his explanation for why he gives President Obama four Pinocchios for saying in ads that Mitt Romney wants to kill Big Bird: Romney may have been off base in suggesting PBS funding has much to do with the deficit, but that's no excuse for the Obama campaign to declare that means the demise of a popular children's character. According to ... (read more)

2012/10/10

Republicans Run Attack Ads on Charlie Crist

The Florida Republican Party recently began running a TV ad here that attacks former Gov. Charlie Crist, the Republican who left the party and became an independent during his unsuccessful 2010 Senate run. The ad shows old clips of Crist praising President George W. Bush and Sarah Palin and declaring he was "about as conservative as you can get." That statement turned out to be as true as Mitt Romney calling himself a progressive when he wanted to be governor of liberal Massachusetts. Crist ... (read more)

2012/09/06

Paul Ryan Lied About Janesville GM Plant

Paul Ryan's speech at the Republican National Convention was breathtakingly dishonest, even by the extremely loose standards of honesty practiced by our politicians. The Wisconsin Republican Congressman, hailed often as a "straight shooter" by the media because of his budget plan, lied about that plan and other significant matters to the assembled delegates and the millions watching on TV. No lie was more brazen than the one he told about the GM auto plant that closed in his Janesville ... (read more)

2012/08/30

Why Woodward and Bernstein Didn't Blog

I'm a big fan of Josh Marshall's political reporting at Talking Points Memo, but he makes a rookie mistake in a reader email he quotes this morning. MB, a regular correspondent on Wall Street matters, offers this bit of advice to Marshall: I know you raised some money from Marc Andreesen. I would bet Marc's fund and Bain Capital have some investor overlap. I'm sure you've already made that call, but I bet that Marc has no love lost for Romney as Marc is truly in the "job creation" business ... (read more)

2012/08/08

Tomorrow I Will Experience Congress

I love the smell of democratic governance in the morning. I'm back in Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Congress and their aides as part of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Long Tail Fly-In. Around 50 web publishers have paid our own way to come to D.C. to explain how Google AdSense and other contextual ad networks power small businesses. This is my third year attending the event. We spend one day talking shop about web publishing and learning about new web privacy legislation, then ... (read more)

2012/06/04

Read More Entries