Politics

Blogger Payments No Kos for Alarm

A Wall Street Journal story and the invisible backhand of the blogosphere are attempting to make the publishers of Daily Kos and MyDD the liberal versions of Armstrong "No Bribe Left Behind" Williams: Howard Dean's presidential campaign hired two Internet political "bloggers" as consultants so that they would say positive things about the former governor's campaign in their online journals, according to a former high-profile Dean aide. There's no comparison between these situations. Jerome ... (read more)

2005/01/14

Democratic Podcast: Social Security Works

The first attempt at public affairs podcasting on Workbench appears to have been popular last week. The audio file of the Democratic response to the presidential radio address was requested 8,400 times. I'm beginning to appreciate the bandwidth requirements of podcasting. One 2.38 megabyte podcast consumed more than 18 gigabytes of traffic. That's not an issue, because I have a great dedicated server on ServerMatrix that allows 1,200 gigabytes a month, but it could become one as listeners ... (read more)

2005/01/09

I'm Joining the Pod People

One of my favorite presidential traditions is the weekly radio address, a practice revived by President Nixon and carried on today. Bush treats them like homework, but in the hands of a natural politician like Reagan or Clinton, the short speeches are an inspired throwback to the days when Americans hovered around the family Victrola to hear FDR's historic fireside chats. Every Saturday afternoon, the president delivers a short address followed by a response from a member of the opposition ... (read more)

2005/01/02

Recounts Bring Us Closer Together

In the Washington gubernatorial race, Christine Gregoire has passed Dino Rossi in the hand recount for a 10-vote lead, which will probably grow when 700 votes that were improperly disqualified by one county are examined. Whether Gregoire wins or Rossi overturns the count in court, the winner's going to have little legitimacy with half of the electorate. As this race and the Bush/Gore debacle demonstrate, this country can't handle photo-finish elections, because no one believes the recount ... (read more)

2004/12/23

Deliver Us From Sean Hannity

Caught a minute of Sean Hannity's radio show last night, and it was enough time to break my brain. He claimed that this newspaper item on Jimmy Carter demonstrates that the former president is a limousine liberal: As one of the most prolific authors ever to sit in the Oval Office, former President Jimmy Carter knows how to sell books. As he hawks his 19th, Sharing Good Times, Carter reveals his secret to reaching the bestseller list: Pitch buyers at discount warehouses. "Sam's Club and Costco," ... (read more)

2004/12/14

AIDS Conspiracist Takes the Prize

The Nobel Foundation gave the yearly Peace Prize today to a Kenyan environmental activist who believes that the HIV virus is a biological weapon created to kill blacks. Wangari Maathai, honored for a long career of empowering women highlighted by a movement that planted 30 million trees, made the claim to an AIDS workshop in Nyeri, Kenya, Aug. 30, according to the East African Standard: AIDS is not a curse from God to Africans or the black people. It is a tool to control them designed by some ... (read more)

2004/12/10

Al Franken signed a two-year extension with Air America Radio, putting him on the network through 2006. I listen to his show often on XM Radio. Some of the comedy is forced -- no one drills a humorous premise into the ground deeper than a Saturday Night Live writer -- but I can't pass up the chance to hear genuine liberal voices on the air like Paul Krugman, David Sirota, Amy Sullivan, and Joe Conason. I wish I could find a clip of Franken's phone interview Monday with weblogger Chris Bowers, ... (read more)

2004/12/08

Bush's Military Jacket a Dud

President Bush's handlers created a military jacket, complete with epaulets, a presidential seal, and an embroidered "Commander in Chief" nametag, that he could wear during a speech to Marines today at Camp Pendleton in California. By appearing in military garb, most notoriously for the "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier landing in 2003, Bush has broken a long-standing presidential tradition, according to Dana Milbank of the Washington Post: ... the experts I checked with said it is ... (read more)

2004/12/07

David Brock, founder of the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, has written a letter urging Creators Syndicate to dump Samuel Francis, the columnist who condemned interracial relationships as abnormal and immoral: We strongly condemn the clear bigotry in this column and assume that newspaper editors across the country feel the same way, as a search of newspapers available on Nexis revealed that none have chosen to run the column. Regardless, Creators' willingness to distribute ... (read more)

2004/12/07

You Can't Handle the Knuth

As an unabashedly liberal computer geek, I've grown accustomed to feeling outnumbered politically among the "cognitive elite," Eric S. Raymond's onanistic term for our tribe, since BBSing in the early '80s. You could find more libertarians among that crowd than liberals; I'm not surprised that the Libertarian Party presidential nominee this year is a programmer. For this reason, it's unpleasant but not unexpected to discover that a technologist I admire, most recently Jeremy Bowers, believes ... (read more)

2004/12/06

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