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Wednesday, July 21, 2004
You know you want one:
posted by jeev |
3:34 PM |
 
Does your neighbor know? All politics is local. But this year, it is getting downright neighborly.
Take Minnesota. The state Republican Party has developed a Web site that allows its activists to tap into a database of voters whose political allegiances and concerns it would like to know. But it is not just any group of voters -- they are the activists' neighbors.
The project, dubbed WebVoter, gives GOP activists the names and addresses of 25 people who live, in most cases, within a couple of blocks from them. The party has asked 60,000 supporters from across the state to figure out what issues animate their neighbors and where they stand in the political spectrum, and report that information back to the party -- with or, possibly, without their neighbors' permission.
posted by jeev |
8:19 AM |
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
My friend Marnie has embarked on her very own Quixotic quest. Taking a leaf from the Vice-President's recent performance in the hallowed halls of Congress, Marnie has decided to ask our government "What the fuck are you doing?" Actually, she has decided to ask our senator, Barbara Boxer, "what the fuck are you doing?", specifically re: the inability of the inhabitants of said hallowed halls to get the President to, you know, stand accountable for the insane performance of the administration, particularly in reference to the war in Iraq. As the New York Times recently put it,Many politicians who voted to authorize the war still refuse to admit that they made a mistake. But they did. While Marnie is all for any of those politicians fessing up, she is really, really keen on the President doing so. So every day she writes a letter to Barbara Boxer, asking her why the fuck she is not holding W's feet to the proverbial fire. The letters go to the Senator's web address, and to Marnie's blog, titled, aptly, CrankReport. She's written seven of them so far, and she'd like you all to join in.
posted by jeev |
10:21 AM |
Monday, July 19, 2004
"Fair and Balanced" isn't. Quel shock. The British Office of Communications actually checks to see if news is, you know, factual. Seems Fox has some, uh, issues in that area:My Word is a personal comment section at the end of an hour-long news programme called The Big Story. On the day of the publication of the Hutton Inquiry Report into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly (which contained criticism of the BBC), John Gibson, the programme anchor, delivered his regular editorial opinion piece. In the course of which, John Gibson claimed:a) that the BBC had "a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest";
b) that the BBC "felt entitled to lie and, when caught lying, felt entitled to defend its lying reporters and executives";
c) that the BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, in Baghdad during the American invasion, had "insisted on air that the Iraqi Army was heroically repulsing an incompetent American Military";
d) that "the BBC, far from blaming itself, insisted its reporter had a right to lie - exaggerate - because, well, the BBC knew that the war was wrong, and anything they could say to underscore that point had to be right". 24 viewers complained to Ofcom that that the item was "misleading", "went far beyond reasoned criticism" and "misrepresented the truth". In light of such a damaging critique, we asked Fox News whether it had offered the BBC an opportunity to respond. So Fox replied, and, oddly enough, their response did not impress the Brits. Read about it here.
Via Daily Kos
posted by jeev |
1:53 PM |
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