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McCain Campaign Uses Spider/Diff Against Obama
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Jul 16, 2008 08:35 AM
from the now-we're-getting-somewhere dept.
from the now-we're-getting-somewhere dept.
Vote McCain in 2008! writes "McCain's campaign is doing everything it can to erase Obama's online advantage, this time they ambushed Obama by detecting edits to his website when he updated some of his policy positions. This isn't the first time the Republicans have shown up the Democrats with their web savvy — you may remember the previous reports about the Republican Web 2.0 Consultants and their online campaigning game. This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks." Assuming the spider adheres to robots.txt, this is clever and well done.
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McCain Asks Supporters To Campaign On Blogs 889 comments
Vote McCain in 2000! writes "McCain is not the stranger to technology some think him to be. McCain is now asking supporters to stump for him on blogs. Republican Web 2.0 consultant David All was effluent with praise for this outreach, calling it 'smart' and 'unique.' McCain's blogger outreach section has a handy list of political blogs which might be interested in hearing about McCain, such as the DailyKos, Crooks and Liars, and Think Progress. You can even report your posts to the campaign and 'receive points for your success,' though the page doesn't say what exactly the points are good for." Slashdot is not on their suggested blogs list. Can't imagine why.
Submission: McCain Campaign Ambushes Obama With Spider by Anonymous Coward
[+]
Obama Significantly Revises Technology Positions 940 comments
method9455 writes "Barack Obama has edited his official website on many issues, including a huge revision on the technology page. Strangely it seems net neutrality is no longer as important as it was a few months ago, and the swaths of detail have been removed and replaced with fairly vague rhetoric. Many technologists were alarmed with the choice of Joe Biden before, and now it appears their fears might have been well founded." Update: 09/22 18:07 GMT by T : Julian Sanchez of Ars Technica passed on a statement from an Obama campaign representative who points out that the changes in wording highlighted by Versionista aren't the whole story, and that more Obama tech-plan details are now available in a PDF, saying "there is absolutely no substantive change to our policy - folks who want more information can click to get our full plan."
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New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
I hear one definition of insanity is repeating the same action while expecting a different result each time. How many times have we thrown our votes away on the major party candidates only to get the same old status quo, regardless of the promises made? It's high time we the people just say no to the corrupt two party system. It's time we got off our lazy asses and learn about the alternatives available outside the corporate-approved "choice" spoon-fed to us by Big Media. Oh sure, probably we'll get either McCain or Obama this time, but if enough people vote outside the box it will encourage others to do the same. Maybe we can even take back our government at some point. But it'll never happen by voting for one of the two "approved" candidates. We need a new meme -- don't throw your vote away. Don't waste your vote on the Republicrats!
Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:5, Funny)
I personally favor the Fingerlicans...
...although, the Tastycrats do make a good point about that titanium tax...
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Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly, everyone's gonna end up voting for the Brain Slug Party... again.
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Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:5, Funny)
ALL HAIL PRESIDENT HYPNOTOAD.
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the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's high time we the people just say no to the corrupt two party system. It's time we got off our lazy asses and learn about the alternatives available outside the corporate-approved "choice" spoon-fed to us by Big Media. Oh sure, probably we'll get either McCain or Obama this time, but if enough people vote outside the box it will encourage others to do the same.
Just three weeks ago I would have argued with you about this. Then Obama flip-flopped on FISA and voted for a bill containing telecom immunity. In so doing he lost my vote and my support. The only thing I would dispute is that the third parties really offer a better alternative. Consider:
Bob Barr: Witch-burning [religioustolerance.org] religious lunatic that led the impeachment of Bill Clinton and somehow gets to masquerade as a libertarian. Could they really do no better than this guy?
Ralph Nader: Left-wing crazy that thinks we should nationalize the energy industries (even I don't lean this far to the left) and expand the nanny state.
McKinney: Don't know a lot about her yet but the initial reading is not very promising [wikipedia.org]. Seems to have a huge chip on her shoulder and is probably at least as far to the left as Nader is.
I won't be voting for Obama or McCain but I don't see how I can support any of these crazies either. I'll sign their petitions for ballot access if asked but I fear that my vote for POTUS may wind up being blank this year :( I'd love the chance to meet Bob Barr and ask him directly if he's changed his tune on wiccans/neo-pagans -- a satisfactory answer might get him my vote. The others don't stand a chance though.
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Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then Obama flip-flopped on FISA and voted for a bill containing telecom immunity.
You know, I still don't get the huge deal with the telecom immunity. Yes the telecoms should be punished, at least as a preventative measure so that in the future companies think twice before following illegal government orders. And yet, the truly guilty party are the government officials who made those orders. Why are we so intend to lynch their stooges when the masterminds are getting away scot-free? Are we just settling because we know they're above the law? Isn't there a bit of a double standard here?
Just try thinking of it from the company's point of view. The government orders them to hand over records. The government obviously shows a disdain for the constitution and considers anyone who stands in their way to be terrorist accomplices. What's going to happen to you when you say 'No'?
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Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just try thinking of it from the company's point of view. The government orders them to hand over records. The government obviously shows a disdain for the constitution and considers anyone who stands in their way to be terrorist accomplices. What's going to happen to you when you say 'No'?
Congratulations, you have just outlined very concisely why fascism worked. Because everyone made that calculations for themselves, came up with the answer that compliance is the only rational choice, and complied with a system they knew to be evil.
Well, almost everyone. The rest got killed or exiled by people who were "just following orders".
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Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Informative)
Qwest said "no".
Qwest actually said, "This is not what a warrant looks like; come back when you have a real warrant."
It was pretty much the most impressive piece of corporate ballsiness I can recall in recent history.
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Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Informative)
In Qwest's case, they said "no" and got fucked out of government contracts worth millions. Classified government contracts, too, so they couldn't directly tell their stockholders where all the fucking money went.
No wonder the other three went along.
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Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not American, so I don't know all that much about the whole thing. However, isn't part of the complaint against telecom immunity due to the fact that it may sabotage any effort to investigate and prosecute government officials?
You don't want the stooges to have immunity because you want to be able to apply pressure so they incriminate their masters.
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Re:it could be worse.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Depressing situation isn't it? Conservatism made the Republican Party an actual party rather than the me-tooism of the 40s and 50s. They win the House and Senate for the first time in forty years while running on an unapologetically conservative platform. Bush wins while running as some weird bleeding heart conservative.
So what do we get?
Vast increase in federal spending!
Vast increase in federal power!
They morphed into a me-too-but-more party.
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Re:it could be worse.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Vast increase in federal spending!
That's bad enough but you forgot "while reducing Federal income by slashing taxes" at the end.
They morphed into a me-too-but-more party.
Indeed. To quote a friend of mine: I'd rather be a tax and spend Liberal than a borrow and spend Republican. At least the Dems are pretending to have a way to pay for their proposals -- the Republicans just want to put it on the national credit card.
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Numbers? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm pretty sure that federal revenue goes up when taxes are cut.
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Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
And everyone else is pretty sure you're stupid.
Funny how that works when you believe something there's no evidence for, and has never been any evidence of.
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Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
That must explain why the national deficit has skyrocketed under GWB.
It's my understanding that tax cuts really do increase revenue, but I'm not insistent on either position. The big problem with GWB is that he never met a government program he didn't like. Say the tax cuts raised revenue 5% for sake of illustration. You can't then increase spending by 25% and then wonder why you're losing ground.
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Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Informative)
The theory is based on the Laffer curve [wikipedia.org]. At a 0% tax rate, revenue will obviously be zero. At some arbitrarily high tax rate (100%? 1000%? 100,000%?), there's such a strong disincentive to earn money that revenue will also be zero. Given two zero crossings, you have an optimizable function of tax rate vs. revenue.
In short, some groups of intelligent people think that the tax rate is higher than the optimal value, and other intelligent people think it's lower than it should be. It's not inherently idiotic to imagine how tax cuts could in fact increase revenue.
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Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Informative)
You're being the idiot. Taxes are a balancing act. Move them too high and you stop consumption which then lowers overall revenue. People like to feel like they are getting value when they buy something. If you tax it so much that value is no longer noticed people quit buying things. If you lower them, then people can (and will) buy more stuff which increases revenue. It's not a hard concept to understand, and there are numbers to prove it.
Your analogy doesn't work. A better one is a company that sells some cool widget for $100. At $100 only 10 people buy it and make the company $1000. The widget is really cool and people want it, but they don't see the value at $100. So the company lowers the price to $10 and now sells 1,000 of the widgets and make the company $10,000. OMG, how did they make more money selling the widget for less??? Maybe they should give it away make infinite amounts of money. I know this is tough logic to follow, but sheesh...
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Re:it could be worse.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now all we need is a cable channel called MTV to start playing music videos for the first time, and we will be all set.
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Re:A vote for POTUS is for far more than a POTUS (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with all of what you are saying and I've railed against single-issue voters in the past. I can't bring myself to get over this FISA vote though. Beyond telecom immunity this bill guts the FISA court and gives the Executive carte blanche to wiretap without warrants or judicial oversight. Do you talk to anyone overseas on the telephone? Your calls could be monitored at any time without a warrant thanks to this bill. You as an American citizen have effectively had your right against unreasonable search and seizure taken away from you just because you want to communicate with someone outside of our borders.
Obama swore an oath to defend the Constitution when elected to the Senate. He has now violated that oath. Why should I believe he will take the Presidential Oath seriously? Call me a sentimentalist but I believe that such oaths should be taken seriously. They remind all of us (from the person serving on a jury or testifying as a witness all the way up to the POTUS) that we are a nation of laws and that no one person is above those laws.
Ironically enough Obama's own statement [barackobama.com] on this issue explains my concerns far more eloquently then I can: "It grants retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that may have violated the law by cooperating with the Bush Administration's program of warrantless wiretapping. This potentially weakens the deterrent effect of the law and removes an important tool for the American people to demand accountability for past abuses."
Indeed. Who knew that giving retroactive immunity for past violations of the law would weaken the deterrent effect of the law? His own statement provides ample justification for opposing this law -- yet he supported it anyway? WTF?
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Re:New Meme (Score:5, Funny)
I knew it: Quantum physics and statistics are insanity.
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Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:New Meme (Score:5, Informative)
You cut off your nose despite your face.
No, you cut off your nose to spite your face.
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Re:New Meme (Score:5, Informative)
Am I the only person who clicked on the link (hyperlink behind "Vote McCain in 2008". It takes you to McCain food services. It was a joke, folks.
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Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
At the end, the author closes with the line "If anything, the changes simply reflect that Obama is just another politician"- one of the most popular right-wing attacks on Obama.
Take a look at the picture, again: http://blog.wired.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/07/15/mccain_obama_versionaista.jpg [wired.com]
That's not some sort of scrub or replacing a sentence that made him look bad or backing down from a strong position. It's an outright replacement of an older quote with a newer one. If anything, it makes Obama's Iraq policy even clearer.
At the bottom, it also shows there are two links that have been added as well.
If there is some sort of "just another politician" type of coverup of an older policy going on at Obama's site, it's certainly not in the picture given in the article; and this makes me think that this is just whining: "He updated his page instead of leaving it static from January to November? HOW DARE HE?!"
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Re:New Meme (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, you're trying to be cute, but if you roll the die a thousand times hoping that NEXT TIME it'll wash your dishes instead of providing the information on one of the die's faces, you've touched upon what the GP is talking about.
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Re:New Meme (Score:5, Informative)
Why not pencil in Powell as a candidate on the ballet?!
Because he was complicit in misleading the public into the Iraq war.
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Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
Until we change our voting system to something like Instant Runoff voting, the large parties will never be beaten because voting for a 3rd party really is throwing away your vote.
No, it really isn't. This is an infuriating bit of misinformation that needs to stop. The only thing that is throwing away your vote is not voting. Any vote, any vote at all, is not throwing your vote away. Period. More importantly, the only thing that keeps third parties from gaining power in this country is thinking like yours. We should get a different voting system, but barring that, people need to wake the fuck up and realize they're only shooting themselves in the foot by voting for "not that guy". Obama and McCain have clearly shown us that you're just voting for the same guy, with a different name.
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Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
Obama and McCain have clearly shown us that you're just voting for the same guy, with a different name.
Really? Really? I've been listening to this tired meme for the past three elections. "Oh, Bush and Gore are just the same guy with a different name. Vote Nader." "Oh, Bush and Kerry are the same guy with a different name. Vote Badnarik." It wasn't true then and it isn't now. Really, if you can't see that there actually are substantative differences between the two front-runners, you're not paying any attention.
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Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you're the one not paying attention if you don't see the striking similarities, which erase any differences that there might be. Let's recap: Obama voted for the FISA bill. In doing so, he showed that, as far as he's concerned, the rule of law applies in this country only when it's convenient. So, on one hand, we have McCain, who supports immunity (i.e., does not respect the rule of law we strive for). On the other hand, we have Obama, who claims to not support immunity, but really does support it as evidenced by his actions. So he, too, does not respect the rule of law. Not to mention the fact that both of them think that it's a good idea to wiretap people just on suspicions they might be a terrorists, and all the horrible precedent that sets.
Both the candidates this year are completely worthless. If you can't see that, you're blind.
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Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad to see that two candidates eventually agreeing on a single bill makes them practically the same person.
Man, I agree that the FISA thing was a bad decision, but don't turn into a one-issue voter.
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Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm furious at Obama for his capitulation over FISA.
However, to argue that FISA is the only issue and that the massive policy differences between Obama and McCain elsewhere somehow pale into insignificance because of that one issue is ridiculous.
While our trust in Obama may be weakened by what's happened, we can at least expect him not to involve the US in needless wars, to make a good-faith attempt to extricate us from Iraq, to not appoint right-wing zealots to SCOTUS, to manage the economy in a way that doesn't involve populist tax cuts without reductions in spending, and to know enough about Foreign policy to understand that Czechoslovakia is not a country and therefore Russia does not export oil to it, and what the difference is between the various Muslim factions in the Middle East.
Our trust in McCain should be at rock-bottom considering the massive number of flip-flops he's engaged in over the last few years, but we can trust him to continue - as he's promised - the occupation of Iraq. We can expect him to at least turn up the temperature in Iran, and quite possibly invade it needlessly rather than attempt to rebuild the pro-Democracy forces that were taking over Iran until the US invaded Iraq and started talking smack about Iran. We can expect him to continue Bush's deficit-growing policies. We can continue to expect him to muse about countries he wants to invade in public, mix up political groups, and work from an Atlas that apparently hasn't been updated since the end of the Cold War, if not earlier (I'm half expecting him to protest about the atrocities occurring in Rhodesia...) And we can expect him to appoint SCOTUS judges who care more about right-wing ideology, trying to undermine Congressional oversight, undermining the separation of Church and State inherent in the 1st Amendment, and attacking privacy and the right to control one's own body.
And you'll know it if you allow McCain to win, just as you did with Kerry, and just as you did with Gore.
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Vote Third or Fourth Party (Score:5, Interesting)
As a fellow Brit, it's almost ontopic to reply here :p
I wrote a JE [slashdot.org] a while back, asking people to vote third or fourth party, even if they could "make do" with one of the "main" parties. The interesting thing is that reasons to do so do not rely upon faith!
A number a years back, I did some campaigning for the Liberal Democrats; I no longer consider myself to be party political, but their campaign techniques were interesting. The most interesting was the "reverse squeeze". The way that that works is that the Lib Dems would go after either Labour or the Tories, whichever had the fewest votes in the seat. Once their support went down, the numbers voting for the other team would come down in roughly equal numbers.
In other words, one vote fewer for one of the main parties implies approximately one fewer votes for the other one. Because voters can sense the political equilibrium, your own decision to deny the main parties your vote for a better personal choice is essentially costless! Better still, your vote is amplified (although they might instead choose to vote for another small party).
Not only is your change of vote essentially costless, but also you get to send a signal both to voters and to your future representative. The voters get to see a change in the support of your chosen party which is bigger than the signal would have been if cast for one of the main ones. Your representive receives a signal as to how best to win your vote the next time around.
The only reasons not to vote for a smaller party are if you are better represented by one of the main parties, or else if you think that competition is a harmful force in politics, and would rather give a clearer "mandate" to the winner. American voters seem to act like this, with later voters preferring to strengthen the early vote, and it can even make a kind of sense if a "strong nation" is more important to you than democracy.
The flip side to the last observation is that if you're in the US, vote early. Others will then copy your vote, so in a sense, you get to "vote early, vote often".
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The Goods (Score:5, Informative)
Here are the goods from TFA:
The Friday, July 11 version of the page says:
"at great cost our troops have helped reduce violence in some areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006."
The Monday, July 14 version spidered by Versionista says:
"Our troops have heroically helped reduce civilian casualties in Iraq to early 2006 levels. This is a testament to our military's hard work, improved counterinsurgency tactics, and enormous sacrifice by our troops and military families."
Re:The Goods (Score:5, Insightful)
So he updated his policy position when the facts changed?
Republicans are just recording that it changed. Why are people so upset they are recording the differences between what Obama used to say and what he says now?
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muahaha, gotcha... (Score:5, Funny)
So through the course of our research we've found that you've modified some of the sections on your policy positions...
*coughs (and that you have twenty times the traffic we do)
Re:muahaha, gotcha... (Score:5, Funny)
So through the course of our research we've found that you've modified some of the sections on your policy positions...
*coughs (and that you have twenty times the traffic we do)
How else do you expect people to keep up with all of those policy position changes?
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robots.txt? Goldmine! (Score:5, Informative)
robots.txt is idiotic in this context, except to steer spiders away from forms that shouldn't be submitted or triggering infinite loops. Suppose you find something like:
Don't you think that's going to be the first place to look? Again, robots.txt is to avoiding causing site meltdowns or stupid behavior. It's not to hide information.
Why is updating your policy positions bad again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is changing what you have to say a bad thing? If you have a different set of facts or a change in thought, why is it bad to change your opinions?
And are the edits that the Obama campaign making really significant? I had a look at the differences highlighted in the linked Wired article, and they didn't really look like a significant change in substance.
So fucking what? Are we really this stupid in our politics that it's now a game of crying "flip-flopper" when you just say more or less the same thing, maybe with a different emphasis?
Re:Why is updating your policy positions bad again (Score:5, Insightful)
New words scare people. Just a couple weeks ago, Obama said in a press conference that he'd be willing to "refine" his Iraq policy during his visit there, and a combination of the media and the McCain campaign jumped all over him for "flip-flopping" on Iraq. They were pretending that he had said that he was going to change his stance on the war, and so he had to give a second press conference later that day to emphasize that he had said nothing of the sort.
The media is trying to have a repeat of 2004 by painting the Democrat as a flip-flopper, when he has only waffled, as all politicians do. Even Obama's worst flip-flop, on the FISA legislation, wasn't a complete reversal: though he voted the final bill, he still voted to strip the immunity provision. He said that he thought the bill had more good than bad in it, and while we might disagree, that's just a matter of priority, not of position.
Meanwhile, McCain directly contradicts himself time and time again, and he has so far gotten off scot-free. We don't have a liberal media or a conservative media, we have a sensationalist media that caters to the lowest common denominator by trying to place the candidates into a pre-defined mold that has existed for the better part of three decades.
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Re:Why is updating your policy positions bad again (Score:5, Informative)
John McCain has had his share of flip flops [rawstory.com], as document in this Keith Olbermann clip. It's pretty hilarious because the clip ends by reading a statement from McCain that his viewpoints are evolving, and then noting that McCain was for evolution, and now against evolution. It is pretty well done.
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We have unequivocal proof... (Score:5, Funny)
McCain trying to hide his flip-flopping (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Obama is editing his web site and fine-tuning his message. BFD. That's what web sites are for. I don't see anything greatly inconsistent in what Obama is doing.
What is really going on is that McCain has a lousy record: he has been flip-flopping on positions and has a lot of history that he needs to hide from. This is a huge problem for the Republican party establishment, who probably would have preferred any candidate other than McCain.
So, what does McCain do? He tries to go on the offensive so that he can say "well, it's OK if I flip-flop because the other guy edits his web site, too".
Don't let McCain get away with this bullshit. McCain is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of both conservative Republicans and moderates in terms of his actual positions and record.
Re:Who are you trying to fool? (Score:5, Informative)
"The Republicans" didn't do a damn thing that I'd call special or a new trick--they simply used an existing tool (and no, its not diff or any other command-line tool):
Versionista monitors Web sites that you specify for edits. Our Web-based service records every change, clearly highlighting added or deleted words and sentences.
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Re:Who are you trying to fool? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because for the first time in 40 years there is a contender who isn't a rich old white guy. For the first time EVER there is a real contender who isn't white.
If you can't see that this is an astonishing departure from the status quo, then you really are blind. I'm not sure what kind of candidate it would take to impress people like you, short of a 35-year old gay atheist inuit liberatarian
If you think superficial factors make him a better candidate for president, then you're every bit as damned stupid as the racists who think that they automatically make him worse. Most of us recognize that the color of his skin is irrelevant. We judge him by his merits as a candidate. Or, as Martin Luther King, Jr., would have said, we judge him not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. And I, personally, have judged him by his worth as a candidate, and found him no different than any other politician. A lot of talk, nothing to back it up. Just look at the damn FISA bill if you want evidence. If that doesn't convince you that Obama is the same breed, just with a different skin tone, nothing will.
There's this idiotic attitude that is starting to pervade our society, where people figure that because a group of people was oppressed in the past, now they should get special regard. That's every bit as immoral and insulting as oppressing them in the first place! Judge them as the person they are, not as the color of their skin, whether positively or negatively.
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Re:Who are you trying to fool? (Score:5, Insightful)
We should judge a candidate by their positions not their race. As far as I can tell in this regard Obama is 'just another democrat'. After listening to one of his speaches I discovered that (1) he is a very good rhetorician (that can be a good or bad thing), (2) he talks a lot about 'change' but never says from what to what, and (3) the few positions that he actually stated where just standard democratic positions.
I would be willing to stand corrected, but on the issues Obama looks like any other democrat. He talks slick, but that is about it.
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Re:http://www.barackobama.com/robots.txt (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How can you say Republicans are "old dogs" (Score:5, Insightful)
Who came up with the Marshall Plan again ?
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Good point. (Score:5, Insightful)
Who came up with the Marshall Plan again
Democrats did, and here's the thing. Most of the "Reagan Republicans" and their intellectual descendants fondly remember when Democrats actually did embark on big visions and big crusade to try and make the world a place for free trade, free from tyranny. That old, old conservative isolationist wing of the Republican Party is basically a small minority.
What really happened is that Democrats completely lost their nerve after Viet Nam. Instead of looking at the war, and saying that they made some mistakes in its execution, and in fact, had actually started to turn things around once Westmoreland was replaced by Abrams, they have instead enshrined an ethic that lacks any sort of faith in the very government to do anything other than redistribute wealth.
I mean, Democrats are to be forever saluted for what they did from the 1940s through the 1960s. A lot of their ideas didn't work, but some did, and, we got the victory in World War II, built a national infrastructure that we've been living off of for 50 years, and put a man on the moon. They built a framework to stand against Soviet aggression and deftly avoided a world war without undermining American resolve. But, today's Democrats tend to reject a lot of that. Back in the 1960s, the Democrats who wanted NASA cut to pay for the poor were squelched, now they run the show. Today, the very idea of going to the moon, let alone mars, is considered to be just a handout, when it really, it is a project that harnesses the finest minds of the country towards a peaceful, momentus, national goal.
I would be willing to bet that if, in fact, a more muscular foreign policy candidate, one who really could articulate the American vision of free trade through Pax Americana, expansively, in the way that FDR and his ideological descendant, Reagan could, I would certainly support them, and, in fact, just about every Republican I know -would-. But instead today's Democratic party is consumed with identity politics and redistribution, sorta trying to divvying up the spoils but without the old Dems that still saw a need to get spoils to divvy.
Unfortunately though, through a catastrophe of party rules, Dems have a process that continually nominates the candidate who kowtows to a group of people that are in the minority. Republicans have a similar problem too, but, they at least have the sense to tend to set aside other policy differences so long as the free trade expansionist vision stands.
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Re:worked ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody knows that if you're fighting an asymmetric war, you make your moves at the time when you can strike and minimize your losses, and you wait patiently at all other times. Anyone who thinks the violence against US targets isn't going to go back up as soon as the surge ends OR it becomes clear by observing US political and military statements and operations that the "surge" is permanent, is kidding themselves.
I'd also like to point out that it is very unfair and biased to measure violence "in the form of attacks, and the number of US casualties in Iraq" - what about Iraqi causalities? Civilian casualties? Shouldn't those be at least as important, if not more important, now that it's clear the war isn't being fought for WMDs?
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