Tag Archives: electoral madness

Fair credit

Compare and contrast two candidate Web sites: Jessica Van Der Veen and Ida Chong. Clearly, we’re getting better at designing campaign Web sites, and candidates are using the Web more intelligently now than they used to.

It’s not so much the Web sites themselves that interest me, however. Look at the domain names:

jessicavanderveen.bcndp.ca versus idachong.com.

Ok, look, I know it’s 2009 and the whole namespace pollution horse has not only fled, but burned the barn down to cover its tracks, but still — candidates as third-level rather than second-level domains! This is great. I gotta give the BC NDP props for doing this right. I don’t know whether it was a deliberate choice to be good to the namespace, or whether it was an accident that came of the way the party is managing its IT infrastructure, but way to go, guys. (The only way it could have been better is if it had been fredflintstone.bc.ndp.ca, but I’ll settle for what we got.)

See also this and this (as a primer if you don’t understand why this is so significant).

(Said the guy who owns fumbling.com and vrinimi.net and is neither a network provider nor a corporation as far as he can tell…)

Raw, unfiltered joy

The defining moment of Campaign 2008, for me: standing in the lobby of the Rio in Las Vegas, having just gotten out from Penn and Teller, watching mobs of people surge through the hallways, some of them crying, some of them laughing, some of them hugging, all of them chanting, in one voice, with the force and joy and certainty of the vindicated: “Yes we did.”

20-odd hours later, it still rings in my ears. “Yes we did.”

I could be cynical about this. I’m cynical by nature. But I can’t be cynical about this.

That's good/that's bad: Connecticut Democratic Primary edition

So Joe Lieberman went down in flames last night to Ned Lamont, every progressive blogger’s favorite candidate. I don’t know anything about Ned, except that he’s not Joe, and frankly that’s more than enough for me to hope he wins. Back in 2004 I had sort of promised I wasn’t going to pay a lot of attention to US politics anymore, because it was getting stupid as hell, but Joe Lieberman strikes me as a particularly sanctimonious breed of prick, and anything that causes him professional pain and suffering is thus OK in my books.

What worries me about this is the message it’s going to send. Not, as per Time‘s suggestion, that bloggers sent the Joementum down to defeat. I don’t really care whether the dreaded Emm Ess Emm thinks bloggers and Internet activists were responsible for winning Ned Lamont his chance to run for Senate, and I care even less whether politicians themselves take that lesson home. (Blogs are good for a few things and the Internet is good as a whole for a bunch more, but if you were a smart campaigner, you already knew this (see “Dean, Howard,” for the benefits and limitations of that strategy).) No, what I worry is that bloggers themselves are going to get this idea in their heads that they can influence the outcome of elections, and we cannot have that. The idea that bloggers are going to change the nature of political discourse in western society is one of the most obnoxious memes out there, and the very last thing we need is to have more bloggers with an even bigger sense of importance.

All politics are local. We have no way of knowing why Connecticut Democrats gave Joe the ol’ heave-ho. We don’t care. But one thing’s for sure: It wasn’t because of anyone’s heroic posting.

Indecision 2005^H6: Stop making sense

I can’t stand the present election campaign, and I really can’t stand it when the Traitors say something that not only makes sense but is good politics too:

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe noted that the House of Commons had already held a vote on the marriage issue.

“We shouldn’t have a free vote on something that has already been decided. We should not have to have one every six months,” he said, adding “the religion of some should not constitute the law for everybody.”

Why, Jesus, why? Why can you not give me an opposition party that can win, makes sense, and runs in my ridings?

Meanwhile, the Tyee has some details about how the Hippies aren’t really Hippies. I can’t decide whether this constitutes a strike against them or not.