Pinging stuff I care about.
Condense Your Day With the Life-Hacking FAQK:
So why is it called life hacking?
Because a new name makes it sound like a new idea. Geeks can’t admit that anything worthwhile was invented before 1981. Soon, “making cocoa” will be called “milk hacking.”
From a mailing from Dennis Kucinich’s campaign:
The Kucinich campaign is still awaiting an official response from ABC News about the unexplained – some have charged “inexplicable” – way in which the network has handled its post-debate online coverage of Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich over the past few days.
Among the “outrages” that have energized tens of thousands of Kucinich supporters – and even non-supporters – thousands of whom have flooded the ABC News website and other online news sites with comments of protest:
* Congressman Kucinich was apparently deliberately cropped out of a “Politics Page” photo of the candidates.
* Sometime Monday afternoon, after Congressman Kucinich took a commanding lead in ABC’s own on-line “Who won the Democratic debate” survey, the survey was dropped from prominence on the website.
* ABC News has not officially reported the results of its online survey.
* After the results of that survey showed Congressman Kucinich winning handily, ABC News, sometime Monday afternoon, replaced the original survey with a second survey asking “Who is winning the Democratic debate?”
* During the early voting Monday afternoon and evening, U.S. Senator Barack Obama was in the lead. By sometime late Monday or early Tuesday morning, Congressman Kucinich regained the lead by a wide margin in this second survey.
* Sometime Tuesday morning, ABC News apparently dropped the second survey from prominence or killed it entirely.
* AND, as every viewer of the nationally televised Sunday Presidential forum is aware, Congressman Kucinich was not given an opportunity to answer a question from moderator George Stephanopoulos until 28 minutes into the program.
The campaign submitted objections and inquiries to ABC News representatives on Monday and Tuesday. ABC News representatives have failed to respond – or even acknowledge – those objections and inquiries.
Stayed tuned for further details.
Somebody at ABC has a problem with Kucinich’s campaign, apparently. A big problem. And is taking action.
Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently visited Iraq with Sen. John Warner (R-VA) and reported that the escalation is “totally and utterly†failing to produce the political reconciliation needed.
The media is reporting Levin’s comments as validation of Bush’s strategy. Fox News spins Levin’s comments as “praise†for the “surge results.†ABC claims the comments are proof of “success of the surge.â€
That’s just egregious. I thought that the unquestioning acquiescence to administration spin was supposed to have drained out of the media by now, but no… Is Fox News just the most obvious example of what’s endemic in the whole institution?
ABC News Reposts Poll Because Kucinich Won | intosanity:
Earlier today ABC News posted a poll asking who won the democratic debate and Kucinich won by over 3,000 votes. Just recently they reposted the poll to bury the previous one and cut his picture out on top of that!
I guess “unscientific” polls put on the internet by large media organizations are acceptable only if they produce results that do not challenge What Everyone Knows, such as that Kucinich is a fringe candidate that nobody should pay attention to.
dennis4president.com – Survey: Majority of Americans Agree with Dennis Kucinich:
In the political equivalent of a “blind taste test†taken by more than 67,000 participants, an independent website surveying public attitudes on various issues is reporting that Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich is the first choice of a phenomenal 53% of respondents.
On all but a few issues, average Americans, whether they self-describe as Republican or Democrat, tend to hold views that would be described in Washington as massively, unelectably left-wing.
As of August 3rd (the survey is recalculated every five minutes), more than 35,600 respondents were “in sync†with Kucinich on the issues. Democratic front-runner Senator Hillary Clinton was the first-place choice of only about 2,400 respondents (3.6%). Other leading candidates fared even worse: Senator Barack Obama (3%), and former Senator John Edwards (1.3%).
As of right now, Kucinich is still owning the field.
The site’s author writes:
You would probably be interested to know that Kucinich has been the first choice of 72134 people (out of 124997). That wasn’t my intention or expectation when making this site, but it is certainly interesting.
This is not as strange as you would think — I ran across this in a Dec 2005 interview with Noam Chomsky of all people —
Chomsky: Well look I think it’s a very optimistic future, frankly.
Interviewer: Really?
Chomsky: Yes very much so. There’s something we know about the country, this country, more than any other. We know a lot about public opinion, it’s studied very intensively. The results are very rarely reported but you can find them. It’s an open society and you can find them. What they show is remarkable. What they show first of all is that both political parties and the media are far to the right of the general population on a whole host of issues and the population is just disorganized, atomized and so on. This country ought be an organizers paradise. And that’s why the media and the campaigns keep away from issues. They know that on issues they’re going to lose people. So therefore you have to portray George Bush as a – look he’s a pampered kid from a rich family who went to prep school and elite university, and you have to present him as an ordinary guy, who makes grammatical errors, which I’m sure he’s trained to make, he didn’t talk that way at Yale, fake Texas twang, and he’s off to his ranch to, you know, cut brush or something.
Kucinich probably is unelectable in our current system, despite the fact that his views are those of the majority of Americans (unless the people who used that choose-your-candidate site were a massively, massively unrepresentative group of people for some reason.)
The news media have written him off before the campaign begins; the popular support his positions enjoy will never be reported on; the massive disjunction between the other candidates’ positions (Democratic and Republican) and the desires of the nation will not be reported on. In fact, their actual positions on real issues will be avoided, in favor of horse-race commentary about who’s ahead this week in terms of massive contributions from corporate donors, and who is rumored to spend how much on their haircuts, and whether Hilary Clinton’s dress revealed a shadow of cleavage, and which of the Republicans is most able to express his willingness to torture “terrorists” while remembering not to call it “torture.”
We’ll get a choice between a Democratic candidate who mostly represents his corporate backers and gives lip service to representing American people, and a Republican candidate who unabashedly serves his corporate backers, especially the ones with military or “security” collections, and openly scoffs at the idea of doing anything for Americans except locking up supposed criminals in profitable corporate jails and bombing supposed enemies with profitable corporate bombs.
Or you can “waste” your vote on a third party, which I would honestly consider at this point, even in light of the nakedly psychotic menace that all the front-running Republican candidates present.
Assuming Kucinich doesn’t get the nomination, maybe we should start a “write in Kucinich” campaign, or some other group like the Greens should nominate him.