After Chris Bowers’ brilliant idea about how to run your own paid media campaign, I decided to give it a shot and personally run a google ad in Ohio. Heck, it’s a free country and I wanted to try to point people searching for information on John McCain to a cool site that shows his lobbyist connections. Here’s the ad as it’s running in Ohio right now.
This ad will show up for the search terms that Chris laid out in his post. After a day and a half, here are my results:
I’ve limited the ad run to $100/month, because I didn’t have an ad budget before yesterday…
Agree or disagree with my politics? Run your own ad! Google adsense makes it a breeze.
Since you’re reading this blog, you’re most likely interested in technology. You probably work in the tech industry, or understand the value of technology infrastructure in the life of our country. I wanted to pass on some great analysis that Lawrence Lessig did of John McCain and Barack Obama’s technology policies as one particularly relevant point as we choose our next president.
Lessig took a look at John McCain’s technology platform, which he released on 8/14. While the platform touted McCain’s experience on the Senate’s Commerce, Science and Technology committee, he found it wanting in many ways.
First, Lessig points out that over the last 8 years the US has plummeted from 5th in the world in broadband penetration to 22nd. Compared to the rest of the world, we have less broadband access today than we did 8 years ago.
This a stunning setback for a country that likes to think it sets the standard for a technological citizenry. MeCain has been at the helm of congress in regards to policies that have brought this reversal about, so Lessig looks for anything in the platform that might reverse this trend.
He finds nothing. But not only does he find nothing to help with this current problem, he finds no acknowledgment of the problem at all. McCain wishes to continue the policies that lead us to this place:
He wants tax cuts for business to help spur innovation.
He wants low income people to get more access to broadband by subsidizing companies to make this happen.
Lessig points out that these proposals have one thing in common–they drive money to the largest Internet companies. And there are now basically two major Internet providers in the US–a consolidation that the US government has been complicit in while John McCain was head of the Technology committee. It didn’t have to be this way.
France didn’t do this. Lessig compares Paris, where you can get 200mbps Internet, telephone service and TV for $45/month to San Francisco, where $90/month will get you those services, but with 1/10th the speed for Internet.
Lessig calls our policy a “failure” and posits the solution is net neutrality. He suggests that you think about the internet as you think about phones. Should your phone provider decide which numbers you can call? Should they be able to listen in on your convervsations and lower the quality depending on what you’re talking about? No provider should get to pick who I get to connect to.
Network operators want more control, they want the Internet to look more like cable TV where you don’t get to choose.
Net neutrality says the internet is like the phone system–you get to call anyone and say anything, as long as it’s legal. Attach whatever devices as long as they aren’t harmful.
Obama’s policy is distinctly different from John McCain’s as it proposes a new direction for how the country uses technology. He recognizes that the last 8 years have been failed policy. He realizes we need a CTO for the country, that we need to use technology to make government transparent.
We have a clear choice in this election when it comes to technology. Should we continue to funnel money to Comcast and fall farther behind the rest of the world, or should we try a new direction based on openness and innovation. I think the better policy is clearly Obama’s plan, and I suggest that if you want more information you check out his plan online and compare it to McCain’s.
Campaigns are about seizing opportunity and running with it. Obama is seizing this opportunity to brand John McCain:
Obama just announced surrogates will be talking about John McCain’s houses and his forgetting about them in 16 states tomorrow. Ouch. Looks like the general is really underway.
I’ve had a great time working with Green for All–they’re accomplishing amazing things very rapidly. And what Van is doing to set the messaging frame for the new environmental movement is invaluable. We all need to keep him out there, spreading the message.
We can’t make a green economy by reclaiming thrown away stuff, we need to reclaim thrown away people.
I can’t tell a drug dealer he’s hurting the community, and that he should go work for Walmart. They hurt the community, too.
Green jobs not jails.
Affluent people can spend money on “green premium” Priuses, but poor people can earn money and save money in a green economy.
It’s not about crisis, it’s about opportunity
This is great stuff. He also calls out the biggest risk to this movement–a backlash alliance between polluters and poor people. I think he’s right on there.
I was listening to NPR today and Juan Williams was arguing that it is strange that Obama isn’t picking Clinton for VP. In his mind, she’s the only one that helps him in the polls, and pushes him over 50%, “because that is how you win–get more than 50%.”
Now, you can argue with Williams’ assessment of Clinton’s possible affect on Obama’s chances in the presidential race. But you can’t argue that he’s correct in saying that getting more than 50% of the vote is sufficient to win the presidency.
For the last 232 years the only way to win the presidency has been to get a majority of the electoral college votes. It is certainly possible to win the presidency with less than 50% of the vote, but we can forgive Williams because he would have researched all the way back to 2000 to find an instance of that happening.
These guys are phoning it in. Thanks for your contribution to creating an informed electorate.
Just heard from Al queda expert Lawrence Wright that in 2001 the FBI had 7 agents who spoke Arabic.
Today it has 8.
This in light of the conservative RAND Corporation’s report that most terrorist groups have ended by either entering the political process or through law enforcement actions.
Good luck with that law enforcement while not speaking the language.
I am loving the Internet media this election cycle. The most insightful political analysis I’ve read this year has been on political blogs, not TV. I watch Keith Olberman, and he reports stories that were broken on blogs earlier that day. I’ve been reading way too much of this material this spring (ask my wife), and I have to say that it feels like a core pillar of our future as a democracy.
There are amazing disparate voices out there that have huge circulation numbers and relatively low production costs. Newspapers and TV struggle as Internet media readership increases. It is the future, and it is skewed to the people, the small voices, not the corporations.
The biggest threat to this massive shift is a top-down squelching that is being attempted by folks like Comcast and fought by folks like you and me in support of what is called net neutrality. In short, we need to keep the Internet wide open, and not restrict people’s access to the small, crazy, off-beat voices out there. Comcast and others are trying to make it harder to read dailykos.com, talkingpointsmemo.com, and openleft.com.
Don’t let them do it.
Think I’m over reacting? Watch this short, small-budget media production of John McCain in his own words:
The overwhelming media narrative on John McCain is that he’s a straight shooter, and sticks to positions even if they are unpopular. These narratives are self-reinforcing and almost impossible for common people to affect. Until now. 500,000 people have watched this clip as of my posting this. Millions have watched Obama online. People are seeing for themselves and making up their own mind.
And the media has to adjust, because it’s harder to maintain an untrue narrative when others are out there contradicting you with pesky things like facts and video. Kinda makes you look like you didn’t do your research, or at worst that you’re lying.
My state representative is retiring this year and a candidate for her seat stopped by our house yesterday. He was a nice guy, a Democrat with lots of experience with fighting for better health care. He asked me what I cared about and I told him net neutrality. He stumbled a bit, but knew about the issue. He said, “It’s kind of a federal issue.”
On one level he’s right. But Comcast operates in Washington state. Comcast is granted a monopoly by the City of Seattle. This fight must be fought at every level of Government. And it must be fought by Democrats. The Republican party is a top-down enterprise. Just look at all the failed Republican projects that were supposed to emulate Daily Kos, or Act Blue. Democrats, like Obama, thrive in a bottom-up world. A powerful Internet-based media is a massive boon to the Democratic party, because it serves the public, and the public is majority Democrat.
If there were a cable provider who was pro net neutrality, I would switch from Comcast in a heart beat. But heck, I may just cancel cable altogether–I can follow politics better on the web anyway. As long as the net stays neutral.
