Free Republic

Just a reminder that for those of you with TV or cable, (and even if you have it), C-SPAN streams its 3 TV channels and radio channel on the Internet. I'm watching McCain's speech in New Mexico today. It's awesome and I would have missed it if not for C-SPAN online. GO MCCAIN!

US presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have released their technology policies, differing on whether "Net neutrality" rules should be imposed on telecommunications companies and on the breadth of their aspirations for the American public. Mr Obama said Net neutrality rules – which would prevent telcos giving priority to certain types of Internet traffic over others – were needed to ensure freedom of expression on the Internet and to prevent "a two-tier Internet in which websites with the best relationships with network providers can get the fastest access to consumers". The debate over Net neutrality has international implications, pitting...

Members of the House will be permitted to use third-party Web sites like YouTube to communicate with constituents as long as the content is for official purposes, and not personal, commercial or campaign communication, according to rules adopted Thursday by the House Administration Committee. The rules are seen by House Administration Chairman Robert Brady as a compromise between several proposals under consideration in recent months and are closely aligned with those circulated by the Senate Rules Committee last week. One plan by Rep. Michael Capuano, D-Mass., who chairs the commission charged with drafting the language for the Administration Committee, was...

New Media on Immigration by: Jesse Masai, October 02, 2008 The U.S. media have hindered effective policy-making on immigration for decades, and their impact has been increasing in recent years as a result of an ongoing evolution in the media industry. That was the consensus emerging out of a panel organized by the Brookings Institution to assess democracy in the age of new media on September 25 at the Ronald Reagan Building. The Institution released a report examining the new media’s role in the U.S. Immigration debate, and exploring how the media conditioned public opinion and the policy landscape. “Changes...

(snip) Free Republic: It's not the prettiest site you'll ever visit, but if your news tastes run to the conservative side of things, you may quickly get accustomed to Free Republic's sharp daily aggregation of news and commentary on all the hot-button conservative stories and issues of the day. You can post your opinions in the site's active forums, too. (snip)

MANASSAS, Virginia, September 29 /Christian Newswire/ -- The defeat of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout "shows the power of the New and Alternative Media," said Richard A. Viguerie, the Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com. "It is the clearest evidence yet of a shift in power from the Washington/Wall Street establishment to the American people." He noted, "Just last year, the people rose up to defeat amnesty for illegal aliens. Now they have risen up to defeat this monstrosity. Not in the last 50 years has the establishment had two such massive defeats so close together. I believe that the Internet, talk...

If anyone is blogging on blogs for John McCain could you please freepmail me. I need a FRiends Favor with a problem on the website. Thanks

The 2004 contest between President Bush and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry marked the beginning of the end for the old media monopoly. On the one hand, clumsy media attempts to fabricate a story, complete with phony documents hastily fabricated using modern word-processing software, clearly indicated that CBS bigwig Dan Rather and his minions were stumping for Kerry. Meanwhile, the old media failed miserably in their shameless attempts to discredit the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth. That organization's thoroughly documented evidence completely unraveled Kerry's baseless claims of heroism in Vietnam. By so doing, the Swift Vets struck the fatal blow to his...

Grassroots person-to-person contacts can negate his eight-figure campaign budget"Unmasking the Source of an Internet Rumor" shows how viral E-mail can decide the 2008 Presidential election. "Viral E-mail" does not mean the E-mail contains a computer virus; instead, it spreads like a virus (or propagates like a nuclear chain reaction). The Flash presentation at Jewsvote.org presents this concept visually, and it shows why the Obama campaign finds the idea terrifying. If neighbor to neighbor contacts expose Obama's support for Black Nationalism, his association with racists and anti-Semites of every stripe, and his questionable campaign financing methods, all the money in the...

Excerpt - United Airlines saw a 76 percent drop in its share price Monday, after it was reported that the company had filed for bankruptcy protection. The news story turned out to have been six years old and had been erroneously picked up by the Google News service. It was then posted to the Bloomberg Professional network. In the words of duckcommander80 from Yahoo Finance's message board, who lost $19,000, "WHO THE HELL DO WE SUE???????" It's not clear... ~ snip ~

Click here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=757087 Join a rapidly growing LinkedIn Group enthusiastically committed to the success of Sarah "The Barracuda" Palin as current Alaska Governor, as future Vice-President and as future President of the United States.

A few months ago, Barack Obama was basically the only candidate on the Internet--In terms of Google trends, anyway--but all that is changing. Due to excitement around the Republican National Convention and the surprise announcement of dark horse vice presidential candidate Sarah Pallin, the web is paying a lot of attention to McCain. Traffic to McCain's site has sky-rocketed recently. Of course, neither Obama nor McCain is gaining as much internet attention as Sarah Palin, Republican Vice Presidential nominee. Check out the spike in this graph of google searches:

Reading the words carries an impact, but nothing compared to when you listen to them: It happened when a Planned Parenthood worker is asked to accept a donation specifically to abort a black child, and her response is: "Understandable, understandable." Now, however, those interested in the controversy over Planned Parenthood's large role in the nation's abortion industry may have to settle for seeing those words, since YouTube has decided to censor several audio recordings that had been posted by pro-life activists documenting the corporation's willingness to accept donations on the basis of race.

I was happy to see a new source on the 'net...Pajamas Media doing some television. But frankly I was a bit dismayed to see the cost involved. Seems a bit pricey to me. Anyone else feel the same way? I'm all for capitalism. If they can make it work, then go for it. I'm just surprised the new venture is starting out at this seemingly high a level. Will it be offering something worth the price?

No picture of a modern candidate can be complete without a survey of her candid moments caught on video. But what videos to watch? Here is some of what the all-seeing YouTube has to tell us about John McCain's vice-presidential nominee

Following Friday's announcement by the McCain camp, the first place many people went to find out more about Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, was straight to the Internet. A lot of political junkies really didn't know a whole heck of a lot about Governor Palin, even though her name had been floated around as a possible vice presidential candidate. But there was no need to fear, because within virtually minutes, everything you had ever wanted to know about her was posted online on sites like YouYube.

Larry Martin owns Frontera Bar and Grill, a Tex-Mex restaurant in Kuala Lumpur. He imports mesquite charcoal from San Francisco and, he says, "serves peace love and American hegemony, one plate of tacos at a time" to Malaysian customers. In his spare time, he writes a semi-anonymous blog, An American Expat in Southeast Asia, on which he rails against mainstream American media, multiculturalism — and Barack Obama. And that is how Martin has come to the attention of a broader audience. His blog is repeatedly cited as a source in Jerome R. Corsi's best-selling anti-Obama book, Obama Nation: Leftist Politics...

Over the past few weeks, Barack Obama's campaign encouraged millions of mobile phone users to sign up to receive a text message so they could be "the first to know" who Obama's vice presidential choice was. It was a deft bit of techno-political marketing. But hours before the text was sent, the campaign's famously tight communications ship sprung a leak. So the first to know that Sen. Joseph Biden would be in Springfield on Saturday were not those who had signed up for a text message, but those who were watching cable television news programs at around 10:45 p.m. PDT...

Sorry for the Vanity but I have a great concern. It's been a good summer for McCain. The ads are good, the American public is starting to learn more about the "real" B. Hussein Obama and he's dropping in the polls. That's the good news. I think that on a level playing field, Mac can beat B. Hussein. But, has anyone thought about the strategy of the scheme to text Obama supporters and notify them of the VEEP selection. He now has hundreds of thousands of cell phone numbers. Visualize, on Election Day, a gazillion Text Messages going out over...

WASHINGTON - When Barack Obama announces his choice for vice president, the real payoff may come during the next few months — one text message at a time. Obama's campaign plans to break the news of the Democratic candidate's vice presidential pick to people who have signed up to receive e-mails and text messages from the campaign. It should give Obama's team access to tens of thousands of cell phone numbers that could be used to mobilize voters under 30 on Election Day. "What Obama is creating is this army of individuals, these grass-roots activists, who are out there trying...

As NewsBusters editor Matthew Sheffield recently wrote, the John Edwards scandal demonstrates why the public is moving to the web for news. A big reason for the public relying more and more on the web for news is that the blogosphere is willing to do the investigative footwork that the mainstream media often neglects. A perfect illustration of this are the revelations made today by the DBKP blog about the suspicious aircraft leasing arrangements made by John Edwards' moneyman, Fred Baron:

Although the mainstream media has finally started to report on the John Edwards scandal now that he has admitted to an affair on ABC's Nightline following several reports by the National Enquirer, they continue to fall way behind in investigative reporting compared to the blogosphere. This is yet another reason why the public is relying more and more on the web for news rather than the MSM as NewsBusters editor, Matthew Sheffield, reported yesterday both here in NewsBusters and at the Washington Times. So what is the MSM excuse for being so far behind the ball in reporting on the...

Keith Olbermann is again being an embarrassment to MSNBC. The cable channel and MySpace have teamed up to choose two "citizen journalist" correspondents to cover the upcoming national political conventions. The "journalists" will be featured both on MySpace and MSNBC's campaign coverage. A spy said, "Every anchor is onboard and willing to play along, except Keith. He refuses to participate because MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp." - which also owns Fox News and The Post. A rep for Olbermann said, "There are no plans for the contest winners to be on any programs other than 'Morning Joe.'...

I looked in my spam inbox today, and noticed the following. Obviously it was tagged as spam because it is using a different domain as the from address. ATLEARNING.COM. Unfortunately, I use gmail, so most of the headers were stripped off and I can't trace it back to it's original IP address. Has anyone else seen the Obama Nation doing this? ==================================== message below ===== msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: Obama set to win presidency MSNBC Breaking News Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 14:30 Reply-To: MSNBC Breaking News To: msnbc.com: BREAKING NEWS: Obama set to win presidency Find out more at...

The 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign is turning into the election year that mainstreamed wireless technology. Barack Obama’s campaign has announced its intention to let texters know who his running mate will be in the days leading up to the Democratic convention Aug. 25-28 in Denver.According to Obama website, voters can be the “first to know� who Obama’s vice president will be by going online and providing a cell phone number (or e-mail address), or by texting VP to 62262 to receive a text message with the breaking announcement.Obama\'s campaign has used wireless and Internet technology to build more of a...

We view the Olympics as a global sporting tradition and consider ourselves citizens of the world, so we don't have much patience with country-specific broadcasting rights. Thus, we're happy that we (and you) can watch the Olympics live right here on on SAI. (Frankly, we wish we could watch the Olympics on NBCOlympics.com, because their feed is marvelously crisp, but of course NBC is doing everything it can to prevent that. Specifically, NBC is trying to make us watch tonight, on tape delay, when the opening cermonies will be as stale as yesterday's bread. And when they do broadcast events...

In spite of being dubbed as a "wrinkly white-haired guy" by Paris Hilton, Senator John McCain's provocative "celebrity" campaign ad has given a boost to his online presence, especially on YouTube, the popular video sharing website. McCain released a chain of blunt yet entertaining attack ads and Web videos which mock rival candidate, Senator Barack Obama, along with the press. Such videos have pushed his YouTube channel to the fifth most watched on the site this week.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain's brutal yet entertaining attack ads and Web videos mocking the press and Democratic presidential opponent Barack Obama has become a huge hit on YouTube. McCain has beat Obama's channel for seven straight days and 11 of the past 14 days, in a signal he intends to compete for the votes on the video sharing site vote. "I want to know who he hired. They went from recycling their TV ads to like putting out these witty shorts," The Washington Times quoted David Burch, marketing manager for TubeMogul, as saying. The McCain campaign said it was...

Sen. John McCain's campaign is urging supporters to spam blogs and forums with official talking points, according to the Washington Post. If you do a good job, you can even win prizes. "That, in essence, is the McCain campaign's pitch to supporters to join its new online effort, one that combines the features of 'AstroTurf' campaigning with the sort of customer-loyalty programs offered by airlines, hotel chains, restaurants and the occasional daily newspaper." "People who sign up for McCain's program receive reward points each time they place a favorable comment on one of the listed Web sites (subject to verification...

Be with you in a sec. Gotta finish this bag of Cheetos. Man, what a mess down here in Mom's basement. Let's see, where were we? Barnicle. Right. Bloggers. Doesn't think much of us. On this evening's Hardball, decrying the decline of bi-partisanship, Barnicle put much of the blame on the blogosphere. Subbing for Chris Matthews, Barnicle had as his guest historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. The jumping off point was a clip of Obama saying he could imagine naming McCain as his head of Homeland Security. Barnicle wondered whether that was feasible in what he sees as a hyper-partisan age,...

Were There More? Did DBKP@Blogger's Shutdown Come from Same IPs? Click on image to enlarge. At least one of the attacks in the latest wave of blog shutdowns this past week came from IPs assigned to barackobama.com. We have reported twice in the last two weeks about the attacks on anti-Obama websites. ["Google, Blogger, Obama: Obamanation Shut Down My Blog!"]] & [BabbaZee's "Anti-Obama Blogs Shut Down by Google, Obamabots"] Speculation on who was behind the attacks has ranged from "Obama supporters" to "it's no one, just a glitch" "to "it's a browser problem". [Site Meter causing Internet Explorer failure ]....

(The Politico) On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid criticized the Washington press corps for failing to report what he believes is unprecedented Republican obstruction. So Friday afternoon, Reid reached out to the liberal blogosphere. "You need to keep doing the job you're doing, but you need to move on," Reid said in a Webcast hosted by a handful of progressive bloggers. "We need your help to push back against the Republican harangue ... that we're not allowing votes" on oil drilling amendments. The Webcast was hosted by meetthebloggers and included bloggers from HuffingtonPost, OpenLeft and thesmogblog.com. Reid seemed flustered...

(The Politico) On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid criticized the Washington press corps for failing to report what he believes is unprecedented Republican obstruction. So Friday afternoon, Reid reached out to the liberal blogosphere. "You need to keep doing the job you're doing, but you need to move on," Reid said in a Webcast hosted by a handful of progressive bloggers. "We need your help to push back against the Republican harangue ... that we're not allowing votes" on oil drilling amendments. The Webcast was hosted by meetthebloggers and included bloggers from HuffingtonPost, OpenLeft and thesmogblog.com. Reid seemed flustered...

Top of Drudge Headlines as of this minute: Obama promises to 'remake the world'... 27-minute speech interrupted by applause at least 30 times... Transcript: 'I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen -- a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.' 'People of Berlin -- people of the world -- this is our moment. This is our time.' Developing... PLUS A BIG PICTURE OF OBAMA WITH A HUGE CROWD IN FRONT OF HIM ,...

If elections were held on YouTube, Barack Obama would win hands-down -- so far. But the McCain campaign is making inroads on the Web, aided by some good old-fashioned attack ads. McCain has beaten Obama in terms of viewers on YouTube (GOOG) on four of the last six days, thanks to the success of two ads: "Obama Love," a montage of press fauning over Obama, and "Pump", which blames Obama for high gas prices. The former has been viewed more than 176,000 times in two days, and the latter 140,000 times in three days. To get a sense of...

Republicans have no lack of would-be George F. Wills. But what they really need are some more Robert D. Novaks. The distinction between the two prominent conservative journalists isn't always obvious, but it's nevertheless important to understand: One almost exclusively writes opinion pieces, while the other offers reportage with a point of view. The same might be said of the emerging differences between the conservative presence on the Internet and the liberal one: The right is engaged in the business of opining while the left features sites that offer a more reportorial model. At first glance, these divergent approaches might...

Hi everybody, I’m excited to be posting on BlogHer. Not only because blogging is something I’ve actually been able to beat my daughters to; but because it gives me the opportunity to tell you a little bit about them, my husband, myself, and our experiences traveling all over this great country. Over the course of this campaign, I’ve been hosting roundtable discussions with working women all across America. I’m there to talk about my husband, of course – but more importantly, I’m there to listen. We talk about what it’s like to play multiple roles at once and what it’s...

AN INCIDENT ON THE BAY HAP RIVER Instead of "No Man Left Behind," the true story of that day is "One Man Left." — John O’Neill A war hero candidate On January 17, 2004, two days before the crucial Iowa Democratic primary, the Kerry campaign staged a dramatic “reunion” between the candidate and Jim Rassmann, a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer who said Kerry had saved his life in Vietnam 35 years before. The tearful meeting of the two men was presented as spontaneous, though the campaign had paid Rassmann’s way to Des Moines and informed NBC anchor Tom...

Usually when I write “Grandmom’s guide to computer” series, I get a geek who corrects my ignorance. That’s fine: I’m a doctor, not a geek, and the series is trying to explain basic computer stuff that I had to learn painfully on my own to others who might, like me, be from the stone ages of snailmail and dead wood news. However, when an article about computer security and the danger of opening spam (using a WaPo article on Obama spam as an example) resulted in a personal attack by an Obama supporter, well, it got me wondering. Usually I...

MSM's Downsizing Bloodbath May Give Alternative Media a Boost Downsizing BloodbathWhat the newspaper industry's unprecedented wave of layoffs says about American journalism -- and what it means for newspaper readers and bloggers By DAVID PAULIN The downsizing bloodbath in America's newspaper industry is different from earlier waves of layoffs over the years. This time top editors and reporters are being let go at the most prestigious newspapers. What does all this say about American journalism? And what will it mean for newspaper readers and bloggers? First, consider the financially troubled New York Times. Layoffs are being threatened there -- something...

WHEN the NBC News host Tim Russert died on June 13, NBC tried to hold back the news from going public for more than an hour to notify his family vacationing in Italy and presumably to prepare for what became six hours of coverage on its cable news outlet, MSNBC. And King Canute, ancient legend has it, tried to hold back the tide. Mr. Russert collapsed from a heart attack in NBC’s Washington newsroom around 1:40 p.m.; he was treated there and then taken to a hospital, arriving at 2:23 and being pronounced dead shortly thereafter, according to press accounts....

In reading a small slice of the coverage of the AP - Drudge Retort contretemps it struck me that a lot of the more breathless coverage in the blogosphere stems from the rather larger misperception that one day last week, out of the blue, Rogers Cadenhead got slapped with a lawsuit by AP. As one of the few people who has seen all the legal documents in the case and has actually read the Digital Millennium Copyright Act I can see it would be wise for some folks to cool down and acquaint themselves with the rather prosaic facts in...

The Associated Press took a grandiose Facebook-style faceplant last week when it attempted to impose strict guidelines on the blogosphere. Now, just like Facebook’s initial unapologetic enthusiasm for its privacy-violating Beacon program followed by Facebook’s effusive apology for its privacy-violating Beacon program, the AP is bowing to the will of the angry Internet masses and backing off. Sort of. [snip] [snip]To citizen journalists out in cyberspace, AP’s proclamation against one little aggregate site (much smaller in comparison to, say, Digg, etc.) rang like a shot across the bow of fair use, especially after an AP spokesperson announced that, from here...

The Associated Press is at it again. Not content with attempting to bring about the end of Snapped Shot, my little wire-photo-critiquing hobby, they’re now going after the dastardly news commentators over at the Drudge Retort for alleged copyright violations. Will they ever learn how this Internet thing works? Back in March, I was delighted to receive a love letter from the AP’s legal department, which kindly informed me that they didn’t particularly care for me. You can read all about those travails in the piece I wrote for Pajamas Media back then. (Pun intended.)[snip] [snip]This harkens back to memories...

The Associated Press is trying to back out of an Old Media-New Media fight that it didn’t quite mean to pick. The 162-year-old news service will sit down with representatives of a bloggers group Thursday to devise guidelines allowing Internet commentators to use excerpts from AP stories and broadcasts. The AP provoked outrage in the blogosphere last week when it issued a blunt legal demand that the Drudge Retort, a small online news and commentary site, remove seven posts containing snippets –- all less than 80 words long –- from AP stories. The website, named in satirical homage to the...

Face it, blogs exist so we don't have to read the news for comprehension The Associated Press took a grandiose Facebook-style faceplant last week when it attempted to impose strict guidelines on the blogosphere. Now, just like Facebook’s initial unapologetic enthusiasm for its privacy-violating Beacon program followed by Facebook’s effusive apology for its privacy-violating Beacon program, the AP is bowing to the will of the angry Internet masses and backing off. Sort of. As part of the big mea culpa, the AP's Jim Kennedy pledged to meet this week with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association (which is,...

The Associated Press, one of the nation’s largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright. The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying of entire news articles is common, may offer a prominent definition of the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For...

What is it about the internet (Sidebar: Why all of a sudden are people calling it the “internets?�) that makes politicians’ brains go all numb and mushy? Consider this from CNET News for this past Friday: Millions of commercial Web sites and personal blogs would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000, if a new proposal in the U.S. Senate came into law.The legislation, drafted by Sen. John McCain and obtained by CNET News.com, would also require Web sites that offer user profiles to delete pages posted by...

As Sen. Hillary Clinton's potential of securing the presidential nomination went from sure-bet to dog-fight, one of the primary complaints from her camp was that the media had taken sides against her. At the spear's tip of that criticism was Matt Drudge, the Internet voyeur, whose site was born out of opposition to President Clinton and became, in the current cycle, a platform for advancing various damaging Hillary stories. Indeed, by the end of the primary, several Clinton aides were insistent that Drudge was personally in the bag for Barack Obama.

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz put Huffington Post blogger Mayhill Fowler on the front page Monday to illustrate how blogs are changing the nature of campaign coverage, but the funniest part came at the end, as Fowler explained she's much more skeptical and distanced now, like a traditional journalist. Excuse me? Through exposing both Barack Obama's "bitter clingers" comment and last week's Bill Clinton "scumbag" rant against Todd Purdum, Fowler has shown much more skepticism and distance than the parade of Obama-maniacs in the "objective" media this cycle. In an e-mail, Fowler says she has come to realize that...