Archive: Category: TechPresident

This post from a diary on the DailyKos site (and the many comments added by readers) is the most interesting post-mortem I have yet read on the Democrats' failure to win the election. Susan, the post's author (no last name given), was one of the Dean campaign's California state house party coordinators, and in the course of being evaluated for a similar top position in the Kerry campaign, she was told, " "To be blunt, this is a fat-cat top-down campaign. The campaign staff doesn't really get grassroots." She then supplies chapter and verse on how the Kerry campaign indeed failed to get grassroots organizing, and then, for good measure, argues that the reliance on 527s also badly damaged the Democratic effort...

Sometime today, tonight or tomorrow, a piece of software or a blog or perhaps a high-tech device like a camera phone or a text message that goes viral is going to make a difference in this oh-so-close election, and those of us in the political, technology and journalism worlds are going to rush to make a big deal of it. And rightfully so. When Andrew Shapiro called Greg Simon, Al Gore's deputy chief-of-staff, late on the night of Election 2000, and fed him the numbers that he was reading off of the Florida Secretary of State's website--which differed dramatically from the networks' premature decision to declare the state for Bush--he stopped the Bush victory train in its tracks. Simon was...

On the surface it appears that the latest Bin Laden video has had little effect on the presidential contest. But I've noticed a swelling chorus on rightwing sites pointing to a purported re-translation of a key passage on the tape that supposedly has the al-Qaeda head specifically threatening to attack any American state that votes for Bush. Here's the translation of Bin Laden's conclusion, from the Washington Post: "I tell you in all truth that your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qa'ida. No, your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn't play with our security, has automatically guaranteed its own security." [my emphasis] And here it is from MEMRI, the Middle East Media...