andy

Saw this earlier. Funny and sad at the same time. This image suggests that Fox News believes a McCain/Obama race will lead to Doomsday! Link

All this time, I've asked myself why Mitt Romney rubbed me the wrong way. There's just something about him that I can't stand. It wasn't until tonight when I saw this clip from Jon Stewart that I really understood why.

F-U Mitt.

This year's presidential race managed to resurrect the Grateful Dead for a one time only concert in order to support Obama. Link

Last week during the NFL playoff games, there were a number of political ads centered around Indian gaming issues. The major issue is whether to allow for some number of additional slot machines on 4 reservations in the southern part of the state.

The set of ads that were against the legislation ranged from describing to viewers how the amount of new slot machines would make these areas look like Vegas to displaying pictures of impoverished looking Native Americans that looked like while a voice over asserted that the legislation unfairly favored the wealthier tribes.

Then came the other set, about how the additional income from taxes would help schools and public services, and my personal favorite, about how all the negative ads on this issue were paid for by vegas casino owners.

I turned to my handy CA Primary booklet that describes the facts about all the pieces of legislation that will be voted on. As you may have guessed, it doesn't say anything about what the targeted areas may look like or become, nor does it say anything about which tribes were selected or how the selection process took place, and it doesn't say anything about where the tax money will go to.

Now if you're like me, or nearly ever other Californian who's going to vote, you don't have enough time to do your own investigation into the facts. You either have to trust one side or the other, by whichever seems more credible. More often than not, the ad that plays the most is going to influence the most people. At least that's the theory. So it comes down to this simple fact: The side with the most money will influence the most people and get the most votes.

Solutions? I would love to hear any. The only one that I can come up with is to hold media companies liable for the ads that they run. I'm sure there's loopholes with this idea. I don't have the time or patience enough to think through them, though.

I took some time today to investigate and correct the campaign total numbers on the 2008 Presidential candidates. Some of you, especially the Ron Paul supporters, mentioned several times that the candidates' financial data was wrong, often times lower than what other sites were reporting.

It turns out that the original way we envisioned calculating this number didn't work out correctly. We had been importing all the individual contributions, then simply summing those numbers for each candidates and coming up with a total. The problem with this is that there's often a chunk of money that was contributed that can't be attributed to an individual person. For example, people who buy t-shirts at a pep rally are technically contributing to the candidate, but generally aren't submitting their name, address, etc.

What's very weird about all this is that some of the candidates, Barak and Hillary for example, put a line item in their individual contributions representing the lump sum that aren't actually attributed to the individuals. Other candidates such as Ron Paul, Mitt and Rudy didn't provide this lump sum, and therefore our process didn't include them. We decided that for the roll-up campaign numbers that aren't tied to a location or date range, we'd go ahead and just use the candidate's summary data on the filing report they submit to the FEC. However, as we obviously can't attribute this to a location or time period, these total values won't be present on the maps and graphs that roll up the data by location or time period.

For those avid Ron Paul fans out there, here's a link to his page showing the updated totals: Ron Paul.

If anyone has questions about this, feel free to leave me a comment or PM me.