The Barack Obama campaign has announced that it will announce his Vice President nominee via text and e-mail sometime between now and the Democratic Convention.  While some might be willing to dismiss this as a ploy, it’s actually quite shrewd.  Potential millions wanting to be in the know are going to voluntarily give the campaign their cell phone numbers and email addresses and, perhaps most importantly, zip codes.  That’s a big pool to turn to for future announcements, not just for Obama but the Democratic Party as a whole.
This is a very smart move to get some long term traction and resources, win or lose.

By way of Right Wing Liberal we find that Big Oil sure does like them some “hope” and “change”:

The Center for Responsive Politics took a look at the candidates campaign contributions from employees of Exxon-Mobil (companies themselves are barred from donating).  Here’s what they found (ABC via Jim Geragthy):

Through June, Exxon employees have given Obama $42,100 to McCain’s $35,166.

Given that the Obama campaign has been trying to paint McCain as in the pocket of the oil companies, this doesn’t bode well for the Audacity of Hype.

Dragging Paris Hilton into political debates strikes me as kinda weird. Sure, John McCain did it and shame on him. But it seems he wasn’t the first of our presumptive presidential nominees to do it:

If it’s so awful to pull Paris Hilton into politics, as John McCain recently did in a commercial, then Barack Obama shouldn’t have dragged her into a Senate debate two years ago, when he attacked the repeal of the death tax:

Mr. OBAMA: Madam President, I rise to speak in opposition to the complete repeal of the estate tax.

First of all, [let's] call this trillion-dollar giveaway what it is—the Paris Hilton tax break.

Ohs nos!

UPDATE: McCain wasn’t even the first to compare Obama to Hilton. It was, in fact, Sen. Obama himself:

A February 24, 2005, Washington Post article begins:

There’s nothing exotic or complicated about how phenoms are made in Washington, and, more to the point, how they are broken.

“Andy Warhol said we all get our 15 minutes of fame,” says Barack Obama. “I’ve already had an hour and a half. I mean, I’m so overexposed, I’m making Paris Hilton look like a recluse.”

Today the NYT covered McCain’s lack of computer literacy and what that means on a broader scale:

While 73 percent of American adults use the Internet (only 35 percent 65 or older), according to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, it’s likely that many of them would rather have a president who can get Osama bin Laden than get online. And there is a common belief that says being president should be more a “vision” job than a “management” job, and that the clutter of a digital life can only distract from the Big Picture and Deep Thoughts a leader should be concerned with. In other words, would we really want a president “friending” from the Oval Office, scouring Wikipedia for information on Iran’s nuclear program or fielding e-mail from someone claiming to be “Nigerian general” seeking an American bank account for embezzled millions?

…

“We’re not asking for a president to answer his own e-mail,” said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley futurist who teaches at Stanford. “We’re asking for a president who understands the context of what e-mail means.”

The “user experience,” Mr. Saffo said, brings with it an implicit understanding of how the country lives, and where it might be heading. As Mr. McCain would lack this, he would also be deficient in this broader appreciation for how technology affects lives.

Mr. Saffo, if I may, if “user experience” is key to knowledge and application of something as President, I suggest you take a peek a priorites and look at Barack Obama’s military experience or lack thereof. Or perhaps his work on foreign affairs in general, which is severely lacking compared to the experience of John McCain. I think America’s standing among its friends and enemies in the world is much more important than whether or not we know what the President is doing’s based on his recent Twitterings.

See: Barack Obama Is Aware Of The Military

Say what you will about the man, but no one can argue that Jesse Jackson isn’t passionate.

10:15am UPDATE: Extreme Mortman has a roundup of how different networks discussed the offending statement.

It appears that a slew of Hillary Clinton supporters’ blogs (which are now more anti-Obama) are seeing themselves tagged as spam by Blogspot. Seems the process is pretty simple and requires just a bit of cut and paste. Enough of these and a blogger can be locked from posting onto their own site until a real live person can review the site and clear it as non-spam.

Sneaky.

As a former Blogger user who hosted via Blogspot, I really find that the service is behind the curve these days. WordPress’s features allow site administrators to really do more with their sites, from usability to tracking spam and dirty IPs from abusive commenters. I can’t say that their Terms Of Service would make it harder for such a lockdown to occur, but this certainly doesn’t make Blogspot very appealing for someone looking to enter the blogging arena.

7/1 UPDATE: The NYT chimes in and includes this tidbit from Google, who owns Blogger and BlogSpot:

On its Web page explaining the “flag” feature, Google says that “it can’t be manipulated by angry mobs. Political dissent? Incendiary opinions? Just plain crazy? Bring it on.” On Monday, Google would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere. “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in a statement. “While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam. We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.”

A lot of folks are having a field day with a video from this year’s PDF where it comes out that “John McCain is aware of the Internet” despite not owning a computer.  To hear the former John Edwards advisor say it, McCain’s lack of hands on use of the Internets puts this country in grave danger.

Does the same apply for her or Barack Obama’s lack of hands on military experience?

The Internet is a fantastic tool and has opened up politics and governing in ways one would have had trouble imagining just ten or more years ago.  Yet to expect everyone to have full intimate knowledge of how every facet of it works (Facebook, Twitter, Google - to use her examples) is to fail to understand how not just politics but the world works.  I seriously doubt that John Edwards or Barack Obama personal Twitter or update their Facebook pages or, heck, even have the means to do so.  That’s what they pay staffers to do.

But to assume or demand that people know every bit of every tool at their disposal, whether virtual or physical (does Barack Obama read every mailing that’s sent out on his campaign’s behalf?) shows more naivete on the part of the speaker than it does on John McCain.

Warner Todd Huston blogs over at The Next Right that Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania is full of dirty hippies not only because they offer credit for a “gap year” (when one takes a year off between high school and college) but because some of that credit can be gained by volunteering with the Obama campaign:

So, not only are we failing our children in high school, NOW we are teaching them that they deserve a break from the nothing that is their high school “education”! On top of that we are telling them that working for Obama is good for college credit but not bothering with the Republican side of the aisle. Not too partisan there, eh?

His post is erred on all points.

I’ll start on the gap year as it’s one thing that hits closest to home.  Not everyone goes to college off the bat.  Your’s truly took plenty of time off in order to work in the real world a bit.  I finally finished that degree and while having gotten it years ago might have been nice, I don’t regret the experiences I’ve had through the years or the resume I’ve been able to build and am now able to use to back up my degree.

I am not alone in this.  Nor is Franklin & Marshall alone in recognizing that people sometimes need to take time off or can use such time to build character and do things that they can apply to life.  Many a university offers “life credits” that take into consideration your resume when awarding a degree.

Maybe Mr. Huston thinks many of our fine men and women in the armed forces are wasting their time or being lazy when they decide not to go to college right away.  But I digress.

Secondly, just because the Obama campaign has approached universities about offering internships with the campaign for credit does not reveal a bias in that school.  If they deny the same to McCain, then, yes, there’s a clear bias.  But the majority of internships are not proposed by the university but by organizations who approach the school in search of free labor.  That Obama has done this and not McCain says more about Obama than it does about the university in question.

Both of these points, the very basis of the blog post, are easily refuted by basic research consisting of opening one’s window and shouting a couple simple questions to a passer by or two.

Now, maybe there’s a legitimate argument of liberal bias at universities and colleges in America rooted in Mr. Huston’s reasoning.  I could get behind a well reasoned argument that displays that, hey, could make one of my own while I’m at it.  But when you go so far off the reservation in an effort to make a point you really lose a lot of people and turn some would be allies into skeptics.  You’re seeing conspiracies where they don’t exist, man, and you’re just going to go crazy.  Stick to the facts, fight the good fight, that’s how you’ll win.

For all the bluster, Barack Obama and Virginia Democrats couldn’t quite round up the expected 50,000 people for Obama’s event at Nissan Pavilion last night, pulling 8,000 to 10,000 instead.  That’s some big nomentum for the Audacity of Hype.

Gov. Jim Gilmore is the Republican nominee for Senate and he will beat Mark Warner this November.

Do not listen to the naysayers even within the Party. If every Republican who is throwing up their hands and throwing in the towel now instead took the time to visit Gilmore’s site and sign up to be a volunteer then Mark Warner’s coranation would be anything but. If every Bob Marshall supporter could fire themselves up for the nominee and bring the same enthusiasm to November as they brought to the convention, you’d have another David on your hands.

We can not afford to sit idly by and simply allow Mark Warner to win this November. There should not be a single Bob Marshall supporter who can sit there with a straight face and say Mark Warner speaks closer to their values than Jim Gilmore.

Just as I would be asking Gilmore supporters to help Bob Marshall had yesterday’s results gone the other way, tonight I am asking Marshall supporters and all members of the Republican Party of Virginia to please stand up and be counted. Do not just stay home and let Mark Warner ensure a Democratic majority in the Senate for the foreseeable future. Don’t count on trying to beat him next time, we must beat him this time!

Now is not the time to quit, it is the time to keep fighting and ensuring there is one less pawn for a Democratic agenda that harms Virginians and Americans.

Folks, Jim Gilmore is our nominee and with our help he will be the next Senator from Virginia.

John McCain wrapped up the Republican nomination last night and Hillary Clinton won just enough to try and make the argument today that she’d make a good running mate with Barack Obama. Not so fast, says spoil-sport Obama.  While Clinton took three off four yesterday, she barely edged him out in delegates.  This is still Obama’s nomination to lose, but a drawn out primary is not something the Democrats should be looking forward to (and something the Republicans have got to love).

D.J. McGuire takes the New York Times to task for their John McCain smear piece and points out that Senator McCain really did a lot of things right.

I’ve shared my thoughts on the latest Rasmussen numbers on the Virginia Senate race at Virginia Virtucon.

Source: NYT

It’s interesting to see the county by county breakdown of this. Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee seem to appeal to the same areas of lower growth and population density while Barack Obama and John McCain benefit most in areas that attract more “new” Virginians. That’s not to say that Eastern Virginians are any less established or at home than Western Virginians. Just interesting to visualize and it will be interesting to see if these maps look similar come November, only with McCain pulling more votes in the Clinton/Huckabee areas in the east while Obama stays strong in the west.
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