X-Tra Rant

So apparently on the heels of the success of No Country For Old Men (which better win best picture at this year’s Oscar ceremony press conference), a studio is going ahead with a movie version of his even more depressing and hard to film The Road. But.. check out this cast!

Viggo Mortenson as the protagonist. Others include Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce. Robert Duvall? Guy Pearce*?!

I have high hopes for this. It’s going to be tough to film a good version of this book, but the lineup of actors has me feeling pretty good.

*Speaking of Guy Pearce, whenever I see him I am reminded of the royal fucking that L.A. Confidential got in the Oscars because of that abortion of a movie Titanic. Off the top of my head (and in my oh so humble opinion), it’s hard to come up with a bigger best picture screw job at the Oscars. It’s too bad his solid acting in The Time Machine was stuck in such a terrrrrible novel to movie adaptation.

So the special election for the 7th District here in Indy is heating up and the Star offers a brief q&a over a few major topics with the candidates, Republican State Rep. John Elrod and Democratic City/County Councilman Andre Carson.

What’s your position on a withdrawal timetable for Iraq?
• Democrat Andre Carson: I support a responsible redeployment plan to end the war in Iraq and bring our brave men and women home with honor. It is time for the Iraqis to take responsibility for their security, with benchmarks for Iraqi military and political success along with a responsible timeline to bring our troops home.
• Republican Jon Elrod: Like everyone in America, I want our troops home as soon as possible. I do not support an arbitrary timetable. I will listen to the generals on the ground.

Shorter Jon Elrod: “I know my district wants us out asap, but I can’t say that and get any Rrepublican votes, so I’ll pass the buck to the ‘generals on the ground’ and not really answer the question”

Carson’s answer is alright, but seems to be a bit wishy washyand lots of talk of “timelines” and “benchmarks” which have worked sooo well to this point.

What should we do about illegal immigration?
• Carson: America’s immigration system is broken and nothing has been done in Washington to fix it. In Congress, I will fight to secure our borders and make sure the laws on the books are enforced. Employers who break the law must be held accountable. I am against amnesty and believe that consideration of how undocumented immigrants can earn the opportunity to become citizens must include paying a fine, paying all back taxes, and not having an advantage over those who have entered this country legally.
• Elrod: I support enforcing the laws on the books. If the nation needs more labor, the solution is to increase quotas; not amnesty or guest worker bills.

This is the only one where Elrod’s answer is far better than Carson’s. Carson is the one who sounds like a Republican on this question. Yuck. Elrod’s is good, especially the statement that we need to increase quotas for immigration. Don’t see many GOP saying that.

What’s the best way to get the health care problem solved?
• Carson: In Congress, I will take the lead to create and invest in solutions that would make sure every American has access to affordable, quality health care. This includes ensuring that all children have health care by expanding programs like the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, passing a prescription drug plan that truly works for our seniors, and working across the aisle, and with states, to invest in pilot programs to find out what works best to lower costs and increase coverage.
• Elrod: Our third party-payer system has caused the ever-increasing health care costs. The long term solution is to create competition through health savings accounts, non-profit insurers, and public pricing.

Health Savings Accounts are a nice bandaid to help with rising costs for people who already have insurance but does nothing to help people without insurance. non-profit insurers? How will that work without massive support from teh government, and then why not just let the government handle it without the overhead of working with another group? Carson’s answer is alot better although his highlight of a state program when running for a NATIONAL office is a little.. odd. Update: I totally got SCHIP mixed up with the Indiana program called HIP. So i take back that criticism and am no longer finding it odd. Damn acronyms.

What would your economic stimulus plan look like?
• Carson: Between property taxes, gas prices and health care costs, the working families of Indianapolis are not able to keep their heads above water right now. We need to figure out ways to put cash back into the pockets of working Hoosiers. The first thing I will do is to create real tax relief for the middle class, rolling back the Bush tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and companies that send jobs overseas, and putting these savings into tax cuts and rebates for working families. I would also like to see an increased investment in job creation for our state and nation, including a focus on the new energy economy and national security, which would bring good jobs back here to Indianapolis and create long-term stability.
• Elrod: I support a tax cut, paid for with spending cuts, that would lower the business and personal tax rates to below the average European tax rates.

Any points I may have given to Elrod for the immigration answer are taken back threefold here. I love it when Republicans say “cut taxes by cutting spending!!!” without ever saying what sort of spending they would cut so they don’t have to follow through except to dupe self-centered voters long enough to get elected **coughcough**gregballard**coughcough**. This line really takes the cake though “lower the business and personal tax rates to below the average European tax rates.” What does that even MEAN? Aren’t the tax rates of the industrialized European nations already higher than our rates here? Isn’t that one of the boogeymen that the GOP has been using forever now - the “ZOMG Europe has crazy taxes those socialists that’s what DEMONcrats want! Boogabooga!!!”

As for Carson, overall he sounds like a Moderate Democrat Talking Point Machine. The answers aren’t BAD, they just sound over-focus-grouped and bland. This is why I really wanted David Orentlicher to get the nomination instead of the Official Party Hack Approved Andre Carson. This is exactly why I got out of local politics - in the end the peopel that get slated or approved by the party are the people with the most pull among the flacks, hacks and jackasses.

To steal a line from CJ (and of course make it more vulgar, because, well, it’s me) Carson sounds like a fucking Perl script. People voting for Andre Carson thinking they are getting Julia Carson 2.0 are going to be sadly mistaken if this q&a is any indication.

From today’s article on the Frankenstein’s Monster that is the property tax bill that is in the state house:

Kenley, whose committee would consider HB 1001 if it’s passed by the House, said he does not support the increase in the income tax credit for the working poor.
That measure would mean the loss of $30 million a year in revenue to the state that could instead go toward lowering property tax bills, he said.

Translation:

Fuck the working poor. Those schmucks don’t vote for me anyway.

Congratulations, Sen. Kenley. You’re a jackass.

This article gave me a bit of a chuckle.

I-69 delay honks off Fishers council
The Fishers Town Council unanimously passed a resolution tonight calling on the state to speed up reconstruction of I-69 through Hamilton County.

Council members are peeved that plans to redesign intersections and add lanes along the route aren’t scheduled to begin for about 10 years.
…
“Traffic is already a challenge for us today, and this won’t make it any better,” said council member Stuart Easley. “The news of the delay came as a total shock to us.”

The resolution’s main effect, Easley added, would be to “let our opinion be known and to go on the record and let the public know we are concerned.”
County Commissioner Steve Dillinger said the current schedule “is a lot longer than we can stand.”

I called the Wahhmbulance for them, but it got stuck in traffic.

I hate to sound overly harsh here (okay, no, I don’t really) but it was your choice to live in the suburban sprawl strip mall hell of GeistoNobleFishers and commute through that traffic. You knew what you were getting in to. Maybe instead of continually expanding I69 until it resembles something out of a weird dystopian future, how about getting behind some sort of mass transit rail line?

Or is mass transit only for the plebeians and unwashed masses? “Buffy, you KNOW I can’t take mass transit. There are POOR people on that!”

I won’t say much about Cloverfield. Giving away spoilers for this movie would be a bad thing. I WILL say that it was a movie that, at times, was completely terrifying at a level unlike any horror movie I have seen in a very long time. The hand-held viewpoint definitely was hard to watch at times, almost feeling a little seasick. But honestly I think that added to it.

A review that sums up my view on the movie pretty much 100% was done by Wil Wheaton in the comments to his post about the movie. Don’t read the review if you haven’t seen it but want to.

So somehow even after I turned comments to only for logged-in users (of which there is only me) it was still getting through. Not good. SO I changed my password, but anyone know of any other ways this may be happening? I also now have BOTH SpamKarma2 and Akismet running and I upped the strength of a few of the options for SK2. If you have trouble commenting once I turn them back on for everyone (in the morning) let me know.

I’m hoping the combo of Akismet, upped-strength SK2 and updated WP will eliminate this problem. I’ve probably had a couple hundred spam comments sneak through today. if it still happens I may just rename the file with the comment code in it to completely eliminate commenting at the code level until I can figure out how to stop it.

Comments will be back on by 11am tomorrow. We’ll see if I get inundated overnight even with the changes that were made.

Update: Comments are back on. We’ll see how this goes.

Update 2: So far so good. 12 hours later and it’s holding up. Let’s hope that’s the end of that.

I had to temporarily turn off commenting. All of a sudden today spam comments have started slipping through my filters. No idea why. Going to update WP and see if Spam Karma has an update or if other users of it have seen it.

Fuck you, comment and trackback spammers.

So last night we had a New Hampshire Primary Party for Drinking Liberally:Indianapolis. Good times. The highlight of the evening had to be Ron Paul’s never-ending old man rant when he addressed his supporters. We tried to ignore it but it just kept going on and on and on.

So can any Paulnuts describe to me how a) returning to the Gold Standard isn’t just about the worst idea ever and b) how we would keep it from pretty much exploding our economy?

There isn’t enough gold to back the current size of our economy. So either you drastically shrink the money supply and blow up the economy, or you make every dollar worth some miniscule amount of gold so as to make the dollar essentially worthless. Not to mention the train wreck that would cause for the global economy and our imports/exports. I guess unless you feel we don’t need to import anything and that our corporations don’t need to export anything to support their current financial situations and that financial and economic isolationism is a good idea.

I really can’t see how anyone takes him seriously on his financial/economic platform, let alone the obvious racism of certain supporters and his past newsletters or even his more current subtle racism (or to be generous, not giving a rats ass about racism and if people are treated as second class citizens, fuck em)

I wish I’d noticed this before my big gubernatorial campaign website comparison entry, but why is Schellinger using a company out of Portland, Oregon to implement his website? Could his campaign not find anyone locally to do this? It’s not like there aren’t some very talented web designers in Indiana that haven’t worked on campaigns before.

Also an update to the Schellinger part, he does have an RSS feed but it’s sort of buried in the little text at the bottom.

Alright, time for a really pointless breakdown of the Indiana Gubernatorial candidate websites!

First the Democratic side.
Jim Schellinger:

• Wow. This is a bland, pretty looking website that would have been good circa 2000-2004. No interactivity, no issues page, no blog. There’s a page for videos, but they are hosted on the Schellinger website instead of YouTube which takes away another avenue for interactivity and internet grassroots organization
• The whole site seems geared towards this message: I am Jim Schellinger. The heads of the state party love me so volunteer and donate to me. Now!
• They do have a nifty Googe Maps app on the site to see where Schellinger has been on his tour of the state, but that alone isn’t enough to make this a viable internet campaign site for 2008. I also had trouble finding a schedule of where he WILL be.
• The main navigation buttons are all for getting people to do something for the campaign. Volunteer, Donate, Endorse (aka sign up for the mailing list), and Build The Base (aka let us send emails to your friends).
• The secondary navigation along the top is all information related, but no page for the issues. A generic “about Jim” page, endorsements, ‘in the news’, press releases and a contact page.
• Where is the interactivity? Where is the way to not only connect supporters to you, but connect supporters to each other to build real momentum?
• I find it funny that near the top it says “This is a grassroots campaign for the future of Indiana. Are you ready to join us?” yet the entire website has nothing for enabling a modern, internet ready grassroots campaign.

Grade: D+. it looks pretty, and there is good graphic design. But it lacks all the features of what a campaign, especially a non-incumbent campaign, needs on a website.

What would I add if I was made the Internet Director for the campaign?

• A prominent blog, possibly even part of the front page, that includes open comments
• Links to and use of Facebook and Myspace.
• Move the videos to YouTube
• A real issue page spelling out Schellinger’s stances on the issues facing the states. Don’t bury them in press releases, which most people won’t read
• While the design is good, it’s also very typical. Oh look, a candidate for office using red and blue and a star in the logo! Build a unique identity with a non-standard color and a unique non-star and non-exclamation-point logo. While Barack Obama has stuck with the red, white and blue his logo is a bit of brilliant graphic design.
• Add an RSS feed, not just for a Blog but for everything

Jill Long Thompson:

• Oh look, a bunch of rural Indiana images yet no images of cities. Shocking. A blue barn siding background. A few rotating header images of farmland with a barn, rural sunset, and state fair arch/sign. Dear Jill Long Thompson, not everyone in the state is a country bumpkin, and we actually have cities, and people in those cities vote. Sincerely: Indianapolis, Gary, Fort Wayne, South Bend, etc. (Update: Finally a refresh brought a single picture of Indianapolis but still the theme is overwhelmingly “rural”.)
• An actual issues page, but only one issue on it about education and a note to come back later for more. No. Get them at least basically fleshed out early and put them all up there. People come to your website to find out what you stand for, not just to be treated as cash machines and donate to you.
• A Blog!!! But.. oh.. wait… no comments. A “blog” without comments is not a blog. Have the stones to put comments on there. Yes, you will get some negative comments and even some vile comments. If some of them get too out of hand have a staffer whose job it is to watch the comments and delete any over the top of hateful ones. But allow people to disagree. This will let your supporters who also comment to back you up and get more involved in the process. As it is, your “blog” is just simplistic press releases.
• Videos actually hosted by YouTube, which allows comments. Nice. There are also links to Facebook and Myspace, which is good. Except the MySpace link is broken. Come on! Seriously, there is no excuse for that.
• Slightly better logo/graphic identity than Schellinger (I like the J inside the outline of Indiana, could be iconic on its own.) Still over-reliant on red and blue.
• There is a calendar of campaign stops but it apparently hasn’t been updated since mid-December. No map of future or past stops.
• Menu includes standard About page, News (which seems to be more Press Releases and less Mentions In The News), the “Blog” that is not a blog, Take Action (a form to submit your ‘ideas’ to the campaign and also end up on the mailing list), the Issues page with one issue, a Photo Gallery that just has a few photos (instead, use Flickr and update it often from the road), the aforementioned out of date Calendar, and a contact page. All pages include a box to click on so you can contribute.

Grade: C. At least there is a slight attempt at interactivity what with the YouTube videos and the links to Facebook and MySpace(although that link is broken) but the Blog-That-Isn’t-A-Blog is just weak. Design is slightly different than normal and a decent logo if still standard Red and Blue. I would like the Calendar if it was actually up to date.

What would I add if I was made the Internet Director for the campaign?

• A REAL blog with REAL comments. None of this fake blog crap. Make the News page part of the blog entries so your RSS feed will update anyone who subscribes.
• Engage actively in the Facebook and MySpace communities you link to (and fix the MySpace link)
• Put more than one issue on the Issues page. Now.
• Make the entire header clickable to take you Home. As it is only the logo part of it does that. Most internet users are trained to think an entire graphic header like that will take you to the home page of the site.
• As recommended to Schellinger, build a brand with a non-standard color that doesn’t blend in with every other candidate.
• Move your Photo Gallery to Flickr and use it regularly to post pictures from the campaign trail
• Update your calendar

It’s pretty obvious to me that neither candidate has a full time staffer dedicated to building an internet presence and keeping the website active and up to date to keep people coming back. Both Dem candidates’ online efforts are weak. Only Jill Long Thompson shows any interest in interacting with the online grassroots community and even that is a pretty weak effort.

Now onto the incumbent Republican.
Mitch Daniels:

• My God, the green! My eyes! I love the non-standard color. It makes Daniels stand out as different among all the red and blue signs, but this is overload. Too much green in the background around the content.
• Use of YouTube is good. Interactive.
• Alot of money has obviously been put into this site. Lots of features like dogs dressed up for mitch (which may sound silly, but it will engage some people even in a minor way), ability to request the RV/campaign stop.
• Links to Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube. Those sites are apparently used by the campaign too.
• Menu: There’s an about the team section. Pretty generic. A “Get The Facts” section that at least tries to address some of the critiques against him and what they see as accomplisments (although they are largely spin and bullshit, it’s good political operation and website fodder), and a “Resource Center” with links to news articles, speeches, 2007 Campaign Donations report. I like the latter, gives a sense of openness to the campaign, although I wish it was the actual election commission report and not just a PDF generated by his finance committee. Could be useful for oppo research into his donors though! (PDF of 2007 donations report)
• No blog at all. While the forays into interactivity via Facebook, Youtube, MySpace and Flickr are good I still feel you need an interactive blog with open comments.
• No Issues page listing all of the major issues for the campaign. Sure, trumpet what you see as accomplishments but also have a standard place where people can find what you want to do next and where you stand on the issues of 2008.
• An RSS feed? Nice. Although there don’t seem to be many items in it which is odd given all the content on the site.
• There is a privacy policy on the website, something I don’t recall on the Dem websites and that I think may actually be necessary legally for a site that collects information?
• There is also a tool to allow people to write letters to the editor to various newspapers. This is something I helped implement on a smaller scale for some of the statehouse campaigns for which some friends and I worked on websites.

Grade: B+. I hate to say it but Daniels has the Dems beat hands down on quality of website and online organization. The lack of a blog and more true interactivity is not surprising but his site is still light years ahead of what the Dems have in that area. The use of an iconic, non red/blue color is great. Everyone knows what that green color means come election time.

I’m not going to give hints of what I’d do if I was the Internet Directory for Mitchy. 1) Because I would feel dirty and 2) I don’t want to even think I might be helping them.

————–

Sadly, there is much the Democratic candidates could learn from Mitch Daniels’ web presence.