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Upstart campaigns in particular have turned to Reddit, which announced at the beginning of the year that it had served a staggering 2 billion page views in December 2011, as a way of generating interest in fledgling political bids.
Online Q&As, via campaign or other popular websites, have been a part of the past several cycles, and candidates are using new tools like Google+ hangouts to similar ends, along with more established social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Still, it’s not clear how useful the AMAs are for the candidates. As it is, most of the congressional candidates who have done the Q&As are long shots to win in November — if they even made it to a general election ballot.
Political Reddit AMA chats on the rise
The government is launching a new mobile app to provide access to the president’s public documents and activities. The U.S. Government Printing Office and the National Archives’ Office of the Federal Register developed the Presidential Documents app. It’s launching free of charge. It includes executive orders, statements and news releases from the White House, as well as the president’s speeches, communications to Congress and federal agencies, approved acts and nomination for political posts. It also includes a mapping function to deliver content relating to a user’s location.
President’s documents now accessible on smartphone
[Commentary] News media that rely on ads have always had a problem covering their own advertisers. It’s rare to find a reporter who doesn’t have a story, sometimes well-founded, of an employer whose newsroom pulled its punches or looked the other way to avoid rattling the worthies who paid the bills. Obviously that’s bad, a corrupt concession to an institutional conflict of interest. Still, at least the harm was confined: The advertiser usually had narrow concerns — say, a car dealer that wanted to squelch some sour publicity. Killing the story was hardly a proud moment for the Fourth Estate, but the ad dependency didn’t shackle the media to a generalized, paralyzing incapacity to cover realities that lay at the core of civic life.
But suppose the ads don’t come from mere local retailers. Suppose they’re from people who bankroll elections. Welcome to 2012, where the sources of the money that’s critical to the business success of influential news media are, at the same time, the people who are orchestrating the major campaigns — people who, if news media were covering the news, would be confronted, exposed, and made to explain who they are and what they’re up to. Instead, some of the same media that should referee political discourse and oversee the process by which a sovereign electorate selects its leaders are in thrall to the backroom players whose mission it is to manipulate and game that discourse.
TV ‘watchdogs’ quiet as political ad cash rolls in
[Commentary] Big Bird is the man. He’s 8 feet tall. He can sing and roller skate and ride a unicycle and dance. Since 1969, Big Bird has been the king of the block on “Sesame Street.” When I was a child, he and his friends taught me the alphabet and the colors and how to do simple math. Big Bird and his friends also showed me what it meant to resolve conflicts with kindness and accept people’s differences and look out for the less fortunate. Let me make it simple for you, Mr. Romney. I’m down with Big Bird. You pick on him, you answer to me. And, for me, it’s bigger than Big Bird. It’s almost impossible to overstate how instrumental PBS has been in my development and instruction. We were poor. My mother couldn’t afford day care, and I didn’t go to preschool. My great-uncle took care of me all day. I could watch one hour of television: PBS. When I was preparing for college and took the ACT, there were harder reading passages toward the back of the test. Many had scientific themes — themes we hadn’t covered at my tiny high school in my rural town. But I could follow the passages’ meanings because I had watched innumerable nature shows on PBS. I don’t really expect Mitt Romney to understand the value of something like PBS to people, like me, who grew up in poor, rural areas and went to small schools. These are places with no museums or preschools or after-school educational programs. There wasn’t money for travel or to pay tutors. I honestly don’t know where I would be in the world without PBS.
Don’t Mess With Big Bird
Mitt Romney slammed President Barack Obama for talking about Big Bird on the campaign trail.
"These are tough times, with real serious issues. So you have to scratch your head when the President spends the last week talking about Big Bird," Romney said at a campaign event in Iowa. "I actually think we have to have a President who talks about saving the American people." The Obama campaign punched back at Romney in a statement from spokeswoman Lis Smith, who pointed out Romney had repeatedly cited Big Bird himself. “If anyone should be scratching their heads, it’s the American people when Mitt Romney says that he’ll reduce the deficit and pay for $5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans by getting rid of PBS and Big Bird, which make up 1/10,000th of the federal budget," Smith said. "That’s not a serious deficit reduction plan – it’s a joke.”
Romney slams Obama for talking Big Bird
Sesame Street has asked President Obama's campaign to take down its latest attack ad against Mitt Romney, which features footage of Big Bird.
"Sesame Workshop is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization and we do not endorse candidates or participate in political campaigns. We have approved no campaign ads, and as is our general practice, have requested that the ad be taken down." Sesame Street later amended its statement to ask both the Obama campaign and Mitt Romney's campaign to remove all characters and trademarks from their campaign ads. The Obama campaign said it would review the request. "We've received and will review their concerns," said an Obama campaign official.
Sesame Street asks Obama campaign to take down attack ad featuring Big Bird
Verizon Wireless said that more than a third of its data traffic is already travelling on its fastest LTE network, and that within a few months, the majority of data traffic will be on that network. It is taking only two years to reach that milestone, compared to the eight years it took 3G to account for the bulk of data traffic, Chief Technical Officer Nicola Palmer said. As of last quarter, 11 million of Verizon’s 89 million contract customers are on 4G LTE devices. The company had said it would hit 400 markets by the end of the year, and Palmer said the company will hit that milestone on Oct. 18, with Marquette, Michigan. The company plans to cover its complete 3G coverage area with LTE by the end of next year.
Verizon Wireless: Soon Majority of Data Traffic Will Be on LTE Verizon: 35% of data traffic now rides over LTE (GigaOm) Verizon Wireless says ahead of target on high-speed network (Reuters)
Obama administration officials plan to discuss a possible executive order aimed at improving cybersecurity with House aides.
Caitlin Hayden, a White House spokeswoman, acknowledged that an interagency team, led by White House national security staff, met with Senate aides on Oct 5. She said the Administration is planning to hold a similar session with House staffers in the "near future." "The Administration is continuing to explore improvements both through the promotion of cybersecurity best practices and increased cybersecurity information sharing. Issuing an Executive Order is one – though certainly not the only – vehicle we are considering," she wrote
White House to meet with House staffers over cybersecurity order
A federal judge declined to throw out the Justice Department's criminal case against file-sharing site Megaupload in an order.
Megaupload argued that because it has no mailing address in the United States, it is beyond the reach of U.S. law. But Judge Liam O'Grady concluded that there was no procedural problem with serving the papers to the company, which is based in Hong Kong. "It is doubtful that Congress would stamp with approval a procedural rule permitting a foreign corporate defendant to internationally violate the laws of this country, yet evade jurisdiction of United States' courts by purposefully failing to establish an address here," the judge wrote. He added that prosecutors could eventually serve a company executive with the court papers.
Judge allows case against Megaupload to move ahead
Leaders of the House Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology expressed concern to the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration about a “stimulus” program that awarded $1 million to the U.K. company SamKnows to conduct a broadband speed test, an initiative that produced no American jobs.
House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR), Communications and Technology Subcommittee Vice Chairman Lee Terry (R-NE), and Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) wrote, “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Act) was supposed to go to shovel ready projects and create jobs. And the $4.7 billion in funding from that Act earmarked for the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program was supposed to expand broadband access. Yet, oversight hearings in the Communications and Technology Subcommittee have indicated that much of the money has been misdirected or remains unspent…
“…The $1 million spent on speed tests is perhaps emblematic. That stimulus funding, meant to help here at home, was sent abroad to U.K. company SamKnows and - according to the Recovery.Gov website - created no jobs. What was the rationale for sending Americans’ hard earned money overseas for a project that didn’t put any Americans to work, especially in the current fiscal climate?
“…Now the FCC apparently intends to expand its speed testing to wireless services. What reason do we have to believe this endeavor will be any more valuable? If anything, it will likely be even less meaningful in light of technical challenges.”
The members concluded, “While we lament that the Commission and NTIA have already spent $1 million of ARRA funds abroad in an effort that created no jobs and little else, we urge you not to compound this mistake by expanding the scope of the program.”
House Commerce Committee Leaders Troubled with Stimulus Dollars Sent Overseas, Producing No American Jobs