It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.
 | Tracking 2008: Candidates’ Myspace Friends, 9/16/07 |
We’ve been tracking trends in Election 2008 button, bumper sticker and t-shirt sales for almost three years to see how the Democrats fare against one another. Yesterday we started looking at official campaign website traffic ratings not just for Democratic Party presidential candidates but for Republican Party candidates, Green Party candidates and progressive independents, too. Starting today, we’ll track the number of MySpace friends brandished by each candidate on that flashy, seizure-inducing internet behemoth. To whom do social networkers pledge their political allegiance? Here are the MySpace rankings for candidates of each party (and no party) as of September 16, 2007:
Democratic Party
Barack Obama : 175,259 friends
Hillary Clinton : 56,089 friends
John Edwards : 47,043 friends
Dennis Kucinich : 31,229 friends
Bill Richardson : 20,575 friends
Joseph Biden : 14,150 friends
Mike Gravel : 9,807 friends
Christopher Dodd : 8,787 friends
Independents
Kelcey Wilson : 63 friends
Orion Karl Daley : no myspace page
Green Party
kat swift : 117 friends
Jared Ball : 22 friends
Jerry Kann : no myspace page
Kent Mesplay : no myspace page
Joe Schriner : no myspace page
Republican Party
Ron Paul : 62505 friends
Mitt Romney : 11926 friends
Fred Thompson : 8944 friends
John McCain : 7655 friends
Rudolph Giuliani : 7509 friends
Mike Huckabee : 4389 friends
Sam Brownback : 2604 friends
Duncan Hunter : 2144 friends
Tom Tancredo : 849 friends
Alan Keyes : 277 friends
As with official campaign website visits, Ron Paul and Barack Obama are on the top of the MySpace friend heap. Hillary Clinton is not too far behind the pair, with John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden and Mitt Romney rounding out those with friends in five digits. With the exception of Ron Paul, who is an internet sensation, it seems pretty fair to say that MySpace leans pretty heavily Democratic. I mean, heck, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson are outpacing Mitt Romney, which is really saying something. The Greens and Independents lag further back, but I think have the potential to grab a ‘net audience of sympathetic people who are looking for an alternative — at least those candidates who’ve erected a page at all.
We’ll take a look at the MySpace pages again after a week’s time and see who’s trending up and down.
Contact Us
After all of the media hype and campaign B.S. subsides, there is a much larger scale confrontation with Bush from the candidates
regarding the Iraq War and the problems it is continuing to cause, after six years of Halliburton and Brown and Root and Blackwater corporate kleptocracy.
Only one candidate, it is abundantly clear to me, is really slamming the truth and providing the logistics and rationale for ending this disastrous war: Bill Richardson. This article was printed in the Washington Post about 11 days ago, and please take the time to read it:
_______________________
Why We Should Exit Iraq Now
By Bill Richardson
Saturday, September 8, 2007; A15
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards have suggested that there is little difference among us on Iraq. This is not true: I am the only
leading Democratic candidate committed to getting all our troops out and doing so quickly.
In the most recent debate, I asked the other candidates how many troops they would leave in Iraq and for what purposes. I got no answers. The
American people need answers. If we elect a president who thinks that troops should stay in Iraq for years, they will stay for years — a tragic mistake.
Clinton, Obama and Edwards reflect the inside-the-Beltway thinking that a complete withdrawal of all American forces somehow would be “irresponsible.†On the contrary, the facts suggest that a rapid, complete withdrawal — not a drawn-out, Vietnam-like process —would be the most responsible and effective course of action.
Those who think we need to keep troops in Iraq misunderstand the Middle East. I have met and negotiated successfully with many regional leaders, including Saddam Hussein. I am convinced that only a complete withdrawal can sufficiently shift the politics of Iraq and its neighbors to break the deadlock that has been killing so many people for so long.
Our troops have done everything they were asked to do with courage and professionalism, but they cannot win someone else’s civil war. So long as
American troops are in Iraq, reconciliation among Iraqi factions is postponed. Leaving forces there enables the Iraqis to delay taking the steps
to end the violence. And it prevents us from using diplomacy to bring in other nations to help stabilize and rebuild the country.
The presence of American forces in Iraq weakens us in the war against al-Qaeda. It endows the anti-American propaganda of those who portray us as occupiers plundering Iraq’s oil and repressing Muslims. The day we leave, this myth collapses, and the Iraqis will drive foreign jihadists out of their country. Our departure would also enable us to focus on defeating the terrorists who attacked us on Sept. 11, those headquartered along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border — not in Iraq.
Logistically, it would be possible to withdraw in six to eight months. We moved as many as 240,000 troops into and out of Iraq through Kuwait in as
little as a three-month period during major troop rotations. After the Persian Gulf War, we redeployed nearly a half-million troops in a few
months. We could redeploy even faster if we negotiated with the Turks to open a route out through Turkey.
As our withdrawal begins, we will gain diplomatic leverage. Iraqis will start seeing us as brokers, not occupiers. Iraq’s neighbors will face the
reality: if they don’t help with stabilization, they will face the consequences of Iraq’s
collapse — including even greater refugee flows over their borders and possible war.
The United States can facilitate Iraqi reconciliation and regional cooperation by holding a conference similar to that which brought peace to Bosnia. We will need regional security negotiations among all of Iraq’s neighbors and discussions of donations from wealthy nations — including oil- rich Muslim countries — to help rebuild Iraq. None of this can happen until we remove the biggest obstacle to diplomacy: the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq.
My plan is realistic because:
It is less risky. Leaving forces behind leaves them vulnerable. Would we need another surge to protect them?
It gets our troops out of the quagmire and strengthens us for our real challenges. It is foolish to think that 20,000 to 75,000 troops could bring peace to Iraq when 160,000 have not. We need to get our troops out of the crossfire in Iraq so that we can defeat the terrorists who attacked us on Sept. 11.
By hastening the peace process, the likelihood of prolonged bloodshed is reduced. President Richard Nixon withdrew U.S. forces slowly from Vietnam —
with disastrous consequences. Over the seven years it took to get our troops out, 21,000 more Americans and perhaps a million Vietnamese, most of them civilians, died. All this death and destruction accomplished nothing — the communists took over as soon as we left.
My position has been clear since I entered this race: Remove all the troops and launch energetic diplomatic efforts in Iraq and internationally to
bring stability. If Congress fails to end this war, I will remove all troops without delay, and without hesitation, beginning on my first day in office.
Let’s stop pretending that all Democratic plans are similar. The American people deserve precise answers from anyone who would be commander in chief. How many troops would you leave in Iraq? For how long? To do what, exactly? And the media should be asking these questions of the candidates, rather than allowing them to continue saying, “We are against the war . . . but please don’t read the small print.â€
The writer is governor of New Mexico and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Comment by Stephen Fox — 9/18/2007 @ 10:02 pm
Go take shits on somebody else’s website. Oh, wait. You have already been doing that for some time now.
Here’s my new policy for you, Stephen Fox. You come here and write your own original thoughts, not cut and pasted, and actually pertaining to the article at hand, fine. But every time you cut and paste some processed PR pablum crap here, I will find me a nugget of negative information about Bill Richardson to write about, and write about it I will. I don’t care if Bill Richardson is a Democrat. I didn’t sign up with the Varsity Cheerleaders or the Marching Band.
Stop treating this place like a cow pasture, you stupid passive bovine cut and paste artist. Your shit smells.
Comment by Jim — 9/18/2007 @ 10:12 pm