The Phony Campaign

2007-10-05 Update

Wow! Over the past four days, most of our candidates have had six-figure increases in their phony hits. I don't know if these levels of phoniness can be sustained—we've had disappointing decreases in the past—but …

Query StringHit CountChange Since
2007-10-01
"Hillary Clinton" phony861,000+392,000
"John Edwards" phony569,000+214,000
"Barack Obama" phony523,000+216,000
"John McCain" phony503,000+184,000
"Fred Thompson" phony486,000+227,000
"Ron Paul" phony432,000+163,000
"Mitt Romney" phony391,000+136,000
"Rudy Giuliani" phony377,000+135,000
"Dennis Kucinich" phony204,000+78,000
"Dave Burge" phony74+12

My guess is that a lot of this increase is due to the phony outrage over Rush Limbaugh's "phony soldiers" remark.

Hence, Hillary continues to pull away from the pack, not least because of her association with "Media Matters for America", well known among connoisseurs of phoniness. This post from the "Hillary Project", for example, comes up tops in the Google's news hits for the senator.

The best my personal phony favorite, John Edwards, can do is (for example) this article from the Washington Times where his wife weighs in on the Limbaugh phony controversy. Really, Senator: you're going to have to do better than this. Stop relying on the Mrs. for your phoniness; I know you have it in you!


Last Modified 2014-12-01 10:41 AM EDT

URLs du Jour

2007-10-05

  • "Naomi Klein Smackdown" is the title of the Free Exchange link collection of negative reactions to Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. There's a link to the Tyler Cowan review we mentioned a couple days back and many more. John Cusack will not be reading any of them. (Via Pejman.)

  • The American Spectator's "Prowler" dishes plenty of right-wing rumor, but this one has a New Hampshire angle:
    Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has signed off on a legislative plan that he thinks will both lead to his party winning an additional seat in the Senate, and new tax revenue for his party to spend in the coming years.
    The "additional seat" is (at least for now) that of our very own Senator Sununu's, and the plan in question is to defeat Sununu's proposal to permanently extend the moratorium on Internet taxation. Quoting unnamed—they're always unnamed—Senate leadership aides:
    "Reid thinks there is enough friction on this issue that there will be no consensus on the moratorium, it will expire, and Sununu can take the fall for no extension. He wants Sununu down and out going into 2008," says a Democrat leadership aide. "We're looking at building a filibuster proof majority of 60 for 2008. That's the goal and Sununu has to go."
    I don't think anyone with a pulse is likely to believe that a Sununu-free Senate is less likely to stick us with tax hikes, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded.

  • The kiddos at Slashdot link to this article at New Zealand's version of Computerworld, where eBay's chief information and security officer, Dave Cullinane, spoke to a Microsoft-sponsored security symposium at Santa Clara University (which is in the US).
    Cullinane's experience with phishing goes back to his previous employer, Washington Mutual, which has been one of the top phishing targets in the US.

    While there, he noticed an unusual trend when taking down phishing sites.

    "The vast majority of the threats we saw were rootkitted Linux boxes, which was rather startling. We expected Microsoft boxes," he said.

    Rootkit software covers the tracks of the attackers and can be extremely difficult to detect. According to Cullinane, none of the Linux operators whose machines had been compromised were even aware they'd been infected.

    Well, um, that's kind of sobering to your blogger, whose major day job is administering Linux boxes. And would prefer not to see even this unsubstantiated slur.

    Free advice to Linux admins: when someone needs to tell you your box has been compromised, you'll feel like an idiot. And you may be right about that. You might want to check out the Rootkit Hunter project, download their software, configure and run it. You don't want to see any bad news, of course, but a rootkit you know about is better than a rootkit you don't know about.


Last Modified 2007-10-05 5:34 PM EDT

Bruce Springsteen is Patriotic

The Boss claims that his new album will cause (unnamed) people to call him unpatriotic.

His response: call those people "unpatriotic" and "anti-American."

Really.

Jonah Goldberg's column today observes that liberals "outinely and righteously condemn the 'questioning' of anyone's patriotism — until they have a chance to do it themselves." As Bruce shows, he's right.


Last Modified 2007-10-05 5:30 PM EDT