Progressive Diary: The Musings of Sebastian Van Der Douche, Harvard ‘08
March 25th 2010
Dear Diary,
It has been a most eventful past few days. With the passage of Health Care I have no doubt that the plebes will finally acknowledge what we progressives have always known; that President Obama has already solidified his place as America’s greatest President.
For a moment there I was scared that the right-wing America haters would get there way and use the legislative process to deny us the victory we so rightly deserved. I mean really, how dare they use something as insignificant as votes to block the bill? It should have been done with Deem and Pass. Our health care is more important than the mere niceties of congressional procedure. The-worse-than- Hitler Republicans should be ashamed of themselves for bringing up the Constitution during the “debate” over the bill. The Constitution has no place in the discussion when it comes to progress and, better yet, there shouldn’t even be a debate. The Founding Fathers, though handicapped by their racist white outlooks, also would have seen the need to push health care through no matter the opposition. Somethings are more important than some 18th century scrap of paper.
Why even bother with open hearings or debates at all? The American people are too stupid and feckless to grasp the basic tenant that they need to be forced into health care. They embarrass themselves with all this talk of “what they want” and their pathetic protests and letters to Congress. They should just shut up and let the people that know best, we enlightened few, we band of brothers with Ivy League degrees, handle things. Like children, they know not what they do and must be put in their place. They don’t know what they want and they don’t know what is best for them. People like Speaker Pelosi need not answer to that shabby and dirty rabble.
Thanks to Republican run education systems in places like Texas, I bet they can’t even read much less articulate a real argument. “Privacy!” “States rights!” “Democratic process!” HA! It makes me laugh, it is like a five year old trying to understand Shakespeare and playing at adults with big boy words! Why do they hate America? Don’ they see they need to be forced to get healthcare? It will run down the deficit too (though I am not quite sure how, I am good with numbers but how does spending a trillion dollars lower the deficit? Why not just tax the shit out of fat-cats making over $30,000 a year?).
President Obama should do us all a favor and fence off everything between the Mississippi and California. Those so-called states resemble more of a third-world loony bin than the US. With their guns and superstitions as well as their racist, sexist and homophobic outlooks, those people belong more to a bad western than the modern era. They even like Sarah Palin! Ha! She doesn’t have a real degree (a “BA” from the “University” of Idaho….how droll!) How could they be so stupid!?!
Thank goodness though. Thank goodness our beloved leader, our Great One, our Dear One, had the courage to do whatever it necessary to pass the bill. He is from Chicago and you can tell! They have it right, they know that important things need to be passed and that the law shouldn’t get in the way. Giving dissenting pieces of shit whatever they wanted in pork for their districts was an inspired tactic! Our beloved President’s bold leadership saved the say from the stupid filthy masses!
It is a great day to be an American. I thought I would never see the day when the Democrats would finally get the courage to do whats right and put to bed silly notions of “Constitutionality” that stand in the way of whats best for America. We finally have a leader that will do whatever it takes to transform this nation into a real, modern social democracy! We will no longer have to be ashamed of America and lower our eyes when the French or Germans talk about the glories of cradle-to-grave government protection.
I have to run, first I have to pick up my check from McDonalds, then clean out my room at home (Mom is on me again) and then I have brie and wine with Jenny Williams-Anthony-Cohen and her life partner * Copeckny-Liter-Jones at the independent bookstore. Its poetry night! I hope my “Ode to Our Beloved One” is as well received as “Texas is Full of Stupid Rednecks and Racists.”
-SVD
Berkeley, CA
Coverage from the Code Red Rally
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to the ‘Code Red Rally’ in Washington, DC today, however I have been following it closely. To help anyone looking for coverage of the event, I’ve put together a small archive of some of the coverage received. If you come across something that I’m missing, simply leave a link in the comments section and I’ll add it as soon as possible.
Links:
Politico: Tea Partiers rally: ‘Kill the bill’
Dakota Voice: Code Red Rally Today Against Gov’t Health Care
The Washington Independent: Nervous About Health Care, Tea Parties Look to 2010
Christian News Wire: Concerned Women for America Joins ‘Code Red’ Rally on Capitol Hill
Courthouse News Service: Right Wingers Dress in Red to Protest Bill
CNN Political Ticker: Dean: Time to ‘kill the Senate bill’
CBS News: Conservatives Rally to “Kill the Bill”
CNN Political Ticker: Conservative ‘Code Red rally’ hits the Hill
The Hill: Tea Party supporters, conservative groups rally outside Capitol
Video Coverage:
Just how popular is TaxDayTeaParty.com?
There have been many on the left who have been diligently trying to discredit the rapidly growing Tea Party Movement as nothing more than a few angry activists.
Well, I guess in terms of web traffic, these few angry activists are more energized than the ever-so-famous Barack Obama army.
What this link shows is the increase in traffic rank, as calculated by Alexa.com.
Of course, any computer geek will quickly rush in and discredit Alexa’s ranking system. However, if you look at some of the other metrics presented here, TaxDayTeaParty.com comes up strong in every category, bringing to question the real power of the post-election Obama machine.
For those of you who don’t follow this stuff regularly and may be confused, let me just walk you through the more important metrics.
While traffic rank is an interesting number to follow, most techies are more concerned with things like pageviews, as shown on the “pageview” tab here.
Now Alexa doesn’t provide you with the exact number pageviews, but instead displays the data as a percentage of overall online activity.
Even so, TaxDayTeaParty.com comes out strong again.
Using another metric, bounce rate, you can easily see how engaging a particular website is. Basically, bounce rate represents nothing more than a percentage of people who come to a certain page on a site and then leave without clicking to other internal links. This metric is important because if a site has content that isn’t relevant or interesting, they’ll leave.
Looking at the two sties, TaxDayTeaParty.com wins another round. Since this metric is based on a percentage of those who exit the site, it’s better to have a lower a number, which TaxDayTeaParty.com does, with a bounce rate of around 35% versus Obama’s 45%.
Yet they’re still trying to discredit this movement?
While I could easily stop there, I might as well finish this out by examining the “Time on Site” numbers.
This metric is self explanatory, it represents the average amount of time visitors spend browsing a particular website. If you’re a web developer, this is an important metric because the time spent on site will often reflect the quality of your sites content, structure, and interactivity.
So looking at the two sites, once again TaxDayTeaParty.com is the victor, with an average time on site of just under 3 minutes, versus Obama’s, which is right around 1 minute and 30 seconds.
While it’s easy to understand why TaxDayTeaParty.com is doing better than the Obama site at present, it’s important to note that in the weeks following the election, everyone was worried about what Obama was going to do with his “massive grassroots army.”
While he may still have a massive email list and a flashy website, in terms of measured attention, it looks like it’s become a model that can be (and is being) replicated by other organizations and movements successfully.
Just for kicks, here is how TaxDayTeaParty.com does against other sites:
TaxDayTeaParty.com vs. MoveOn.org
Winner: TaxDayTeaParty.com
TaxDayTeaParty.com vs. Democrats.org
Winner: TaxDayTeaParty.com
TaxDayTeaParty.com vs. DailyKos.com
Winner: DailyKos.com (for now)
Is your tea party listed?
A few weeks ago I created a GoogleMap to help a few co-workers and myself keep up all the different tea parties happening around the country. At first, this was an extremely easy project to manage, however, as the momentum started to build, these tea parties spread like wildfire, as the map shows:
View Larger Map
Odds are there are dozens of events that we haven’t even heard about yet, and if that is the case, please leave the details in the comments section below, and I’ll make sure I get them posted ASAP.
Also, if you want to embed this map on your blog or website, here is the code:
<iframe width=”425″ height=”350″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ src=”http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=112875499027114938790.0004647d9f61bab744fd4&t=h&ll=36.713898,-96.379716&spn=21.879292,53.294898&output=embed”></iframe><br /><small><a href=”http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=112875499027114938790.0004647d9f61bab744fd4&t=h&ll=36.713898,-96.379716&spn=21.879292,53.294898&source=embed” style=”color:#0000FF;text-align:left”>View Larger Map</a></small>
Special thanks to Brendan Steinhauser for helping keep this map up-to-date!
In Defense of AIG Bonuses
While I’m sure at present, the idea of defending American International Group (AIG) isn’t exactly the most popular on either the left or right. However this is one of those issues where I think passion has superseded common sense, and some perspective might fruitful.
A few points:
First, let’s remember that AIG never actually went into bankruptcy proceedings, instead allowing the United States government to become a majority shareholder in the company, taking ownership of 79.9% of their assets.
Look at this from the role of shareholder: would you want to have the company you’re invested in revoke contracts that were designed to keep your talent on board, during an especially difficult time? If you were in fact a shareholder, and saw that it had the potential to yield a return with the right people and incentive, I would hope you’d say yes.
The government claimed when they made this investment that they thought it was going to have a positive return on investment for the American people. How do they expect that to be the case when the people working at the company are having one of their biggest perks stripped from them?
Second, staying on the same topic, it’s important to remember that bankruptcy is one of the legal protections a business has to get themselves out of the potentially crippling contracts without having to go through a sea of red tape and individual legal proceedings.
Just as is the case with any company, AIG had the option to file bankruptcy, go into protection and remove these contracts. However, the United States felt that AIG was too big to fail, and decided that instead of letting them go bankrupt, they would give them the money they needed to continue doing what they thought was needed to become solid again.
Third, do people actually believe that AIG would be able to employ quality people without having the ability to give them something to sweeten things a bit? If you’re someone who actually understands the credit market and has the knowledge that could save AIG, odds are if you’re not receiving the right sort of benefits package, you’ll just going to go elsewhere (especially in this economy).
Those who orchestrated this deal both in New York and Washington have all worked for institutions like AIG at some point. I am quite confident that if they weren’t receiving bonuses when they were with those companies, they too would have gone elsewhere.
While the media has had a field day with this, I find it extremely troubling that the government is coming down so aggressively on AIG for a practice that involves bonuses that are renewed annually, yet is unwilling to speak out negatively against union contracts held by the auto industry that often yield more benefits, FOR LIFE, and yield no positive return for the company.
The government is creating a slippery slope here by now threatening to come in and take this bonus money back, particularly when they’re talking about tracking down the individuals who received the money.
The government has no place telling companies that they cant honor contracts that were established prior to their investment. If they want to do this, they’re going to have to write a new slate of contract law, or use their majority power to drive the company into bankruptcy. However, when you’re the United States government, odds are regard for the law is the last thing you’re paying attention to. Public opinion and approval rating, however, is another story.
This is going to get worse, I promise.
If you thought Sarbanes/Oxley was a business killer, wait until you see what extreme regulation they’re going to come up with to try and prevent the unknown in the future.