Obama’s Zillions, and the Web Celeb 25

Drudge

Matt Drudge, the most un-cool man on the planet!

Just in case any of us ain’t-got-a-life internet hoodoos were still pretending that the web is cool, Forbes Magazine has published their annual highly-scientific list of internet celebrities, with headliners like Matt Drudge, and a former child star from Star Trek, Wil Wheaton!

Wheaton

To generate the Web Celebs ranking we first defined a “Web celebrity” as a person famous primarily for creating or appearing in Internet-based content, and who is highly recognizable to a Web-based audience. That definition excludes people who were significantly famous before they hit the Web, like television and movie star turned top Twitter user Ashton Kutcher, and leaves us with a pool of people whose fame grew out of, and is dependent on, the Internet.

From there we created a candidate list of over 200 Internet personalities. Each candidate was ranked in four areas: Web references as calculated by Google, traffic ranking of their home page as calculated by Alexa, TV/radio mentions and press clips compiled from Factiva, and number of followers on microblogging site Twitter. These four categories were totaled and weighted to produce a final score, then sorted to produce our rankings.

Also in the category of uncool shit connected to the internet is the $750,000,000 Obama conned out of naive web-geeks in 2008, and what the fuck did he do with all that money?

Obama spent twice as much as McCain, even though McCain is a Republican, and those guys are supposed to buy elections!

A little digging around in the campaign spending data on OpenSecrets.org also provides some insight about why the story of every American election is…

Which whore won?

Spending

Presidential campaign spending approximately quadrupled between 2000 and 2008, while inflation only accounted for an increase of about 25%!

In constant dollars, at the same rate as Gore/Bush in 2000, all candidates combined would have spent about $430 million in 2008, but they actually spent an additional $900 million, for an ultra-grand total of…

$1,324,000,000.

Why?

Does that constant-dollar explosion from $430 million to $1,324,000,000 reflect a proportional increase in political corruption?

Yes.  

1 comment

  1. about those charts:  total 2008 contributions, about $1,748,000,000; total expenditures, $1,324,000,000.  Ahem,  what happened to $424 million, the excess of contributions over expenditures?

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