Tag: misleading

On Really Padding The Résumé, Or, “Vote For Me! I Died In Viet Nam”

We have already seen some impressive efforts in this campaign season to do a bit of résumé padding, particularly as it regards things military; so far Illinois’ Mark Kirk has managed to turn himself into a kind of camouflage Austin Powers, while Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal’s trying to catch up with some “Vietnam” service of his own that no one else in the theater of operations exactly knew about.

But now, in the race for Alabama Governor, we may have seen something that takes us to a whole new level of “inflation”: the Republican candidate is running an ad that not only suggests that he served in Vietnam…it seems to imply that he actually died there, and has now come back to save the State.

Which is some serious irony indeed, considering that the candidate is actually a medical doctor.

And with that, let me introduce you to the either living…or undead…Dr. Robert J. Bentley.

BP Has Solved Our Oil Problem 20100607

BP has reported today yesterday (-Sunday- Monday) that they collected 6100 10,000 barrels of oil in the past 24 hours.  This is stupendous!  (Note:  the volume changes.  It was over 10,000 in 24 hours now, but that just reinforces my point).

If this is correct, and it seems to be, if they can tune their collection device a bit more, they can collect more, perhaps much more.  You do not understand the ramifications of this development.  If correct, BP will go down in history as the most important cog in the wheel of energy independence ever for the United States.  Please allow me to elaborate.

SEIU ads on Dkos

If you've been to DKos today, you've probably already heard about this. But if you haven't, I thought this needed to be pointed out. Right now, at the top of the Rec List, is a diary by flitedocnm discussing something strange going on. Seems that every diary dealing with health care issues, or at least the ones that have tags like “health care”, etc., are being hit with an auto-appended ad.

The ad is from SEIU, and of course is asking to be clicked, and their agenda supported. The problem is, this ad is placed in such a position that it looks like the diarist placed it there intentionally. But in reality the ad is being placed there automatically. It's obvious the ad is being placed there through some programming technique, but what isn't so clear is WHY. Of course part of the answer to “why” is to increase ad revenue, but the other issue is whether the “right or wrong” of this was thought out in advance.

I'm still waiting to see how the site admins, or Markos himself, responds to the complaints about this… and believe me, there are LOTS of complaints, running maybe 95% against. I'm not dumping on DKos, because as of right now it's not clear whether anyone realized how offensive people were gonna find this. I'm hoping they'll come back with, “What was I thinking?!”, and fix the problem. But if it's some new site policy where they can put up an ad anywhere they want, even if it makes it look like the diarist is supporting that ad's agenda, then there's of course a serious problem with that. I feel it's no different than editing the text of a diary or a comment to make it appear that the writer said something he/she didn't. Well, maybe not quite as bad, but still not good… not good at all.

Again, the main reason I'm writing this is not to dump on DKos. It's got a lot of good things going for it, and I don't plan on leaving there anytime soon (if I have any say in it). But there are obviously some issues about that site that get people riled up, and I wanted to give you all a heads up in case this turns into another one.

Of course by the time you read this, it's entirely possible that Markos or someone else will have fixed this, and the whole point of this little rant will become pretty moot. I hope that's what happens.

UPDATE: Just wanted to make it clear I'm not taking a position on SEIU or their healthcare stance. As far as I can tell, they're pretty close to where we want to be (public single-payer option), but not perfect. Regardless, that's not the point. Even if it was Amnesty International, GreenPeace, the ACLU (all of which I completely support), or whatever, it still wouldn't be right to append their ad onto a person's diary and make it look like that person supported the cause, when they may or they may NOT.