This will have repercussions:
Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.
McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.
Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the site, he replaced one that shows contact information with a statement:
Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between two passionate females.
People said nasty things about McCain in radio and tv commercials, and he spent the next five years criminalizing political speech and assaulting your speech rights with McCain-Feingold. I don’t even want to think what the jackass will do after this.
pharniel
I’m thinking we start with a full senete investigation into the secret lives of what married lesbians will do in the privacy of thier own home. With closed door testimony and, *ahem* demonstrations.
anyway, good for him. he should have also hit the mccain campgin with a dmcia take down notice pulling thier website offline for a bit.
Jake
[Wipes coffee off monitor]
If the McCainiac has any sense [insert gales of laughter here] he will be veeewy quiet. The story as it stands: One of McCain’s aides swiped something from another person and that person demonstrated why it is important to read all of the instructions before using the product.
Not a lot one can do with such a tale except apologize.
I suppose McCain could woo Das Base by sputtering about how disgusting he finds the idea of marriage between two passionate females, or he could show what a jolly fellow he is by laughing it off. Hard to tell with Mr. Straight Gibberish.
Andrew
Far more interesting was McCain’s bat shit crazy talk that Petraeus is driving around Baghdad in an unarmored Humvee and Michael Ware just called him on it on CNN. He basically said McCain is absolutely insane and that military personnel laughed at McCain’s comments.
Cyrus
Oh my fucking god. OMG. ZOMG!!1!1! That is priceless. So McCain’s staff was either dumb or disorganized enough to steal bandwidth. From an IT industry professional. Wow.
In the past, I have given people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to computer literacy or blog savvy. In one of the recent threads about the document dump, for example, someone suggested that the White House was genuinely caught by surprise by how quickly a legion of bloggers and commenters went through it, and I disagreed, saying that they didn’t really expect the document dump to stall the investigation for months, they were just trying to run out the clock.
Well, I won’t be doing that here. If McCain gets elected (somehow) and whoever runs his MySpace page stays on staff (somehow), bloggers won’t have to pore over e-mails to get at his scandals, they’ll just read the listserv.
Tsulagi
LOL. McCain is lucky the guy had a clean sense of humor and just used the gay marriage announcement. Now if I could have chosen what would have been displayed on the maverick’s space under his face, he’d be surge pissing all over himself.
What is it with Pub politicians/staffs and their failure to grasp the workings of the Tubes?
Dreggas
but how will he explain the stash of tapes on the back of the bus?
Seriously though this IS straight talk, he’s a man who supports passionate females, his position on it is rock solid. It may even snag him the Lesbian nod for the nomination especially if he comes up with some sort of affirmative legislation particularly if it is numbered something like, oh, say, 69 in the senate numbering system.
Andrew
They hate Algore?
DougJ
You know, if he had actually said that, I’d respect him more.
Jake
Republicans: Too concerned about your pubes to understand the tubes.
grumpy realist
Why is it so hard for people to learn….
Don’t Piss Off The Computer Geek.
(There was a wonderful example of this I saw when a Certain Company Not To Be Named decided it was going to consolidate all its Asian credit card processing down in one hub in Australia. Let’s say there was the interaction of the guy in charge of getting all the programming done, his group of Indian coders, a tight deadline, and a certain racist hot-shot hell-mell up the company ladder….Result: one set of very insulted coders leaving, one very pissed-off head-of-project who walked off the job, one half-completed program with no commentary or referencing, a loss of $8M down the drain, and one hot-shot having irretrievably decapitated his career…..)
LLeo
OT:
Have any of you heard the new Republican talking point about a date to remove most of our troops from Iraq?
They are calling it the “Surrender Date”. How can you fucking surrender in someone else’s civil war.
We deposed Sadam.
We conclusively found that Sadam had no Wepons of Mass Distruction.
The Iraqi people have had Three very successfull elections. They have their government set up. The have their own constitution.
And due to the medacity and incompetence of this crowd of Republicans & Leiberman, they have the own person civil war.
These fucking Republicans & Leiberman want to wash away their abject failure to turn Iraq into a “shining city on the hill” with the blood of American Marines and Soldiers.
Well fuck-you-very-much Republicans. You got Sadam. You got elections. You got an Iraqi Constitution. You got a Civil War. NOW QUIT THE FIELD AND DECLARE VICTORY, YOU MORONS.
cd6
Hell that’s a winning campaign issue
Let’s see some commercials around this theme
Zifnab
I would absolutely love for Republicans to come out in ’08 screaming at Dems for being surrender monkeys. After six years of their bullshit it will be fun to see exactly how many Americans are still buying the guff they’re selling.
We’ll have won the word games when people finally start standing up and saying, “Withdrawl, Redeployment, Surrender, whatever you want to call it, just get us the hell out!” I think we’re already very near that point.
Bubblegum Tate
Oh man. That one’s going to be all over the right-wing onanosphere in no time flat. It’ll be like crack-laced catnip.
ThymeZone
“Straight Talk Express.”
If it’s Republican, you can count on one thing: Whatever they say, the truth is probably exactly the opposite.
McCain is to “straight talk” as Jeffrey Dahmer was to cooking shows.
Richard 23
Honesty sells.
Otto Man
Must explain why the Republican Party is in a death spiral.
jake
Surrender Date – As in the date the war profiteers surrender their Iraqi Cash Cow.
Richard 23
Wow, Jake. Keep speaking truth to power, dude. It’s all about profits for those evil corporations isn’t it? No more blood for oil! 9/11 was an inside job! Chimpy McBushHitler is shredding the constitution!
Punchy
PWNED!
The Other Steve
Apparently John McCain has now come out in favor of the “The Media isn’t telling you the truth about Iraq” line, which we get form the wingnuttosphere.
Our good friend over at crooks and liars has more
mrmobi
Dick23:
You need to get some new lines, dude! It’s called vocabulary, read about it.
You must be very proud to be part of the 25 percent of Americans who couldn’t find their own ass with both hands and a map.
Randolph Fritz
Oh, my. I wonder if McCain’s campaign will survive this. And I suppose some really nasty lawsuits are possible. It’s easy to specify a policy in your license–as Lawrence Lessig says, “Code is law”–but enforce it in court? This could be a great deal of trouble for both Mr. Davidson and FOSS.
Tulkinghorn
Dick 23:
Are you suggesting Halliburton has lost money on its operations in Iraq? That’s right, they are in it out of the love in their little corporate heart.
If Halliburton failed to renew its contracts, because it wanted out, the war would be over because we no longer would have the capacity to support the troops in the field. So who is controlling policy, or as you would put it, the surrender date?
You have to surrender to reality some day.
28 Percent
There are 28 percent of us! You cannot keep us down!
Faux News
Dick23 is no Darrell that is for sure. Not even close. I miss Darrell, as no other Troll can hijack a BJ thread like him. this so called Richard 23 is simply lame.
At least 28 Percent is amusing sometimes.
Matt M
“Surrender is when soldiers give up fighting and become prisoners of war, either as individuals or when ordered to by their officers”
so ah, who wants to tell me how leaving iraq is the same as surrendering…… El richtard 23, looking in your direction…….
Otto Man
Well, that explains who Richard 23 is. Mac Buckets used to use that same stupid phrase and tone all the time, before he mysteriously disappeared.
Cyrus
It’s not just about Davidson being offended when the campaign used his template and didn’t give him credit. The story says that McCain’s campaign left in links to files that were still on Davidson’s server. I don’t know what Davidson uses that server for or how much traffic it normally gets, but a presidential campaign could have meant a lot of extra traffic. Maybe crashed his server, maybe ran up his bill from his ISP, or maybe just slowed things down for a few hours, but it was probably noticeable.
So Davidson changed the files that were still on his own server. According to him, that’s it.
Which isn’t to say McCain couldn’t file a lawsuit. He doesn’t have a case, but that doesn’t stop some people. Still, it seems to me that the smartest thing for McCain to do is take a joke, fire the overzealous intern, and let this die. Anything else will hurt him a lot more than Davidson.
John D.
He changed a file he controlled on his website, as is perfectly legal.
Randolph Fritz
Defamation, though, is not legal, and to thwart the ambitions of a powerful politician is to invite legal attack.
Chris
Looks like Randolph Fritz is riding the short bus….
Richard 23
Hey, no need to get nasty, Otto Dude. I am not pail-on-the-head bucket boy. That stung.
Besides, I thought MacBuckets was EEEL.
sidereal
“Chimpy McBushHitler”
I smell a rat. All patriots know that there’s only one ‘h’ in McBushitler.