Communications

And it's in the form of a website:

Obama and Biden have hit the ground running. If you notice, the site is barely finished.

I am running out the door and I am rushing to post this, but while last night everybody was running screaming that today the Republicans in the US Senate are putting a proposal to a vote, I literally scoured the web looking for a copy of their plan.

I came out empty handed.

These elections are a big huge failure for the techies that helped propel the "people powered politics" of the Dean campaign back in 2003. Why? Because bills, proposals and bailout are still being discussed behind closed doors and away from the voters.

And a big WTF!

We know that Barack Obama is a control freak when it comes to his image (the suits just tells you all you need to know). But honey, this is getting friggin' ridonculous. I mean, they have in Latin, "Yes We Can" (Vero Possumus).

I keep reading that as "Very Possum", so that's how "too much" that seal is.

My question is, who's the semiotician in his PR and communications team.

H/T Dave Winer, via Twitter

Image Courtesy of BarackObama.com at Flickr.

HOT!

She's not going to wait for the vultures to do the talking about her. Michelle Obama gets her own war room along with a new chief of staff:

Later today, the campaign is set to announce the hiring of Stephanie Cutter, a longtime Democratic strategist who worked as Senator John Kerry’s communications director in 2004, as chief of staff to Mrs. Obama. Ms. Cutter is scheduled to begin soon, with the first task of re-crafting the image of Mrs. Obama, who has come under intense criticism by Republicans and even some Democratic rivals. She also will lead a war room to fight attacks against Mrs. Obama.

At first I found it odd that, given Kerry's slow response to the Swift Boat attacks, his former communications director is working for Ms. Obama. Maybe it makes sense because she's already "been there, done that" and won't let that happen ever again.

Hopefully that's the reason why they hired a former John Kerry staffer. Because she's indeed lived through all the republican's filth and knows now how to handle it.

Think about it, though. Michelle Obama has a war room. She's gonna get her shero on.

How HAWT is that!

Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's chief strategist has resigned from the Clinton campaign amid allegations of conflict of interest and ethical improprieties.

Penn had worked full time for the Clinton campaign even though he had not taken a sabbatical from his position as CEO of the international communications and lobbying firm Burson-Marsteller. What that meant was clear : Penn was taking meetings with political, corporate and consular clients while managing the campaign of a potential future president of the United States.

One of those clients was the government of Colombia, which had hired the firm in order to market in Capitol Hill a bilateral free-trade agreement with the United States as well as their anti-drug trafficking initiatives.

Penn vigorously defended the meeting saying he was there as CEO of Burson-Marsteller, not as campaign manager of the Senator. Yet he later retracted after it was revealed that Clinton was opposed to the trade agreement as well as her supporters with the labor movement.

[This post is for Greg Scott, who caught me in the middle of a rant about RCN over at Twitter.]

For about 4 months now I have noticed the change in service : I will get to YouTube but the pages load as slow as molasses. Other times, if I'm doing a search in Google, the page will take forever to load.

Today though, it's pretty obvious what's happening : I can't get into Google from my home connection. No Google. No Gmail. No YouTube. So I pinged people on Twitter and asked if anybody was having problems getting into Google.

Erica G replied from Boston :

I'm on RCN in Boston and having trouble connecting to Yahoo and tinyurl this evening. # [...] And actually, thinking of it, for the past several weeks I haven't been able to load YouTube videos properly, either. #

Melanie Notkin, who is also in NYC, reported the same issue. Maria Niles is on Comcast California, but she has had similar choppy access to YouTube in the past several weeks, making her wonder if she's living in China.

Why is this so important to blog and not dismiss as a possible "blip" or outage? Well, if we take into consideration all the services Google provides, the search company may indeed be the largest and most trafficked network of websites in the world. YouTube alone would make Google the largest video broadcaster at least in the United States.

Are you going to tell me RCN just happened to degrade service to the biggest web network and web services provider in the United States? As Seinfeld would say ... I. Don't. Think. So.

And those cojones are carried by non other than Gary Hart :

It will come as a surprise to many people that there are rules in politics. Most of those rules are unwritten and are based on common understandings, acceptable practices, and the best interest of the political party a candidate seeks to lead. One of those rules is this: Do not provide ammunition to the opposition party that can be used to destroy your party's nominee. This is a hyper-truth where the presidential contest is concerned.

By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party's nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her.

As Andrew Sullivan deservedly says, "it's a start" but not enough because it would be too high a price to pay if McCain wins in November :

This is a generational struggle - although plenty of older folks get it completely. As such, it usually does take more than one insurrection to move past the past. Usually, we might wait for the forces of reaction and inertia and cynicism to fade away. The trouble is: we cannot afford more Rove-Morris politics given the enormous dangers we now face at home and abroad. And if you give the Clintons any power, we know they will use it to destroy - not just limit - any threat to them. They know the threat Obama and his politics present to them and their machine. They will never forgive his presumption. And you cannot assume they will at some point allow him to take over. The battle really is now.

There really was nothing else for her to do than to resign after becoming a liability to the Obama campaign :

Samantha Power, an unpaid foreign policy adviser and Harvard professor, announced her resignation in a statement provided by the Obama campaign in which she expressed "deep regret."

"Last Monday, I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign," she said. "And I extend my deepest apologies to Senator Clinton, Senator Obama and the remarkable team I have worked with over these long 14 months."

Previously : "She's A Monster".