dissociatedpress.com » presidential

Presidential Race 2008: The Final Lap

admin — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:51:22 +0000

As we head into the last few days before the election, I’m consumed with bittersweet feelings. An Obama White House won’t offer much fodder for my political comic, but it would be nice having someone sane and intelligent in the White House. And all the fun of videos like Cindy McCain Claims She’s Just Like Any Other Female Human or info-graphics like Political Nascar (pictured left) will suddenly be rendered irrelevant. It’s all about charts, maps and polls now. So first up: If The World Could Vote, McCain would be pummeled into oblivion, with Obama taking around 90% of the vote in every country except Macedonia and Albania. And frankly, those few hundred votes out of half a million are probably coming from the only people with Internet in those countries: Republican-appointed diplomats living in U.S. embassies. For solid figures on votes that will actually count, RealClearPolitics.com has a mind-numbing collection of data, but a good place to start is their electoral map. Since the final results are heavily dependent on swing states (or vote rigging) you might want to bookmark Politico.com’s Swing State Map or Electoral-Vote.com. And don’t forget the power of opportunistic marketing-as-polling. The Dems have already won the Baskin Robbins race, but don’t forget we still have the Busken Bakery Cookie Poll and 7-Eleven’s 7-Election.com

2008 Presidential Debates: It’s A Bird, It’s a Plane, No It’s…

admin — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:07:10 +0000

…SuperCain! Able to suspend elections, chat with Katie Couric, save the economy…

…and still take time to vanquish his unworthy debate opponents!

Fleshmaps, Heatmaps, And Tag Clouds

admin — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 09:28:38 +0000

Ever notice how many times in a rap song someone uses the word “booty”, or in a country song how often they use the phrase “in your arms”? Well at Fleshmap.com (maybe NSFW; occasional nudity and body parts) they have a cool tool that renders a visual representation of the number of times certain body parts are mentioned in a piece of text. You can view by musical genre or see a few examples of specific songs here. You can even create your own Fleshmap by pasting in a body of text. Fun, but a little limited. As a person kind of obsessed with how people communicate, I find “word clouds” and “tag clouds” more interesting. TagCrowd.com lets you paste a body of text and create a static version of a word cloud similar to the one here on Dissociated Press. Tools like this are not only amusing, they can be very informative. See this presidential speeches tag cloud tool. It’s a great way to view the themes not only of recent speeches, but going all the way back to 1776. You can even download the tool and set up your own analyses.

Bush Administration Says “Pardon Me?”

admin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:37:36 +0000

Well George, it’s time to buy a new set of pens. You’ll be going through a lot of ink as you sign the blanket pardons for your felonious staff of the past several years. Although Slate has an excellent round up of the offenders available, so far the attempts at citizen’s arrests aren’t going so well. Although Bill Clinton (probably with merit) catches a lot of the flack for his pardons as he left office, both Reagan and Bush senior used up a fair amount of ink on their pardon power as well. They had that little Iran-Contra thing to clean up, after all. According to most sources you’ll review, Jimmy Carter was probably the last president (except for Ford’s pardon of Nixon) to use the power of pardon in a generally ethical way.