At the risk of sounding like I’m beating a dead horse, let me report that the Bush “poster” tool fails to work on PCs using Mozilla.
The behavior is exactly the same as Mac/Safari — constant page refresh with no poster creation or error message (such as, “This tool works only on Windows machines and MSIE”).
I was able to get the tool to work with this machine (Win2000/MSIE 6.0) at 1.38 pm Friday (Seattle time).
Today, the “make your own” Bush poster tool has been significantly revised.
There are only two customization choices — either by state or by “coalition” group (not the usual list of suspects but demographic groups like “Arab Americans” or “Hi-Tech” … interestingly, no “Educators” … so are we to assume that Arab Americans are more likely to vote for Bush than teachers? Students and families are an afterthought, found at the end of the list — until that point, the list is alphabetical.).
No more “write your own slogan” (custom text field).
Nevertheless, the Web site still appears to be overwhelmed. Using this WindowsXP workstation with MSIE 6.0, I still get an error message (that page seems to be unavailable) when I select “create poster.” No poster for me.
As far as Mac/Safari — no change in response. Just continual refresh — the “create” command never gets to the web server.
I guess Mac folks aren’t considered a core audience for the Bush campaign. <tongue firmly in cheek>Heck, we’re probably all artsy-fartsy educators, anyway. I mean, who else “thinks different”? </>
I’m sure that when the Bush team brainstormed the idea of having a “make your own poster” tool on their web site that they did not think the idea through to its logical conclusion.
If they had, they probably wouldn’t have gone ahead with it.
Thursday, Slate reported that readers could visit the Bush Campaign web site and create a Bush poster with any slogan you want. Repeat: any slogan.
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I’d not thought of our “red” and “blue” states (an artifact of TV graphics in the 2000 presidential election) as surrogates for creative/technology centers until now.
Richard Florida makes a compelling case explaining this phenomena in the current issue of Washington Monthly.
In 1980, according to Robert Cushing’s detailed analysis of the election results, there wasn’t a significant difference between how high-tech and low-tech regions voted for president; the difference between the parties still depended upon other factors. By 2000, however, the 21 regions with the largest concentrations of the creative class and the highest-tech economies voted Democratic at rates 17 percent above the national average. Regions with lower levels of creative people and low-tech economies, along with rural America, went Republican. In California, the most Democratic of states, George Bush won the state’s 14 low-tech regions and rural areas by 210,000 votes. Al Gore took the 12 high-tech regions and their suburbs by over 1.5 million.
Florida, whose 2002 award-winning book explores the same subject, hypothesizes that not only have we undergone a seismic cultural transformation, but we are also on the verge of losing our competitive edge in “white collar” fields like creativity and technology.
AP reporter Dan D’Ambrosio couched the battle between EchoStar and Viacom in “David and Goliath” terms:
Satellite TV giant EchoStar pulled the plug … in an escalating legal dispute with Viacom over the price of programming.
The implication is that EchoStar is the large bully (Goliath) and Viacom the victim (David). However, his characterization of EchoStar as the “giant” is a serious case of role reversal.
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