Incredible that this has gotten next-to-no coverage but at Falwell’s Liberty University, Mike Huckabee claimed divine providence as the reason for his rise in the polls. More and the video at Prezvid.
: LATER: Lots and lots of comment over at Comment is Free.
Digg, the social news site, has created pages for all the candidates and already, there’s a rush to follow and befriend them. Tops on the Republican side: Ron Paul by a gigantic margin (they are a tenacious bunch, those Paulites… or are they the Ronnies?), followed by Huckabee, Thompson, Romney, then Giuliani. On the Democratic side: Obama followed by Kucinich (!), Gravel (!), Edwards, Clinton, and Biden.
True to form, Diggers find the stories that are overlooked in mainstream media. They’re also generally befriending the candidates overlooked by MSM.
(Crossposted from PrezVid.)
If you ask me — and you didn’t, so I will — it’s pretty damned incredible that Michael Arrington and TechCrunch is getting interviews with presidential candidates: McCain today; Romney earlier. It’s just a blog. It’s just a tech blog. But it’s powerful and has an important audience in a critical industry. So candidates are paying attention. That and 10Questions and the YouTube debates are evidence of a political process that’s just beginning to open up.
Incredible. Fox goes after John McCain’s campaign to cease and desist use of a clip from the last debate that has the Fox logo on it.
It would be shocking enough for Fox to go after a citizen who put this online — and we should all fight for that citizen’s right to do so. It’s all the more shocking that Fox is going after a presidential candidate. It’s triply shocking that Fox is going after Republican McCain.
This precisely why we have been fighting for the networks to assure that they would make debate footage available to all of us. When I spoke with FoxNews about their policy in May, they said they would abide by fair comment and use. Well, as Stanford’s Lawrence Lessig has pointed out often, this is the problem with fair use: you can argue about it (and have to hire attorneys to do so).
McCain, to his credit, is telling Fox to shove it.
But one way to solve this is for all the candidates to pledge that they will not appear on any network’s debate unless that network frees the footage for all candidates and citizens. It is, after all, our election.
The AP reports:
In the ad, McCain is shown at the debate saying: “A few days ago, Senator Clinton tried to spend $1 million on the Woodstock concert museum.”
“Now my friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event,” he says. “I was tied up at the time.” It was a referance to the 5 1/2 years McCain spent in a North Vietnamese prison.
The Fox News logo is in the corner of the ad.
But Fox News bars candidates from using debate clips in ads, and officials there sent a cease and desist letter to McCain. McCain rejected the request, arguing that he is within the law’s “fair use” rights to use an 18-second clip of a 90-minute debate.
Here’s the commercial. Take that, Fox:
(Had the wrong commercial up before; corrected now.)
(Crossposted from Prezvid, where there’s lots of interesting stuff lately.)
I’m pround to be a cosponsor, via Buzzmachine and Prezvid, of 10 Questions, an attempt to hold one more Presidential debate but to do it better this time. It’s elegantly simple: You tape the questions. We, the people, select the best ones. They are submitted to the candidates. They respond. We grade their responses. Have at ’em.
