Hattip to Patrick Ruffini (a good party guy, who knows his stuff about technology) who posted a review of the new DNC site and as I’ve been doing political tech consulting for a little bit I thought I would offer my two cents.

DNC Review

What is going on over at the DNC, this page, while slick looking, is caught in like 2001 as far as technology goes. The usual grassroots tools such as email your legislator, write a letter to the editor, are enitrely GONE. I mean gone. I have to think they are just being retooled and will come up soon, but as such still embarassing.

One upside is it is a totally tabeless CSS design which is one of my personal petpeeves, but the loss of the functionality is just astounding. Moreover the lack of internal navigation with breadcrumbs or some alternative is mindnumbing. Another thing is that while they have an XML feed for their press releases they have absolutely no archive of releases, which again hurts the brain.

Where is all the Dean for America stuff? I mean it just appears to be totally missing, which I think proves the point many have made in the past: Dean’s rise was due to Joe Trippi’s genius not Howard Dean. The DNC should be begging Trippi to come and save them from this disaster they just wandered into. I would have thought the DNC’s redesign would have involved all sorts of innovations to hook the base into the party and make their blogs and other areas more consistent echo chambers for the DNC’s talking points, as well as hooking them into the grassroots machine better.

Daily Kos Redesign

Now this is a man who gets technology. The redesign is nice, functional, and gets the point across. My only complaint is that the ad bar runs down the middle of the page which gets annoying. The consistent color theme is nice and you can easily navigate around the site and find everything you want.

dKospedia needs to be brought into the same design as the main site, as right now it still is stuck in the old design, but as it is a semi-independent (and 100% certifiably insane) site it is forgivable though. I’ve never been a fan of Scoop, which both RedState and DailyKos run on but that’s just my two cents.

Anyways, add your comments…

This man does not deserve to be in our party. I don’t care how conservative you vote, and McHenry does vote conservative, but when you call and threaten CRs as a sitting Congressman you DO NOT deserve your job.

The Hill story is here, I’ve exceprted it below.

“He said, ‘Elizabeth, I thought we were friends, that you cared about getting me elected,’” Beck said. Then, she added, McHenry warned her that he would not help her or her school’s College Republicans in the future unless she voted for Gourley for CRNC chairman.

“It was requested from Gourley to McHenry. McHenry told me [that],” Beck said. “Basically, he said, ‘Y’all are screwed.’ It was one of the worst days of my life because I do like McHenry.” She felt threatened and disappointed because “before that, I felt like I had a relationship, like I had connections, a career.”

Another College Republican, who declined to be identified, was standing next to Beck during her conversation with McHenry and recalled that she was intimidated. “It was very pointed - if you don’t do this, there will be consequences,” she said, summarizing McHenry’s words. “If you don’t do this, it will be bad for your political career.”

Steal an election, collect 15 grand.

President Bush is set to give what must be a monster speech tonight. I am counting on it to mark a positive and pivotal turning point in public opinion. Furthermore, the Wall Street Journal has this great piece today arguing that the Vietnam metaphor - incessantly perpetuated by the media - is actually appropriate when discussing the Iraq War. While the liberals use it to imply we have been defeated in Iraq - just as we were in Vietnam - the article argues that the lessons of Vietnam should remind conservatives that total victory in Iraq is attainable and critical to American national security: “Rather the Vietnam metaphor is apt today because the U.S. is in a war it can win and is winning, if only those inside the Beltway would stop preferring defeat to victory and disgrace to honor. ”
This may be the best part: ” As in Vietnam, the stakes in Iraq today are much larger than simply allowing millions of people in one country to descend into chaos and oppression. We fought it out for a decade in the jungles of Southeast Asia, losing more than 50,000 American lives, because we knew that handing communist insurgents one country made it more likely that they would soon grow hungry for another. Do we think it is now any different with Islamic insurgents just because there is no longer a Soviet Union out there ready to back them? If the U.S. walks away from this war and leaves it to Europe to hold back Islamic extremists, we might as well just accept right now that the terrorists will topple more of our skyscrapers–or worse. ”

We are indeed faced with Vietnam-like circumstances in Iraq. The question is, will we make the same mistake again and cut and run when the going gets tough? By staying tough in Iraq, perhaps we can redeem our nation for its failures in Vietnam and destroy the defeatist, “blame America first” syndrome that the Vietnam war tragically begetted.

With Al Gore inventing the internet and all I thought they would realize that we can see which sites they came from, but alas….

Tanbark check this out. I’m posing as Chuck Colson on http://www.savethegop.com/archiv…6/26/moving-on/

There’s little wide eyed wonders over there whining about Davidson’s loss to Gourley. I’m tryin to toughen ‘em up by giving them some Repub election highlights and spelling out why they need guys like Gourley if they’re gonna win.
Chuck Colson | Email | Homepage | 06.28.05 - 10:55 am | #

Apparently the Battle of Trafalgar was won in vain, as the celebration of the great British naval victory has been taken over by PC EU-nichs and the like. I can’t comment sufficiently on such lunacy, so check out the article. Mark might want to give “props” to Anna Tribe, 75, the great, great, great granddaughter of Lord Nelson:

“I am anti-political correctness. Very much against it. It makes fools of us.”

Huzzah!

I think a fun exercise might be to find other battles that have been “won in vain.” The Siege of Vienna springs immediately to mind. Any others?

Gary, Alex… I know this is going to set off a blog civil war between our pro and anti Lincoln folks but how about Sen. Barrack Obama (Commie-IL). I think Obama has a point, though its hard for me to take seriously any man who at one point advocated POST birth abortion.

“In Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat - in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles. He also reminded me of a larger, fundamental element of American life - the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams,” Obama wrote in a package dubbed ‘Uncovering the Real Abe Lincoln,’ on newsstands Monday.

Obama, a Chicago Democrat who is just the fifth black senator in U.S. history, also raised questions about Lincoln’s role in ending slavery.

“I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator,” Obama said. “As a law professor and civil rights lawyer and as an African-American, I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a military document than a clarion call for justice.”