This article in The Atlantic was one of the more interesting pieces I read about the 2012 campaign and election. A few excerpts:

“If you look like an asshole, you have to be really good.”

They didn’t have to buy the traditional stuff like the local news, either. Instead, they could run ads targeted to specific types of voters during reruns or off-peak hours. 

With Twitter, one of the company’s former employees, Mark Trammell, helped build a tool that could specifically target individual users with direct messages. “We built an influence score for the people following the [Obama for America] accounts and then cross-referenced those for specific things we were trying to target, battleground states, that sort of stuff.”

Last but certainly not least, you have the digital team’s Quick Donate. It essentially brought the ease of Amazon’s one-click purchases to political donations. “It’s the absolute epitome of how you can make it easy for people to give money online,”

They learned what it was like to have — and work with people who had —  a higher purpose than building cool stuff.

They started to worry about the next Supreme Court Justices while they coded.

From an opinion piece on Al-Jazeera, by Paul Rosenberg 

Obama, however, is just one political figure, reflecting the more general state of US politics – particularly elite opinion and major economic interests. His ambivalence is, in this sense, an expression of America’s fading power. Obama’s belated attempts to play catch-up with the Arab Spring are but one facet of a more general loss of previous dominance.

And this from Wadah Khanfar, on the obsolecense aging Arab regimes:

This outstanding change, this historic moment, was totally lost on ageing governments that thought they were dealing with a bunch of kids who only needed to vent and then go home to their aimless lives. But they were wrong: because their ideas were old, their opinions were old, their minds were old, and their spirit was old. Ignorance can sometimes be a tool of destiny.

I’m finding Al-Jazeera a very credible and refreshing source for world news.

And then there’s this from a recent NYT story:

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Reminds me of all those Stinger missles we gave the Taliban fighters to use against the Russkies.

That’s the title of a damning story in Rolling Stone by Tim Dickinson. The sub-title sums it up: “The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder”

There are so many depressing aspects to this story I don’t know where to begin.

“As BP was cutting corners aboard the rig, the Obama administration was plotting the greatest expansion of offshore drilling in half a century. In 2008, as prices at the pump neared $5 a gallon, President Bush had lifted an executive moratorium on offshore drilling outside the Gulf that had been implemented by his father following the Exxon Valdez. On the campaign trail, Obama had stressed that offshore drilling “will not make a real dent in current gas prices or meet the long-term challenge of energy independence.” But once in office, he bowed to the politics of “drill, baby, drill.” Hoping to use oil as a bargaining chip to win votes for climate legislation in Congress, Obama unveiled an aggressive push for new offshore drilling in the Arctic, the Southeastern seaboard and new waters in the Gulf, closer to Florida than ever before. In doing so, he ignored his administration’s top experts on ocean science, who warned that the offshore plan dramatically understated the risks of an oil spill and petitioned Salazar to exempt the Arctic from drilling until more scientific studies could be conducted.”

As a contributor to the Obama campaign in 2008, I’m on a shit-load of mailing lists and frequently get calls to contribute. I told the last guy, “No.” He asked why and I told him I was disappointed in so many of the president’s decisions (or lack of decisions). The young man asked for specifics, ready with a screen-full of talking points and responses, but I declined.

He said something like, “In a democracy, nobody is going to agree with everything the president has to do. If you approve of 75% of his actions, that would be pretty good.” Not for me. Not if that 25% is symptomatic of the same old political shit that Obama promised to move beyond. Uh uh.

Am I sorry I voted for Obama? Not given the McCain-Palin option. Is Obama a better president that W? Yeah, probably, but so what. That aint much of a bar.

[For some reason this story is no longer available on the Rolling Stone website]