Did you know? Besides sitting on Apple’s board of directors, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been an informal adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. In fact, he lurves Obama so much that’s he not just going to endorse him (shock, right?) he’s going to actually campaign for him next week. And not just ’cause Obama might be good for business! No, he says he’s “doing this personally.” Very possibly because he wants to be the nation’s very first Chief Technology Officer, a position Obama said he would create last year—maybe not-so-coincidentally right before he paid his first visit to Google!
After the Washington Post ran a story about how both Verizon and AT&T tripped over themselves to put up cell towers at John McCain’s Arizona ranch to patch up his crappy reception, Verizon came out huffing with remarkable speed that it “was wrong,” and they just put those towers up because the Secret Service said so and they had to, not because it was John McCain and he’s more specialerer than you. However, the Atlantic’s Joshua Green lays out why Verizon’s denial doesn’t quite add up.
Mobile reception sucks an elephant dong at John McCain’s Arizona ranch. Or it did, until Cindy McCain “embarked on an expensive public process” for Verizon Wireless to build a permanent cell tower at their ranch, reports the Washington Post. That got scrapped, but Verizon did see fit to “navigate a lengthy county regulatory process that hit a snag on environmental concerns” in order to get the McCains setup with at least a portable tower, absolutely free of charge, after a Secret Service request. AT&T caught word of this, and brought in one of their own towers, also free. Wouldn’t ya know, there’s a laundry list of ethical concerns? Update: Verizon has responded to the Post’s story, their statement below.
Tonight is the final part of the talent portion of the Mr. President 2008 pageant, which I’ve been reading is like the most important one in our lifetime or something, but I think they say about that about all of them. Regardless, if you’re stuck at your computer and can’t get to a TV, don’t worry, you don’t have to miss this momentous occasion, the final talking points battle between good and evil (which is which is up to you). Feel free to get political and talk about the debate in the comments, but be civil, or we’ll splatter your head with the Maverick Banhammer of Hope. Here’s everywhere you can watch it go down live online.
AU: Some of these won’t work for us Aussies, but some will, if you’re keen to follow who K-Rudd will be sucking up to come 2009…
If you weren’t already convinced that Obama is the candidate of choice for geeks, there’s now an entire website dedicated to preaching his tech merits to nerds everywhere. Yeah, essentially Tech for Obama is a bunch of techie talking heads—the CEOs of Craigslist and Real Networks, Googlers, former Wired editors, among others—explaining why you should vote Obama.
During the last Presidential debate, John McCain delivered this line about his opponent with withering contempt:
[Obama]voted for nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel earmark projects, including, by the way, $US3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois.
I’m already tired of hearing these guys talk, but that caught my ear. A $US3 million projector? What does that even look like? Gearlog did some digging and found out that the appropriation was requested by the planetarium to replace an awesome (but obsolete) 40-year old Zeiss Mark VI star projector with a newer model (pictured above).
Whereas a live online stream of the first presidential debate was a bit harder to pin down, our pick for tonight’s at 9PM Eastern is Hulu. Its live stream of the final two presidential debates is actually Hulu’s first ever live broadcast, which is something they might do more of following the debates. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it’ll be in HD.) But there are, of course, other options.
Our friend (and Wired editor) Nick Thompson wrote a piece in the Washington Monthly accusing John McCain for the sorry state of America’s broadband. It seems the e-mail-avoiding presidential candidate, as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, supported too much consolidation and too little oversight. The end result? “Since 2000, the United States has gone from fifth in the world to twenty-second in broadband penetration.”
Even if politics and Presidential debates bore you to the point where you need to nap like a 72-year-old, credit is still due to C-SPAN for making the whole process slightly more interesting with its ambitious Debate Hub. The social media-packed, live-blogging saturated, video clip bonanza, pulls content from a variety of sources—including YouTube, ADD microblogging tool Twitter, and C-SPAN’s spin-free video coverage—and crams it all into a clean little web page. At the conclusion of each debate, C-SPAN guarantees to have all video clips linked to the official transcript, as well as a tag cloud detailing each debate’s central themes. Dare I say it, this could be the future of covering live events. It’s liveblogging, on steroids!
Tonight at 9pm ET the first debate between John McCain and Barack Obama takes place. In the interest of keeping political discussion alive in America, here’s a link to CBS, where we know the debate will be streamed live, at least within the US. Here’s a link to NBC, which hosts much debate-related video, but doesn’t quite say outright that it’ll be streaming live. ABC also has a link to election coverage, but they don’t seem to say much about this streaming video thing at all. Watch, discuss, get excited or pissed off. If the network’s commentary is too vanilla-bean for your uppity self—or if your sorry arse is out of the country and blackballed from US video service—hit up Gawker’s liveblog of the debates. When you’ve had enough of democracy in action, come back here for your fill of Lego Millennium Falcons, boob-related iPhone apps and other timeless objets du awesome. [Gawker]
