Democracy, Republican Style
Apr 19th, 2007 at 10:24 am by Susie
WASHINGTON - For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.
The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush’s popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.
Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.
Questions about the administration’s campaign against alleged voter fraud have helped fuel the political tempest over the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys, several of whom were ousted in part because they failed to bring voter fraud cases important to Republican politicians. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales could shed more light on the reasons for those firings when he appears Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
They really don’t think anyone should have a say in anything - except the people who agree with them.
Senate committee postpones Gonzales hearing…
The Senate Judiciary Committee postponed Tuesday’s questioning of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales …
What is unpartisan.com?
Unpartisan.com is a political site that blends news, discussion, and commentary from all over the internet. There are thousands of political weblogs all over the internet comprising two distinct political spheres. Unfortunately, it is extremely rare that these spheres ever intersect or even meet. It is our mission here at unpartisan.com not to get everyone together at the table to discuss our differences and reach a compromise, but to at least offer a forum where each side can at least see what the other has to say. At this site we do not censor, but we certainly encourage intelligent discussion over flamewars or yelling matches. We aren’t sure if any of the links will change anyone’s mind or their political views, but maybe that’s not the point.
How does unpartisan.com work? How are stories chosen?
Unpartisan.com relies entirely on RSS feeds to select stories. Stories are aggregated and the most popular political stories are chosen from those feeds. Unpartisan.com relies on dozens of news feeds to choose its stories, and hundreds of blogs to choose relevant discussions pertaining to that issue. There are no human editors at this site, and every story, every blog posting, is chosen by a complex computer algorithm which we are refining every day. Sometimes the wrong stories are chosen or a blog feed is placed in the wrong category. Please bear with us while the site is in beta mode.
What is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a method for distributing news and blog content (mostly) in XML format. Unpartisan.com grabs from hundreds of RSS feeds and sorts out the most relevant stories in the world of news and in the blog world. For more information about RSS, check out Wikipedia.
Unpartisan.com is totally biased to the left/right.
No human editors means that there is no inherent bias in which stories are chosen. There are an equal number of conservative and liberal blogs referenced on this site. The computer code is constantly being refined to eliminate any bias that may arise.
There was a news story up on the front page that had nothing whatsoever to do with politics?
What can I say? The sorting algorithm is based on the popularity of words and phrases sorted from dozens of separate news feeds and hundreds of stories. Sometimes it’s a slow news day and all the major news organizations have is incredibly useless and irrelevant human-interest fodder. I hate it as much as you do. Sometimes news organizations just have to publish news no matter how incredibly un-newsworthy their stories are. This is why CNN and Fox News often devote hours to the story of an incredible dog who traveled 2000 miles to be reunited with his family, god bless him. Sappy and warm, most certainly. Newsworthy? For the love of god, no.
I saw a link to a news article/blog posting that wasn’t related to the headline. What’s going on?
Unpartisan.com has no human editors. It is entirely run by a computer program which scans dozens of news sources and hundreds of blog feeds. Sometimes errors are made, like when a person writes a blog posting about their cats, one of which who happens to be named George Bush and the other Tony Blair. Meanwhile, their posting shows up associated with a story about a presidential trip to Europe. The program is being constantly refined to eliminate false positives and false negatives.
How can I get my blog on unpartisan.com?
Right now while we’re in beta stage there is no form to automatically add your blog to Unpartisan.com. But don’t worry, the feature is coming soon. In the meantime, we’ve chosen several hundred of the most popular liberal and conservative blogs currently on the interent, sorted by number of posts, frequency of posts, google pagerank, and of course, ability to syndicate their content. Once this feature becomes active and you wish to contribute, make sure first that your blog focuses on politics and national news, is relevant and topical, and keeps the entries about your cats to a minimum. For now, make your voice heard by posting comments to individual stories. That helps a lot in getting this site going.
You have my blog listed as being in the liberal/conservative side, but I’m not liberal/conservative! I’m conservative/liberal/moderate/apolitical/ultraneoconservative/libertarian!
Much like the way news stories and blog postings are chosen, blogs listed on this site are chosen by a number of criteria and are categorized by a computer algorithm. This algorithm takes into account the criteria described above in determining which blogs should be listed in order to ensure that only the most popular and relevant blogs are polled. The categorization of blogs is determined by which types of blogs link to you and who you link to. If the majority of sites that link to you are known to be conservative and the majority of the sites you link to are known to be conservative, you get lumped in with the conservative blogs. This tends to work close to 98% of the time, and saves me the time of analyzing every single blog that is listed here. If you were miscategorized, please let me know through the feedback form and I’ll be happy to fix it immediately.
This site violates my copyright. I don’t want my news site/blog listed. Take it down or I’ll send you a Cease & Desist letter.
Despite the fact that this site will most likely increase traffic to your site, we will be more than happy to remove your site listing from our site. Please submit a site removal request through our feedback page.
Stop abusing my trackback system.
Unpartisan tracks political blog feeds. When the scanning robot detects a post that contains a trackback link, it sends a trackback ping to that blog to let it know that it has been listed on Unpartisan.com. Now, some may think that this is an abuse of the trackback system, which was designed exactly for this purpose. And, of course, if you feel this way, we will be more than happy to unlist your blog. Right now, there is no way to deactivate trackback pings for certain blogs while leaving them for others. But think of it this way: trackbacks serve three very important purposes in this case. 1) They inform you that your blog is being listed somewhere (isn’t it nice to be quoted somewhere?); 2) They allow your readers to investigate other related blog postings about the topic which you are discussing; 3) They increase traffic to Unpartisan.com, which increases interaction between the left and right (and seeing Democrats and Republicans come together in harmony is a beautiful thing, isn’t it?).
I was offended by something I saw on unpartisan.com. I demand that you do something about it.
I would love to, but it seems you need a babysitter more than a moderator. Political, ahem, “discourse” in this country can often get heated and offensive unfortunately. That’s just the way things are. I’ve always been of the opinion, though, that an intelligent argument beats a belligerant argument any day. Keep the tone of your postings intelligent and intelligent responses will follow.
Who are you?
My name is Cameron Brooks and I’m a PHP programmer in Santa Barbara. I majored in Political Science at UCSB and always wanted to do something creative combining computer science and political science.