Will the Republicans ever learn?

This video (.ram download) is of a commercial aired by the Republican Club for Growth.

No sooner has it aired than Dean slaps a fundraising request on his website and the money rolls in to respond. He'll get another $200000 and get to air an advert directly refuting these points. Its exactly what happened a few months ago when the Bush campaign ran attack ads elsewhere in America.

Someone somewhere needs to slap them with a big cluebyfour.

On the other hand someone should slap Dean with a big cluebyfour about his trade policy. Hes right to talk about the need for fair trade not free trade, but the whole steel tarriffs issue was a non-starter. Not only did the economist suggest that they were doing about four times more damage to the US economy than good, but they're naked protectionism of a very bad kind indeed.

Raising the bar

Sigh, its tough this freelancing business. Like in every business you've got to have an angle, and like every business some old pros have got the best ones stitched up. Take my old boss Steve Johnston, he's decided to freelance some dough while he waits for his new business - which is about supplying posters of cars and other things to hang on your walls - to take off.

I mention this because Steve's angle is that he's a 'google consultant'. So he knows why I've linked the words I have.

(course he also knows I'm currently PR 0, must do something about that...)

Not given a different job

Sigh, not only did one employer not want to interview me, but when I wrote attempting to change their mind they complained to the recruitment agency. Chief complaint - how had I got the email address?

Anyone who runs an online company - as this one was - has got to consider their email address common property. I've been lucky enough to meet the heads of some big internet companies, a couple of billionairres, founders of hot silicon valley start ups and world class design agencies. The one consistent thing is their email address. Its always either

firstname.lastname@company.com

or

firstname@company.com

They're switched on enough to know that being contactable is not a bad thing, that email addresses are best when they're simple and that talking is good. I suspect that despite all impressions I previously had to the contrary, this was not a company I wanted to work for.

Once given the job...

If I become Internet Deployment and Communication manager for Philips my first act will be to have the job application tool rebuilt. It's awful. I have just sent in an application after following a link in a job description to 'apply online'.

Having filled in a form I have now been told that 'should they find any matching vacancies' they'll get in touch. In otherwords I have just spent an *hour* (no helpful .doc upload here) pissing about with the formatting of a html document in word (and word is not an HTML editor anyone with a brain would choose to use) only to be told that I might have to do it again.

I am off to find an email address and cause problems. Likely to be more effective than chancing everything to this system again.

Update It did infact work, it just gave me a message at the end of the process telling me it failed. Which is about as poorly as one can design a user interface.

Numbers go all fuzzy

Yesterday *every* news channel (and I have many to choose from) was dominated by the news that US soldiers had killed 54 attackers following an ambush. Around 8PM a story emerged that Iraqi police could only confirm 8 dead including one definite civilian. That story is now something of a footnote to the main news.

This report is interesting. The figure of 54 was based on soldiers reporting casulaties they saw / caused. The figure of 8 is based on counting bodies. That's not to say the idea that some bodies were removed is ridiculous, but 46 bodies? Surely there'd be blood, not to mention bits.

This is like Vietnam reporting, when any firefight was reported as a victory and troops regularly made up casualty numbers after battles. This is important. Yesterday we were told that 54 dead attackers represented 'the heaviest fighting since the end of the war', the kind of event that could impact on policy decisions. 8 dead might not have that kind of influence, but no-one seems to know for sure and the figure of 54 is in the public consicousness. It is at this point and many others like it that policy and reality start to diverge.

Wonderful weekend

I'll write more about this when I get the chance. Spent the weekend on Texel (pronounced Tessel), an island of the north coast of the Netherlands. There were seals, and bicycles, but sadly not at the same time.

Liberty closed!

I had no idea that the Statue of Liberty had been closed to the public for security reasons. Here's a link to a campaign to reopen Liberty. She's my favourite gal in all of New York, and its a terrible shame she's been locked away.

On a slightly more serious note the muesum and other bits and bobs inside the statue are fantastic, and seeing her from the ferry just isn't the same as looking up from Liberty Island.