According to Salon, some Democratic Party media flacks are wringing their hands over ads from MoveOn, the Media Fund, and others. The fear? No centralized command-and-control. Thus, they worry, Liberal group ads may muddy Kerry message:

Liberal interest groups are running television ads meant to hurt President Bush and, in effect, help Democratic rival John Kerry. But some media strategists say such efforts could backfire by muddying Kerry’s message of the moment with the electorate.

Interest groups can’t legally coordinate advertising with political campaigns. That means their ads could address different issues than Kerry’s commercials, be nastier than his advisers prefer, clutter the airwaves, stray from obvious themes — the economy and national security — or politicize issues Kerry would rather leave alone.

[N.B.: issues Kerry would rather leave alone is short for the war —Ed.]

If I were Kerry’s folks, I’d be up nights worrying about this, said Bill Carrick, a veteran Democratic media consultant.

Personally, if I were Kerry’s folks, I’d be up nights worrying about the logically prior question: doesn’t Kerry need to have a message before anyone could count as muddying it?

Besides doing the good deed of using his web space at Austro-Athenian Empire to support the GoogleBombing for objective, sane information in searches for Jew, Roderick Long also reports a facet of the site that shan’t be linked which I hadn’t noticed before. Not only is it a raving anti-Semitic conspiracy site, but it also lists the following devilries as Jewish Mind Control: anarchism, unionism, civil rights, and homosexuality. (Feminism is not explicitly listed here, but it is described elsewhere as a cultural concoction of the ADL (!)–which I guess amounts to reproach beyond any possible appeal in Nazi Bizarro World.) So by supporting the GoogleBombing you are not only striking a blow against anti-Semitism; you’re also striking a blow against its kith and kin–patriarchy, homophobia, racism, statism, and the oppression of workers.

So fie on fascism, and here’s to Jewish Mind Control!

Let’s say you pass a blind person walking down a busy sidewalk, tapping a cane in front of her. Now let’s say that someone sneaks up on her and sticks out a leg to trip her up, putting it between the cane and her legs so that it will not be detected before the unfortunate victim has fallen face-first onto a concrete sidewalk. Let’s say that you ask the assailant why the hell she indulged in such a senseless act of cruelty, and her baffled reply is, Jesus! I was just playing a practical joke. I didn’t realize that people walking down the sidewalk might not be able to see!

Unfortunately, this is not very different from how many Web designers treat the blind on a regular basis. Sites are frequently designed without any thought at all for how people who don’t have normal sight might be able to access them. I’m not saying this to be preachy; bad, inaccessible web design is a sin I’ve certainly been guilty of in the past, and one that I have to make a conscious effort to overcome. It’s not easy just to sit down and produce a website that will be accessible to people with radically different ways of browsing the web. But even when the right thing to do is hard, it’s still the right thing to do, and accessibility is something that we should all seriously think about, and act on, starting right now.

Most of the sins against accessibility on the web, though, are sins of omission; people fail to make use of web design features (such as proper semantic markup or alt text for <img> tags) that make things easier on the blind. There are, however, those who do worse than that: who indulge in sins of commission by breaking standard web features and actively making their sites unpleasant, or simply impossible to use, for people who don’t have normal sight. Sometimes they do this by implementing important sections of their website with glitzy and completely inaccessible technologies like Flash. And sometimes they do it because they think they have legitimate business reasons for trodding all over basic Web standards.

As much as I love Google, it looks like they have decided to put themselves in that latter camp with their proposed free e-mail service. Google, apparently, is worried that people might reverse-engineer their webmail interface and use it in unauthorized ways; in order to get around this they have apparently decided to override basic web conventions (such as, you know, using <a href="..."> for links) and implement the interface through scripting hacks. Mark Pilgrim discusses the astonishing number of usability landmines in his demolition-review of the Gmail interface:

Gmail is the least web-like web application I have ever seen. It requires both Javascript and cookies in order to load at all. It uses frames in such a way that prevents bookmarking and breaks the back button, and frames can not be loaded in isolation because every frame relies on scripts defined in other frames. The entire application appears to have been designed to thwart reverse engineering (of the YahooPops and Hotmail Popper variety).

Furthermore, the most innovative feature of Gmail—the global keyboard shortcuts—appears to have been designed by vi users (j moves down, k moves up, and we are expected to memorize multi-key sequences for navigation). Yet by using fake links everywhere, Gmail throws away the most basic web feature, breaks useful browser-level innovations like Mozilla’s “Find as you type”, and breaks third-party products like JAWS and WindowEyes. So the target market for Gmail appears to be vi users who use Internet Explorer, and have a working pair of eyes.

In short, the only way to use Gmail is the way that the Gmail designers use Gmail. The only way Gmail could be less accessible is if the entire site were built in Flash.

Lots of people have raised privacy concerns about Gmail (see, for example, CultureCat’s remarks on Gmail and the recent Slashdot thread); I think these concerns are understandable, and worth raising, but more than a little overblown. I’ll have more to say on that in coming days, but for now I want to say that this ought to be considered a complete show-stopper. There is no excuse for interfaces that discriminate against the blind like Gmail’s planned interface does. No-one with a conscience could allow their company to go forward with a service like this. I can only hope that Sergey Brin and his compatriots will prove that they have one–by thoroughly rethinking what they are doing, and fixing their interface so that it does not needlessly make life harder for the visually disabled.

For further reading:

• Rad Geek People’s Daily accessibility statement
• An excellent resource on accessible design is Mark Pilgrim‘s web book, Dive Into Accessibility: 30 days to a more accessible website.

At last, a bombing campaign that I can support.

As it turns out, certain anti-Semitic imbeciles have gotten their nutsoid conspiracy site (charmingly entitled JewWatch, which I shan’t link here, lest it throw off the GoogleBombing) listed as the number one site returned by a Google search for the word Jew.

But there’s a campaign afoot–just in time for Passover–and that is about to change.

Sporadic GoogleBombing sorties have been lighting up LiveJournal for a the past few days; today, Alas, A Blog is letting loose, and the campaign is spreading out through other political weblogs. It’s time for a ruthless carpet-bombing of the whole area. So, if you have a web page or weblog, and if you prefer objective, factual information about Jews to raving fascist conspiracy theorists, here is how you can help out:

1. Go to your webpage, weblog, LiveJournal, or anything else that Google can see. If you don’t have one, get one — set up a free website from Geocities, Angelfire, Pitas, BlogSpot, or wherever you like. It doesn’t matter where. Just sprinkle it with a bit of personal information (or put up that huge site you’ve always dreamed of), and remember to add the Google bombing code somewhere on your page (see below). You can help even more by helping to spread the idea further: provide a link back to this page or to the post from Alas, A Blog, or provide your own explanation of what the GoogleBomb is and how people can get involved.

2. Somewhere in the HTML on your site, include the following snippet. You can either include it in the HTML of updates themselves, or in the linkroll. The more frequently you update your site with this HTML snippet present on it, the better the results:

   <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew" title="WikiPedia: Jew">Jew</a>

   Which will result in a link like this:

   Jew

3. Add the URI for your website to Google if you haven’t already.

And from there, watch the magic of precision GoogleBombing work!

Onwards!

–The Management

P.S. You may notice that I have added a Precision Bombing section to the linkroll for all my pages; this drastically boosts the number of pages supporting the GoogleBomb, and also ensures that the support won’t drop when my initial post scrolls down past the bottom of the front page.

Thanks to our War President, equating political dissent with an act of treason has become something of a national pastime in Republistan. Tom Tomorrow has already commented on this phenomenon in connection with televised sociopath Ann Coulter, but while Coulter is certainly a dangerous lunatic there is at least this one point in her favor: a significant part of her book is devoted to documenting what she takes to be overt acts of war, and material assistance to the enemies of the United States (especially the Soviet Union). Of course, her case is based mainly on distortions, fabrications, and nonsense; but it still puts her a step above the foot-soldiers of tyranny who simply drag out the language of “aid and comfort to the enemy” explicitly and directly on the basis of nothing more than peaceful dissent from the President’s war policy.

Consider, for example, a fellow named Dan Kuykendall, who (during my time in the Auburn Peace Project) decided that it would be best to notify the Opelika-Auburn News that rallies opposing the war on Iraq give aid and comfort to the enemy, and mused that Isn’t the definition of treason giving aid and comfort to the enemy? Since then, the rhetorical tactics haven’t changed much; consider this contribution to Blockheads for Bush, commenting on Ted Kennedy’s recent missives against Mr. Bush’s war:

Let us be clear about this – there are legitimate criticisms to be made about the liberation of Iraq; about whether or not we should have gone in, and about the manner in which we went in, and about how we have performed since we went in; there are, however, no legitimate criticisms to be raised about the reason we went in, nor can there be any legitimate point for an American to make other than that we should be doing more to win this fight. To criticise the reasons we went in and/or to do anything which indicates an unwillingness to see this thing through to final victory is the statement of a fool, or a traitor. No two ways about it.

We’ve given the left a pass long enough – its [sic] time for those who are of leftwing opinion to make their final call: which side of the river are you on? If you’re on America’s side, then you want total and overwhelming US victory – and just to really spell it out; this means that our enemies are dead or begging for mercy. I challenge you – choose, and let you be known for what you are by what you choose – patriot, or traitor.

(Subsequent comments make it clear that most of the Bush League takes the traitor horn of the dilemma. Some offer the charitable suggestion that Ted Kennedy might be both stupid, and a traitor.)

I sent a letter to the editor of the Opelika-Auburn News in reply to Mr. Kuykendall back in April 2003; since the underlying rhetoric hasn’t changed any in the ensuing year, the reply was a useful template for my comment on the BfB article:

Treason is a federal crime, defined in Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which says Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court. Apparently at least some of the commentators on this weblog have read the passage, as they refer to the aid and comfort language. Unfortunately, it seems that they have also failed to read Amendment I, which reads Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The Founders did their best to make very sure that the Constitution prevented the government from using charges of Treason to suppress peaceful dissent. That is why the language of the article clearly states that the law of treason to be invoked only for overt acts with the intent to wage war on the United States, or to provide concrete, material assistance to those who do.

If anyone has evidence that Ted Kennedy has committed such a serious federal crime, they should contact the FBI field office in Boston at (617) 742-5533. Otherwise, baseless insinuations against Mr. Kennedy, for nothing more than disagreeing with George W. Bush’s foreign policy, amounts to little more than a shameful proposal for tyranny. You have every right to agree or disagree with Mr. Kennedy’s policy; you have no right to make such scurrilous attacks against fellow citizens on the basis of mere political disagreement.

Posted by: Rad Geek at April 10, 2004 11:51 AM

The comment has been posted directly on the Blockheads for Bush article; we’ll see how long it remains in their echo chamber as it was posted.