Nate Knows Nada

You’ve probably seen these by now, but here’s the winners and finalists for MoveOn’s planned ad campaign during the RNC.

Note the resemblance to Apple’s “Switch” campaign.

The Times does its usual workman job on filling in the details.  Also included is this very interesting graphic of the connections between the organization and the Bush world.

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Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe rails on John O’Neill on the News Hour:

Again, the credibility problem, which is what keeps this thing
in the tabloids primarily and on cable television where there are different
standards.

Almost conclusive doesn’t cut it in the world’s parts of journalism
where I live, John. You have a burden here. And almost conclusive is
nowhere near what I’m looking for.

There are eyewitness accounts actually on all sides of this story.
The closer you get to Kerry, the more one-sided in favor of Kerry these
accounts tend to be.

There is a problem that one of your people, this Mr. Thurlow, has made
an allegation about there being no combat fire coming that day that
is contradicted by the citation of his own Bronze Star.

Now, you can then say, well, that was all made up and that Kerry lied
and produced that, for which you provide no evidence.

And we keep going in this endless cycle of, see, I put this out there,
I made this accusation, I made this charge, but held to a higher standard,
I’m not saying your… that this didn’t happen or that something did
happen, I’m saying that you haven’t come within a country mile of meeting
first-grade journalistic standards for accuracy.

Jon Stewart skewers the whole thing better than any mainstream reporter.

Last shorty item for the day.

The power of statistical aggregation and estimation.  Find the value of pi by tossing baguettes out the window.

You can try to win the election yourself.

Somebody please get this for me!

If you’re trying to read this, you should know that the damn Harvard
Weblogs server was out again for about 12 hours today.  It affected all of us.

Here’s what I wrote earlier today on our e-mail group:

Here’s what I know, from people at Berkman itself.

There are
simply not enough tech resources to maintain adequately theHarvard
Weblogs server. The tech people (one on-site, one remote[Kentucky, I
think]) there have so much to do maintaining the computer stuff for
staff that they can only just keep the blog server running.

Judge
for yourself what you think of the explanation. I am simply the
messenger. But you should hope that what happened at www.weblogs.com
does not happen to us. (Read this for more detail on what happened
there: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/002739.html)