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PATH: BS | Business | PACs
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Israel Goes High Tech With Online Astroturfing
Posted by Pile
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 Do you ever wonder how such a small minority has so much power online and in the media? Here's one reason:
The Megaphone desktop tool is a Windows "action alert" tool developed by give Israel the appearance of large scale online support. The tool is distributed by the World Union of Jewish Students, World Jewish Congress, The Jewish Agency for Israel, World Zionist Organization, StandWithUs, Hasbara fellowships, HonestReporting, and other pro-Israel public relations, media watchdog, or activism organizations. The tool delivers real-time alerts about key articles, videos, blogs, and surveys related to Israel or the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially those perceived by GIYUS (which stands for Give Israel Your United Support) to be highly critical of Israel, so that users can vote or add comments expressing their support of Israel.
The Megaphone Desktop Tool gives the user the option of going to a particular site with a poll, and if the user chooses to go to the site, the software then casts a vote automatically, when this is technically feasible. The vote is chosen automatically by the distributors of Megaphone. |
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Media Spawns More PACs in Sheep's Clothing
Posted by Pile
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| Common Cause has produced a report, titled "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing," which describes some of the astroturf front groups that have been created by the cable, telephone and internet industry to lobby for legislation favorable to corporate interests. Groups such as Consumers for Cable Choice, FreedomWorks, the Progress and Freedom Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, New Millennium Research Council, Frontiers of Freedom, Keep It Local NJ, Internet Innovation Alliance and MyWireless.org "accept subsidies or grants from corporate interests to lobby or produce research when they normally might not, but too often fail to disclose the connection between their policy positions and their bank accounts. ... These sorts of campaigns are dangerous for our democracy. They deliberately mislead citizens, and they deliberately mislead our lawmakers, who are already charged with the difficult task of making sense of complex telecommunications policies." |
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Bumper Sticker Store
In Robert Greenwald's new film, The Koch Brothers Exposed, he examines the pervasive influence of David and Charles Koch on the American fabric of life. It covers areas as diverse as their impact on community school boards, colleges, the environment, voting rights, and think tanks. Greenwald began the film before the Occupy Wall Street movement exploded. He was eight months into conducting his own research and filming when he saw how the 1 percent was using their financial resources to promulgate their specific ideologies and economic interests.
In his weekly address, President Obama discusses the Republican Power Grab - this is an important, short video worth watching that will shed light on the coming mayhem of the mid-term elections.
The National Tea Party Convention, an event I'm sure many readers have already gotten tickets for, has run into a couple of snags. Fortunately there's one big-haired semi-pro ex-governor who's going to pull it out of its doldrums.
Yea, they seem like nice people, right? They keep the lawn mowed and he let you borrow a sander last year... that was nice of him, but did you know they donated $6000 to Rudy Giuliani's campaign and $2000 to George W. Bush? A clever new system featured at Huffington Post integrates political donor records with Google's map system, giving you the ability to find out who's giving to what parties and political candidates in your area, and also tell you a little something-something about your neighbors and neighborhood businesses.
Florida evangelist Bill Keller says he was making a spiritual, not political, statement when he warned the 2.4 million subscribers to his Internet prayer ministry that "if you vote for Mitt Romney, you are voting for Satan!"
Pastor John Hagee writes in his book, "Jerusalem Countdown: A Prelude To war" that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves by rebelling against God and that the Holocaust was God's way of forcing Jews to move to Israel where, Hagee predicts according to his interpretation of Biblical scripture, they will be mostly killed in the apocalyptic Mideast conflict Hagee's new lobbying group seems to be working to provoke and which John Hagee believes to be a necessary precondition for the "Rapture" that will lift Christians, but not Jews, bodily into Heaven to enjoy physical immortality in paradise.
A tiny little movie making fun of Al Gore, supposedly made by an amateur filmmaker, recently appeared on the popular Web site YouTube.com.
