Monthly Archives: June 2012

Update on Florida Senate Race

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With the republican primary looking like it will go to Connie Mack IV, I thought it would be nice to check in on how the candidates are doing on Twitter:

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Connie Mack’s Twitter activity is like Tigger: bouncy bouncy bouncy.  Endorsements keep rolling in for him, and his focus has to be shifting to the general election.  But there’s still not a lot of mentions of Bill Nelson in tweets about Mack, so November is not yet on the public’s radar.

McCalister, on the other hand, has flatlined.  I actually panicked for a moment thinking I must have missed his pulling out of the campaign.  But no, he’s still there. Twitter was never his thing, to be fair.

George LeMieux is still around, but he too almost lost his pulse on Twitter until the Florida Federation of Young Republicans annual conference produced a surge of activity.  Now days, I think his name is mostly mentioned in the context of Charlie Crist and the Jim Greer trial.  George is stuck with Charlie like some sort of bad buddy movie.

But all’s not well on Twitter for Mack … there’s a shadow trailing him, keeping up but keeping his distance.  That shadow is Bill Nelson, waiting for the general election cycle to get under way…  Let’s see what happens with him towards the end of August.

The Ups and Downs of Anti-Obama Hashtags

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When the President said the private sector was doing fine1, it set off a storm of criticism from his political opponents.  And that storm spilled onto Twitter as well. These storms come like summer rain here in Florida: the sky clouds over, there’s lightning, thunder, and rain, and then the clouds part and the blue sky returns.

When you look at how two storms washed through Twitter — the #Julia infographic response and the #Doing[Just]Fine comment, we can see how brief these storms are:

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Typically, within a week virtually all the excitement is spent, and within two weeks it has drifted into the background.  On that schedule, by June 22nd the Doing Fine remark will be forgotten in favor the next excitement to come along.

Footnote:

  1. Seems like both candidates are starting to show wear already — Obama’s making gaffes while Romney is forgetting what doughnuts are called.  This is going to be a very long campaign for the two of them.

Marissa Alexander fades from view on Twitter

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Marissa's Prison Photo

Florida’s stand-your-ground (SYG) law was under scrutiny this week as the Governor’s task force held its first meeting on Tuesday.

The prosecutor at the heart of two of the most visible SYG cases, Angela Corey, had an  interview published yesterday in which she talks a bit about the Marissa Alexander case.  As you recall, Alexander tried to assert a stand-your-ground defense in firing a warning shot, but was convicted nonetheless and sentenced to 20 years in prison.  There’s nothing new, really, in the interview, as Corey repeats what she’s said before about Alexander and declined to talk about her other high profile case, George Zimmerman.  For Angela Corey, the Alexander case is done and over with and there is no reason to reconsider its outcome.

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The one paragraph that proves Rick Scott is BSing the DOJ

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I am not a lawyer, and so when I looked at the competing letters from the Florida Department of State and the Federal Department of Justice about the voter purge, I thought that, well, it doesn’t look like the law is on the side of Florida — but since our legal code is written in lawyerese and not plain English, I couldn’t be sure what the definition of “is” is in this case.

However, I am a computer systems architect.  I work with the largest of corporations on issues of managing their customer data, and the problem of reconciling two lists of customers is a frequent challenge my customers have.

And that is exactly the same problem Rick Scott wants to solve: he wants to match up his list of Florida voters with the list of aliens in the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE database.  Matches would theoretically allow him to identify non-citizens who are registered to vote.  Rick Scott points out, correctly as far as I can tell (again, I am not a lawyer), that the law permits Florida to gain access to the database for any lawful purpose.  And then he chides the DHS for not fulfilling what he perceives to be their obligations under law.

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The real winner of the Wisconsin recall: Walker? Romney? How about Ed Schultz!

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The failed Wisconsin recall a week ago (6/5) generated a lot of conventional wisdom: Scott Walker renewed his mandate, the unions lost, and a new dynamic was introduced into the presidential campaign that helped the Romney campaign.  And from a media perspective, Fox News was crowned the winner while MSNBC and, in particular, Ed Schultz were the grieving losers.

The mood around MSNBC that night and the next day bore witness to the disappointment of the MSNBC hosts. Pundits — conservative and liberal — mocked MSNBC’s seemingly all-in bet on the recall.

Despite their disappointment being palpable, it does not mean that MSNBC “lost”.   MSNBC is not in the business of getting democrats elected (as much as it may seem to be the case); MSNBC is in the business of selling its viewers to advertisers. When you look at it from the perspective of ratings and social media, the night becomes a win for Ed Schultz.

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