The Former Guy
I’m glad to tell you that his fundraising is down.
He raised less than $50 million, which looks especially weak compared to a senate race raising $25 million – yeah, Beto.
And in other good news for our side: Republican FEC commissioners tried to ram through an advisory opinion with little to no public comment that would allow Google to launch a pilot program to have political e-mails bypass the Gmail spam filter.
The public isn’t having it. The FEC released 1000 new comments about it. You can read them —
Way to go, Americans! If you want to read unsolicited emails from politicians you’ve never heard of, go look at your spam filter and leave me alone.
The amount of money raised is not the problem or the solution. The st00pid are voting rePUKEian and they out number the rest of us.
1In Hawaii we have strict laws governing the number and size of signs for advertising. No billboards. Even McDonalds has to modify the size of their golden arches to conform.
Except politcal signs. During elections hundreds of supporters will line the highways with campaign signs, waving and jesturing “shaka.” Lawn signs border on lawn billboards.
I don’t particularly care for the clutter, but the silver lining is you rarely see Republican placards, maybe wo or three for Trump in my neighborhood in the last election.
2When I email my Senators, I always check the box that I want no response – really what could Cornyn/Cruz have to say that I want to read. I always get a stupid response which makes me angrier than when I emailed originally!
3I’ve sent a few emails to congress critters and local politicians over the years when they said or did something most people would agree is stupid and/or obnoxious. My phrasing would be cordial and business like. I didn’t say what they did was stupid or obnoxious, just not what the majority of citizens would agree with or need from them. I’ve never heard back from any of the critters even when I asked for an explanation. That would take some effort on their part, so of course no response received.
4I get canned responses from my (R) senators, usually a long time after it would make any difference anyway. Just click and send and means nothing.
The political email I find annoying is when I contribute to someone through Act Blue, never checking the box to be added to the mailing list, and within days…if not in a day…I’m getting emails from the campaign asking for more money. They end up marked spam anyway.
I think Google would lose a lot of us if they pulled that and agreed to what the right wingers wanted.
5For those who have not yet checked: the three links JJ posted go to PDF files, which (mostly?) have one email per page. I have only downloaded two of them, but a 30 minute spot check seems to show they do not have the usual “form letter spammed out by bots on the web” look. [This is anecdotal examination, not something a reputable researcher would cite].
Unlike the “overwhelming opposition” Ajit Pai (Trump’s FCC drone) claimed for the opposition to net neutrality. Which after many complaints and much legal fighting turned out to be mostly bots coming from Serbia, Russia, and other notably non-US locations.
So both common sense and a swift perusal suggests that these are really people unhappy about Google’s action. I don’t use gmail; I have my university edu email (strictly for business), and protonmail.com (which is free and based in Switzerland), plus a few others. I recommend protonmail, enough to where I actually shifted to a paid account to send a few spondulicks their way. Plus it allows encryption between people who have accounts on it. In case we want to say something really nasty about Alex Jones, but don’t want whoever wins in 2024 to be able to read it.
6The Surly Professor @6, I’ve used ProtonMail for almost a decade [and rec’d it for years], since it was an ‘invitation-only’ beta. You can send encrypted to people without PM, just have to give them the key via ‘other means’ [backchannel]; also can send self-destructing timed emails, which is neat.
Also use ProtonVPN, and ProtonDrive to store your stuff [encrypted] without the Google rifling through it.
The only way to protect your online stuff today, along with a few secure and trusted browsers and SEs [y’all really rly don’t want to be using the Goog stuff, like Chrome].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail
The leading nonprofit defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation:
eff.org
Gotta maintain one gmail for the Android stuff though, while rarely used for actual emailing [except for incoming spam].
.
7As far as ActBlue, I still donate, but damn, do they pass around your email and phone number.. So that you’re flooded by campaign spam and calls from politicians all over the country, even obscure positions you have no connection to whatsoever. Damn, I have limited funds for Dem political giving, gotta pick and choose carefully.
@AK Lynne and @Sandridge: Re: Act Blue, I heartily agree! I honestly don’t give to Dems that much anymore because of them. They sell your email like a cheap whore on the waterfront. Unsubscribing to everything is a pain. They used to give you an option to unsubscribe from everything Act Blue, but that’s been missing for at least a year now.
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