The US was going to withdraw troops from Iraq in time for the midterm elections. Sounds like a great ploy to increase political capital for those supporting the war.

Well, they canned that idea.

Another example of a never-ending war.

Is there enough room for a memorial for the Iraq war on the national mall?

Actually. Lets go forward with this. I really haven’t talked about my view about Iraq yet.

I originally found the war amusing. The army going through, the bombs over Baghdad (good, overplayed, song by Outkast.) I have no idea why, and I am ashamed of it, but that type of stuff is just “cool.” Until you look at what it is actually doing. Each bomb is killing somebody (hopefully not, that is what bomb shelters are for) and in retrospect I feel very bad about it.

Now I see I was just plain wrong. I thought it was going to be a quick sweep through. Get him out of power, and get out of there for the country to figure itself out. Which is probably what we should have done. No “instilling democracy” bullshit, just get the dictator out and let the rest figure itself out.

Of course, that was the same thinking everybody had. Rush in, rush out. Well, life doesn’t work that way.

Now I see that I was wrong, that it involves more. But our army isn’t a global police force. It wasn’t designed for that.

So I guess I am confused. Leave 30k troops there to secure Baghdad and bring the other 100k home.

Doyle’s Campaign Website is a joke. Let me elaborate.

Most important problem with this campaign’s website (and just in general) is the campaign logo. Doyle Lawton has the worst logo in the history of man. Let me explain what I think the logo team thought:

Let’s do an italic Doyle, then a smaller italic Lawton, put dark blue on the top and dark red on the bottom. Shows that Doyle is a man and Lawton is a woman. But it’s dark, so that means they are strong… Oh, and lets make it a square, forget about the fact that everybody has rectangle yard sign sticks at home. Italic text just wouldn’t stretch that far. We are going to make it so square that we can’t put any cool graphic, like Wisconsin! And lets forget it is a sign for a governor! We will just say their names and since he is never in the Journal Sentinel absofuckinglutely nobody will know what the hell they are voting for! “Doyle Lawton! I’m supporting Doyle Lawton for… whateverthefuck Mr. Doyle Lawton is running for…. You go for it Doyle!” I couldn’t think of any other candidate who has a logo and yard signs that really excites me and lets me know what is going on. Absolutely no other candidate. Nobody.

Doyle Team: Did you design your logo with MS Word? Because this only took 3 seconds:

I was going to put it in photoshop and make it look exactly the same, but it is 2AM and I have to get some sleep.

Anyways, let’s go on to their website.

Lets look at the header.

In the top left we see the logo previously mentioned. Only it is HUGE. What the hell?

Then we have some pictures of the candidates. They have halos around them because they took just about the worst pictures you could possibly put in photoshop…

wait! I’ve seen that picture of Doyle before!

Do a quick Google image search and we see that it is his portrait.

Lets go to his state-hosted online biography. Well, there ya go. The state is hosting the same portrat. In fact, the image you see directly above is hosted by the State of Wisconsin’s Servers.

If you have read my blog in the past you will have noticed that I got a press pass. Part of this meant that I got a nice press-kit. It comes with two glossy photos. The one above and… wow… a picture of the Lt. Governor that is exactly the same as the one I have. Only it is on a much lighter background, so obviously it will not work well on a dark header. Thus the halo.

What else is on top. The Home Page | Search | Site Map | Contact links are effective. If the middle two worked, of course. Site Maps are rarely on webpages now, they were created when people had very little bandwidth. Nowadays, it really isn’t required, and having it in the top right is just… annoying. Your site should be simple enough that you don’t need one. As for search, put a search box so you can enter what you want on the main page. Google Site Search should handle your needs for free.

Lets go down the front page.

I see his entire agenda on the front page. Can’t see what is going on in any of the pictures…

I don’t see any news about how the race is going, but his pictures the size of bullet points are great.

OH WAIT! I found the news! All the way on the bottom! A lot of people are going to scroll down to see your campaign news!

Bullshit. Nobody does. Do some research. Hell, I didn’t even notice it until now. I thought there wasn’t any.

They have some cool blogs I guess. Wait, no. Just press releases. No cool 1st person “Doyle went out today and I took some pictures and the event was really great, Doyle met a lot of people and there were even some dairy farmers that gave him some cheese and there were creme puffs. They were tasty… Governor Doyle is so cool… it was a fun day… etc. etc. he said that he wants Cows to start voting Democratic, that the Democrats were better for cows… it was really funny and everybody laughed…”

If it looked like that, people would actually read it! And probably comment. Those crazy cows.

And while we are at it, lets go over the color scheme. It is just too damn dark. Dark pages are for porn sites, not Gubernatorial campaigns (someone said that to me before, specifically mentioned gubernatorial campaigns too.)

Let me show you a page that has great use of lighter (see: white) colors. Fair Wisconsin. See: All of the data is positioned just right, with their content easy to access without scrolling down. The pictures are easily seen and the page is not crowded at all. I can still access all of the information I need with a click. The lighter colors allows more space between parts of the front page, and there are still pictures and news. Their positions are easy to access and, once you click on them, you get more options related to the item you clicked on. So you can read that page and go to more pages, all reasonably short, that give you the specific information you want. Fair Wisconsin’s site is small, but their design is scalable.

And their Blog is Beautiful. It has personal stories, big pictures that fit, and information about what they are doing from a personal standpoint. There are no press releases there, it is down to earth human emotion in those blog entries. I read it regularly, because the quality of the stories really draws me to it.

Mark Green’s site isn’t much better, although it is readable. Stop with the tabs on top, and if you do crappy grey scrolldowns like Green you are copping out.

Simple. Keep it simple.

And use valid html/xhtml. And if you run your site through The Bobby Accessibility Checker and find a single problem with Accessibility Priority 1 go back and redo the entire thing until it checks out. If you are a governor’s website, you need it to be accessible too people with disabilities. At least the Priority 1 items. Using compliant code should remove all priority 1 and should help people with disabilities navigate your site.

Now you can come back to me and say that my site sucks. It does. It uses an overused default page with crappy random headers (at least as of this writing.) It doesn’t validate at all. Most of the content is trivial. But I am not running a major campaign website.

Fix yours or you will loose votes.

Actually, screw that, fire whoever did the last one and get a new site. And for christ’s sake, get a new logo. Have a wider logo. Do you really need to have Lawton on the banner? If people are going to vote for Doyle, they are going to vote for Lawton. It is pricy to redo, but it is early enough that general public won’t notice. Recycle the ones you have now, and give me a few so I can patch up this hole I have in the basement.

I hope Mr. Doyle Lawton wins.

If you need help or opinions, email me

For the Doyle campaign: If I get some vibe that you want me to shut up and tell your field staff to never contact me or have your field staff disown me. Fine. You lost a good volunteer who cares. I’m not removing this, so don’t ask. I stand by every word.

Also, if I worked for a campaign, I would never do this without the campaign’s approval. Would probably keep you in the loop about your own website, just so you know.

Lets talk about the constitutional amendment that would ban Gay Marriage and Civil Unions in Wisconsin. There was this buzz in the air at the convention that the state constitutional amendment could threaten private businesses and their ability to provide benefits as they choose to their employees. AKA making it impossible for a company to provide full coverage for unmarried couples of the same sex. The people I talked to may be wrong or have false information, but it sounds logical.

So… A constitutional amendment that prevents tax-paying private businesses from offering a private non-government-overseen non-legally-required benefits package(s) that it feels is most appropriate for it’s organization and it’s goals. Goals like making money to grow it’s business. Here in Wisconsin. What if a company wants to offer that package and feels it is necessary to continue it’s business? What if and organization is based in another state and are looking at coming to Wisconsin? Even if you fucking hate the idea of two men kissing, (and yet “your neighbors” rent all of the girl-on-girl dvds in the back of the video store) this amendment (assuming people are correct) is anti-business in Wisconsin.

What the fuck?

And while we are on the topic: Why the fuck is the government involved in the union of people anyways? Let other people define marriage, unions, etc. Catholics define it as one thing, Lutherans another. The two religions never got along in the first place…

Ahh yes, Saturday of the Convention. It is a rather boring day, all you have is some breakfasts in the AM (sponsored by Herb Kohl, nice guy in person) and a few other people (Teachers Union had a private one, so did labor unions, and in the middle was a congressperson.)

I decided against blogging about it. Rather I was just going to sit at the College Democrats table selling I (heart) Birth Control t-shirts for $18. I had my laptop there so I spent a lot of time surfing the web, trying to fight off how tired I was. Eventually if you stay up long enough adrenaline kicks in and you aren’t tired anymore. Well, and my run to the store (well, it involved about a mile of walking, me running across La Crosse would be a sad sight) for 3 RedBulls was useful.

So I didn’t see much. I went in for Bryan Kennedy’s wonderfully written speech. “Now Sensenbrenner is in the district every weekend. He sees me in his rear-view-mirror but what he forgets to read is the text that says ‘Objects in mirror are closer than they appear’” Bryan is the Democrat running against my congressperson, the beautiful Jim Sensenbrenner.

The other thing I went out was to watch Mike Tate. He is working for FairWisconsin, a group who is trying to defeat the referendum that advises the legislature if there should be a ratifies the proposed State Constitutional Amendment to prevent Gay Marriage, Civil Unions, and possibly prevent ANY EMPLOYER IN THE STATE the ability to provide domestic partnership opportunities. Of course the place was almost empty and all the college dems and some other people who knew him were brought in to cheer him on from the back of the place. I guess the spattering of 100 or so people in the audience lightly clapped. Was like the Attorney General Candidate Kathleen Falk, where all the young people yell… but this time it was like MAX 30 people. Don’t mistake anything, I was there cheering on… who knows, he could get me a job in politics some day. Or so this Democratic Party Leadership Institute binder says. All I have is “network” and “intern.” I have networked with a lot of important people and I have some people guiding me in this process. And I did a lot of free work for Kerry and organized a large amount of high school students I helped get on the sidewalk or on the phones. Plus people know about my school board run. So people know about me. Not necessarily GOOD THINGS about me (but… but… I was in high school… I’m better now…) *rolls eyes*

It was basically just the morning when everything went on. And nobody was there, most of the candidates/officials that people wanted to see were on Friday night, making Saturday morning rather pointless.

I tried to get into a fundraiser lunch but it filled up too quick, so after having a confused loop about me I was told that there would be pizza given to the staff back at the convention center. Of course I didn’t have a staff badge (probably could have swiped one the first day) so I had to figure out a way to get into the backstage area to get pizza. I just told the nice woman who was controlling who could get behind stage that I was told I could come back for lunch. She asked who told me, I said, and she let me back. Pizza took a bit longer than expected to get to the place, but once it came it was tasty. Nothing but napkins, so eating it was awkward, but it was food. And after eating NOTHING but some fruit, 2 donuts, and a muffin early in the morning, then walking around and standing up all day, I was rightfully hungry. The pizza filled me up for basically the entire night.

After the event was over the two women that gave me a ride had to go to an executive board meeting. First off, if I am ever in Wisconsin and there is a seat open on that I want a spot. There is one student at Marquette my age (who I talked with quite a bit at the Democratic Leadership Institute) on the board. Getting on the executive board is difficult but not impossible. They are definitely elected positions. A boring 45 minutes, but worth seeing. After that we went to an old fashioned ice creme place. I said I didn’t want anything (I really wasn’t hungry) but when one of the women insisted and offered it as a gift, I said OK and asked for chocolate and a waffle cone. Only wanted one scoop but she ordered 2 scoops. It was tasty, but I have never been a fan of straight up ice creme. Custard is much better in my opinion. But it was a gift.

The ride back was fun. I tried to sleep but could only get a half hour nap. Then we started talking politics and what they felt happened in the downfall of Dean and the success of Kerry. Then what they felt was going to happen in 2008.

Update: I had to update the gay marriage/civil union/etc ban. Death Penalty is advisory, Marriage ban is the real Constitutional Amendment.

Lets talk about the race for Democratic Nomination for State Attorney General. It is a heated debate. On one hand, you have Peggy Lautenschlager, the incumbent Attorney General who got in a crash after drunk driving then saying that she was the AG and should get out of it. All on the police car camera. Beautiful. So Kathleen Falk, former assistant AG and executive commissioner (or whatever they call the top person in a county) of Dane County (think Madison.) There are very few policy differences between the two, so for all intents and purposes this is the most fired up match over who can win a general election that I have seen recently. When the two were introduced it was all about whose side in the hall could yell harder. Lautenschlager got a bigger acceptance, but it could be that the Democrats at the convention are more willing to accept and forgive her previous actions. She is a good AG. We will see later on. Falk’s people seem so much more young and energetic. It seems every 5 seconds I had someone slapping a Falk sticker on me (which I made sure were not on me when I had my press pass on.) When I was in the press room blogging Falk was behind me doing an interview and you could tell she was pissed off. I would be too based on the way this race is going. The mud is slinging from one side to the other. Just before I entered said press room I saw Feingold in the hall way. Sharing glances I was not sure what to say while I had a press pass on so I said “Senator” as in nodded my head.

Update: I love comments.
Turns out the police officer who pulled over AG Lautenschlager is endorsing her. Of course, there is talk from the officer on how professional the AG was during the stop. Looks too pretty to be as clear cut as the article put it. We will see. We will see…