Results tagged “caucuses” from DesMoinesIst

In case you're looking for abundant political fun to be had this weekend, your options are aplenty. Those hoping to find out all the gory details of municipal budgeting can sit in on the West Des Moines city budget workshop starting at 8:00 on Saturday morning. And then, if that hasn't fulfilled all of your hopes and dreams, you can migrate to your precinct caucuses to help set the Republican or Democratic party agendas for the state in 2010.

If there's anything that could break the normally hospitable spirit of Iowans, it's the insufferable and unending harassment we've been receiving by telephone lately from campaigns and pollsters alike. Campaign literature arrives in the mailbox by the truckload, but it's easily sorted out and thrown in the recycling bin.

But the phone calls are both incessant and completely useless. They come in just two or three flavors:

• Someone in a boiler room asking, "Who are you going to caucus for?"
• A recording from some no-name individual offering their "neighborly" commentary on a candidate, like "Hi...this is Nosmo King of East Doodledorf, Arkansas. Did you know that Mike Huckabee used to light people on fire in the governor's mansion? I know, because I'm from his state. Did I mention I'm from Arkansas?"
• A recording of the candidate him- or herself blathering on about their next stop in your ZIP code

It's gotten to the point where even a cell-phone-only household gets five or ten calls a day (the national Do-Not-Call Registry, unfortunately for our sanity, doesn't restrict political calls or polls). Compound that feeling week over week for about the last two months, and you've built a recipe for Iowans to start throwing their phones out the window...especially in two-party households.

Here's how you know the calls have pushed us to the breaking point: Van Harden and Bonnie Lucas will be interviewing F. Christopher Arterton of the George Washington University School of Political Management on their show on WHO Radio tomorrow morning. If the bucolic Van and Bonnie have finally had it, then the rest of us must already be reaching for our guns.

A movie came out in 2003 called How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. Never saw it. Never had much interest.

But it's almost certain that whomever is running Rudy Giuliani's campaign in Iowa saw it and decided to apply whatever lessons came from it to the political sphere.

Most cell-phone users have caller ID, and use that to screen calls they don't want...like political calls. But imagine seeing 319-000-0000 pop up on your caller ID screen over and over and over again -- with nary a voice mail left behind:

Tuesday, 8:08 pm
Wednesday, 6:19 pm
Wednesday, 8:05 pm
Wednesday, 8:24 pm
Wednesday, 8:42 pm
Wednesday, 8:54 pm
Thursday, 5:55 pm
Thursday, 7:50 pm
Thursday, 8:00 pm
Thursday, 8:09 pm
Thursday, 8:16 pm

This is no exaggeration: The same campaign office was calling me every ten minutes on Thursday night.

When I finally answered at 8:16 -- after ten calls in 48 hours -- what do you think they wanted to know?

"Will you caucus for Rudy Giuliani?"

Short of a personal apology? Not likely.

After one of the Presidential candidate debates held at Drake University earlier this year, I went out to my car and found this CD or DVD sitting on my windshield, just like others all over the parking lot.

I'm a pretty technology-friendly kind of guy, so why don't I know whether it's a CD or a DVD?

Because I threw it into the trash after taking this picture.

While I admire the enthusiasm of any legitimate organization that uses new media to reach out to spread their message (that's a First Amendment right, after all), I would never, ever put a CD or a DVD into my computer unless I knew exactly who gave it to me, and why.

A study was conducted last year in London to determine just how many people would accept a "free CD" outside a train station, and then try it out on a workplace computer. The number was huge: 70% of the discs were used.

The problem is that those discs could have contained anything: Spyware, viruses, or even backdoor codes that could have allowed outsiders to gain insider access to company networks.

Unless you know exactly who's sending you a CD or DVD, and why they're doing it, leave the stupid things in the trash. Just because we have the first-in-the-nation caucuses doesn't mean we have to be gullible about our computer security.