Posted on 09/17/2008 10:28:43 AM PDT by KayEyeDoubleDee
This is what the Nut Roots are doing to WGN-AM in Chicago:
Obama vs. WGN-AMIf you guys in the Robinson family don't get your act together, and get it together soon, then the Nut Roots are going to take down this site, and take it down hard, for the next two months.
The station is coming under attack for offering airtime to controversial author.
by John McCormick and Steven Schmadeke | Tribune staff reporters
September 16, 2008
chicagotribune.comChicago radio station WGN-AM is again coming under attack from the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama for offering airtime to a controversial author. It is the second time in recent weeks the station has been the target of an "Obama Action Wire" alert to supporters of the Illinois Democrat.
Monday night's target was David Freddoso, who the campaign said was scheduled to be on the station from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Chicago time.
Obama mobilizes rapid response on Web
Campaign targets media when attacks aired By John McCormick | Chicago Tribune reporter
12:32 AM CDT, September 17, 2008
chicagotribune.comMuch of Barack Obama's political success can be traced to a database listing contact information for millions of people, a tool that has proved invaluable in raising record sums of money and organizing a national volunteer network.
Now Obama's presidential campaign is increasingly using the list to beat back media messages it does not like, calling on supporters to flood radio and television stations when those opposed to him run anti-Obama ads or appear on talk shows.
It did so as recently as Monday night, when it orchestrated a massive stream of complaints on the phone lines of Tribune Co.-owned WGN-AM in Chicago when the radio station hosted author David Freddoso, who has written a controversial book about the Illinois Democrat.
You need to do several things to the Free Republic infrastructure and have them in place no later than about October 1; among them:
1) Mirror Free Republic to at least two other physical locations around the country - one on the east coast [Washington/NYC/Atlanta], and the other maybe more central [Texas has some large colo's with backbone connectivity].
Right now, I am seeing only two IP resolutions for "www.freerepublic.com" - 209.147.64.200 & 209.147.64.201 - and traceroutes have them [predictably] on the same physical network [I imagine that they are sitting right next to one another in the same server rack]:
2) Turn off as much of the relational structure at Free Republic as is possible, and return to a strictly flat file structure for as much of the content at Free Republic as is possible.[n - 2] mg-1.a01.mlpsca01.us.da.verio.net [n - 1] 128.242.105.82 [n] 209.147.64.200 The current relational structure is hopelessly broken, and the negotiations between the caching frontend and the relational backend are breaking down multiple times a day.
Again: THE RELATION STRUCTURE MUST BE DISCARDED - THIS IS IMPERATIVE.
[Furthermore, it is vastly easier to propagate a flat file structure to multiple physical sites around the country; trying to propagate a relational structure, in real time, with relatively limited funds for bandwidth, is essentially impossible.]
3) As things really heat up in October & November, I'd consider banning [temporarily] all non-political content, and instituting an aggressive policy of putting on probation the accounts of users who post lengthy, inane, unfocused, meandering, off-topic soliloquies - concentrating instead on promoting the work of people [like Kristinn] who are doing original investigative reporting and who are presenting their results in simple, straightforward, declarative arguments.
Along those lines, I'd move aggressively to upgrade the quality of the moderators who are policing the content at Free Republic - the quality of the moderation is utterly unpredictable from hour to hour - one hour there will seem to be a moderator who "gets it", and the next hour, it's as if that moderator's shift suddenly ended, and we have an utterly clueless moderator in charge of things.
I don't care if you're worried about hurting Granny's feelings if you tell her that she can't moderate for the next two months - we have to get some moderators in here who are up-to-date on current events and who understand the difference between original investigative reporting [regarding e.g. DEM/Obama treason & Bolshevik/Gramscian subterfuge] and the kinds of "Pray for my Kitty who is having feline leukemia chemotherapy tomorrow morning" threads which seem to waste so much CPU time & bandwidth at this site.
Y’all might consider putting all n00bs on a probationary status for the duration. Maybe their posts can be subject to review prior to posting, or some such thing.
~~~~
Great idea to consider. New signups at this
point in this close election aren’t all going
to be Snobama muckrakers, but I bet a fair
amount could be.
Thank you so much for this post. You are a scholar, a gentleman and the best of FReepers.
I do understand your concerns and I will keep a vigilant eye out for undermining forces. “Good on you”, Obadiah!!
Thanks for the info!
Prayers up for FReeRepublic and our great country.
Yes, same here. That particular problem (the blank page) seems unique to FR.
LOL! It just happened again on my first attempt to post this (blank page). However, I checked 'pings' to see if the post did get through before I sent it again. My guess is that some folks might not be checking before resending, thus one possible reason for the double postings.
“You people can pray for your d*mned kitties on your own time.”
I guess this isn’t a good time to request prayer for my pumpkin plant that seems to have contracted a blight of some sort?
May God shine a little light onto your pumpkin.
ping
I've had many instances of the "blank page" over the past few weeks. I've never resent the page, just clicked "Refresh" to reload and have always been led to the page that includes the update. No double posts here.
I'd suggest NOT sending again.
You know, I’ve always been amazed at the fundraisers on this site, a ton of money is raised and yet we host our site for very little money on a network you could not bring down if you tried, it’s all .NET technology too running on SQL Server. A few thousand dollars a year is all it costs and we’ve had massive denial of service attacks against it, we surived. I cannot say more but suffice it to say with the money raised on this site this should be a non issue.
Well, I’m sure we’ll all be a lot happier once John gets the new servers installed. Hopefully, it’ll be today. The good news is, we’re getting a helluva lot of new traffic. People are flocking to FR to read the latest news and conservative opinion.
lol....you bad..
Thank you for your continuing support.
I am not enough of a techno-geek beyond my own firewall to agree or disagree.
I can offer my observations whicj agree with Obadiah. FR has been remarkably slow these past few weeks. I haven’t noticed problems loading pages at FR ever. Not like this. I have to hit a link 2 or 3 times and when it works, it takes forever to load. There is almost a pattern to it.
Read the last few posts here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2084074/posts
I am NOT covered in tin-foil nor do I see black helicopters. I do believe in an extra measure of caution at times. :-)
“May God shine a little light onto your pumpkin.”
More than a little Jim, I live in the darkness of Connecticut.
We’ll be fine. John has done a remarkable job of keeping FR on the air for all these years.
My two year’s of posting ends next month.If all you FReepers have put off contributions until now please reconsider.Let’s make next month’s FReepathron short so we can put more effort into the coming election.
Sounds like good news all around (new server, new customers). Of course, the more that tune in the better, especially now, *before* the elections.
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