Special Blog Post:
The $100 Plan
Despite the obvious appearance of trying to buy votes in the November elections, the Republican majority in Congress is still considering a scheme to provide every American with a $100 check to compensate for the current high price of gasoline. President Bush has already rejected a revenue-matching windfall profits tax on oil companies, which means the money sent to American consumers would expand the already near-record federal budget deficit without significantly helping people with the skyrocketing fuel costs they are facing.The opposition to this rebate plan is significant, as Shakespeare's Sister and BlondeSense Liz, among many others, have noted. Your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums has posted comments at both of the aforementioned blogs offering an alternative to opposing the Republican rebate plan. Herewith now is the formal statement of that alternative.
If the hundred dollar checks are indeed disbursed pursuant to an Act of Congress approved by the President, all who are opposed to the Republicans pledge as follows: Upon receiving the check for the sum of One Hundred dollars ($100.00), I shall immediately sign the back of the draft and send it to the non-Republican political party or candidate of my choice.
The Republicans will, then, have instituted de facto public campaign financing on a scale that could rival any formal campaign finance reform proposal. If one million households were to honor the pledge suggested above, one hundred million dollars ($100,000,000) would flow into the coffers of the Democrats, the Greens, and other non-Republicans for the 2006/2008 election cycle. If the Republicans in Congress chose not to back down from their hare-brained, transparent vote-buying scheme, they would stand their shaky ground knowing very well that the commitment of non-Republicans to use their checks this way would be far greater than that of Republican voters to use their checks to support the GOP, especially considering how unpopular the Republicans are as we head into the jaws of the 2006 campaign season.
If you would be willing to make the pledge to commit your rebate check, please say so and pass this plan on to those you know. With a modest effort and a willingness to surrender a hundred bucks you wouldn't have had anyway if we had responsible leadership in Washington, the Republican attempt at naked vote-buying will turn into a catastrophe for the Grand Old Party.
The Dark Wraith has thus laid his counter-proposal on the table.
Update:
CNN.com is now running an article with the following headline: "Senate GOP backs off $100 gas rebate proposal," but the article itself tells a very different story:
"[Senator Bill] Frist said he will still push the rebate, but abandoned the accounting change [on how oil company crude inventories are taxed that would have paid for the rebates] and said the Senate Finance Committee planned a hearing on the issue in the near future."
This, of course, means that the rebate is still in play, but the oil companies have prevailed upon the Senate to abandon any plan that would have included a revenue-generating tax on oil companies to offset the estimated $10 billion cost of the rebate scheme.
Now, who says the Republicans aren't responsive to those they serve?
Published 5/01/2006 12:22:00 PM
<< 65 Comments Total
Good Morning Dark Wraith: What an interesting idea--donating the $100 gas rebate money to an alternative political party of your choice. Talk about public financing here! We both know that the Republican Party is more interested in taking care of their corporate benefactors, or the rich elites, rather than the American people. In fact, this gas rebate scheme that Congress is considering, will actually come out of the U.S. Treasury coffers, rather than from the oil companies themselves. And who is to say that this will help any American in coping with the soaring gas prices--it will probably give me two full tanks of gas, and I'm driving a non-descript 2000 Mazda 626 sedan here!
And this $100 gas rebate check isn't going to stop the oil companies from raising their prices on gas.
In 2004, I donated $150 to John Kerry's presidential campaign. It was the first time I've ever donated any money to a political campaign, or to the Democratic Party. And I've vowed that it is the last time I will donate any money to a political party or campaign. In 2004, I've watched as Kerry's campaign imploded with Democratic campaign strategists' incompetence, stupidity, and Karl Rove's machinations (Think Kerry's response to Swiftboat tactics, or his I opposed the war while supporting it pledge). And yet even with all of Kerry's problems, and Bush's weaknesses, Kerry certainly came close to winning. I've certainly been angered and sickened by the Democratic Party's inability to formulate a clear opposition plan to fight against this abusive Bush White House. And I'm not alone, considering the comments I've seen here and in other liberal and progressive blogsites. So I'm no longer willing to donate my own money to the Democratic Party yet.
But I'm certainly willing to donate a $100 of the fed's money to the Democratic Party. The Republicans are giving plenty of the fed's money to Big Oil through tax breaks and reductions of royalty payments. And it is not just Big Oil that's getting these breaks--just about every corporate interest is getting something. This would be a nice little counter-weight to the millions that corporate interests give to their Republican lapdogs, even if it is a one-time only deal.
And one last thought....Think of the infusion of cash given not only to the Democrats, but also to the Greens, Libertarians, Peace and Freedom Parties....
Exactly, Eric: this proposal of mine is party-neutral (with the exception of the Republican Party). It would benefit small parties that have a hard time raising cash because their supporters tend not to have as much money to donate to campaigns.
The Dark Wraith sees a chance to do some leveling of the playing field.
good morning dark wraith: ahhhhh, leveling. such a simple idea. after reading your comment at shake's place i took the pledge, then figured, wtf, why not give ms. busby a front. she's been getting hammered by brutal misleading ads from the republican national committee accusing her of supporting child molesters and such. of course, the republican candidate, bilbray, is shocked, shocked, by the content of the ad yet, totally powerless to stop them. it's disgusting. i dropped a donation on her website. i will still sign the check over to an opposition canditate if it comes. my reply to rush's "what do you think i am?" rant is along the lines of oscar wilde's famous "we've established what you are, we're just negotiating the price"
Good afternoon, Stephen.
Does Rush's price include the cost of his back pain medications?
Street value, of course.
The Dark Wraith thinks the name "Rush" is rather appropriate for the fellow.
Genius, my dear Dark Wraith... simply genius. I, too, will pledge to send in my check... if in fact, we ever get one.
Yes - in fact, I will give it to the candidate that best exemplifies thinking on finding a way out of our current energy mess. Use the money to get rid of Republicans AND Big Oil.
Brilliance!
You are the master of great ideas.
Count me in!
Good afternoon, Dark One.
Great idea, assuming the moronic repugs can get this miserly bit through the congress. oo bad they won't up the ante, but they are cheap bastards, I would imagine that many of them think $100 to the pissants is a gawdly gesture that further annoints them to the pearly gates.
If this happens, I'm on board.
I would gladly donate my rebate, if I was going to be among the recipients. Unfortunately, that's unlikely.
However, I'll be glad to help spread the word about this plan. I think it's a good one.
Good afternoon Dark Wraith,
That's a fantastic idea! If I spend that $100 the way the Republicans want me to, I'll only have a couple of weeks worth of gas. If I spend it as a donation, I could have a big happy smile for months. Brilliant.
Dark Wraith,
Is it also possible that this $100 gift can be written off? If so, that would make it doubly nice! Get the money from the Right, give it to the Left and rwite it off to take at least something extra.
I will send mine to anyone BUT the Right. But can I deduct it, too? I await with growing interest (pun intended)
I am SO all over this, DW. You have my pledge. I'm poor, and this would be the most I've ever been able to contribute to any campaign. If they're stupid enough to do this, then I'm crazy enough to give it to their opponents.
Cheers,
GW
Good afternoon, Dark Wraith
I'm in.
Good afternoon, Father Tyme.
Unless the proposal is other than how I'm reading it, that $100 would stand as taxable income; as such, unless it is offset by a deductible expenditure, it is exposed to taxation in the normal course.
If you are able to deduct campaign contributions from your ordinary income, then this would make the income and outflow a wash with respect to taxes. You would still have to report both the receipt and the disbursement, however.
Remember, always check with your tax preparer: H&R Crock will gladly answer your questions before providing all information about you to every sales representative on planet Earth and nearby worlds hospitable to telemarketing centers.
The Dark Wraith taxes his sense of accounting standards.
Good afternoon, karen m. That is, indeed, a good way to think about it: the hundred bucks is an investment in a long-awaited, much-deserved respite from Republicanism.
Good Heavens, it's one of those vacations that might turn into a lifelong adventure.
The Dark Wraith purchases a one-way ticket to Sanityville.
Good afternoon, DecemberFlower.
I've had a couple of people send me e-mail messages indicating that they didn't expect to receive one of the rebate checks. That's interesting to me. I'm wondering how wide the net of distribution of those checks is going to be. If the Republicans in the Senate could do so, they'd probably have the U.S. Treasury stamp a little notice on the checks that read: "Not valid for those who are not rabid Bush supporters."
I don't think they'll go that far, but I do wonder if there's some way they'll try to shape the distribution to favor their base of support... all 32% and dropping. Of course, by the time they get those checks out, they might have to send them to only maybe eight or nine percent of Americans: the ones who still support the President and his increasingly desperate policies.
The Dark Wraith wonders if Bush even notices the popularity phone call from Clueville.
Good afternoon, Gentlewoman.
It's a darned sad day when it's the poor people using what little they have to drag the country out of the mess created by those who have so much.
I swear to God, if it's the poor and lower-middle class who lead the charge to throw the rascals out of Congress, I will not mince words in repeatedly reminding the Democrats for years to come of who it was that rescued this country from the neo-cons, the robber-barons, and the assorted other dregs.
Maybe this time, a Peasant Revolt might work.
The Dark Wraith didn't like the way that one peasant rebellion about which he wrote came out, anyway.
Splendid!
I pledge to donate my $100 as well, that is if I'm on the list to get it (the $400 rebate of a few years ago managed to avoid me).
To be honest, I'm so broke I could use any amount of money to help pay towards overdue bills or credit cards. But I pledge - "I PLEDGE" - to donate my $100, this I think will be a better investment.
I'm in.
Good Afternoon Dark Wraith,
I'm In!
Though, I did read one Republican's words when the bill was first publicized: That, of course, the Dems will vote it down, since ANWR drilling is in the bill. Since the repubs put it there, I'm certain it's a poison pill designed to make sure the bill goes down.
The only surprise was that the republican base was enraged by the suggestion. They clearly thought that their base was either hypnotised into yesmen, or morons. Bushco always speaks to them as if they are morons, so I guess that's what they were going with.
Seems like a loose loose situation for them this time!
Oh, and kudos for the fun graphic!
Good Evening, Dark Wraith. I'm in too, as long as I can convince my registered Republican husband (we file jointly). Of course, he's someone who proudly ordered and displayed some forty "Republicans for Kerry" signs back in 2004. And still has a "Bush: Four More Wars!" bumper sticker on his truck that he's had to actually explain to more people than you'd care to guess.
This is utterly brilliant. Thanks for spearheading it.
Oh yes, I meant to add that in the unusual event I don't get my way, I shall simply go all Lysistrata on him.
I like to think that's worth a bit more than a C-note.
In that case...were's my check =)
I'm in.
Good evening, litbrit.
'Lysistrata', you say.
I suppose that goes to the old adage,
He who would defy his mate
must hand to himself his fate.
That's one of the Dark Wraith's originals, y'know.
I like to think that's worth a bit more than a C-note.
I think it's safe to say most men would likely agree......
- oddjob
I've had a couple of people send me e-mail messages indicating that they didn't expect to receive one of the rebate checks. That's interesting to me. I'm wondering how wide the net of distribution of those checks is going to be. If the Republicans in the Senate could do so, they'd probably have the U.S. Treasury stamp a little notice on the checks that read: "Not valid for those who are not rabid Bush supporters."
I don't think they'll go that far, but I do wonder if there's some way they'll try to shape the distribution to favor their base of support...
"Those patriots who own SUVs need relief more than anyone else..."
Well, yes, Phoenician, I suppose it is those gashole behemoth vehicles that keep America truckin' toward doomsday.
The Dark Wraith says, "Ten-four, good buddy!"
Good evening Master of the Rebates,
Great idea. The problem will be deciding who; I'll not give to just any old scoundrel.
Count me in. I wonder how the dispersement goes? To me, it would make sense to send it as $100 PER REGISTERED VEHICLE, because rebating to the carless is useless. At the moment I have 5 registered, street legal cars in my name(one is sitting with a blown engine, but we shan't tell the Repubs THAT, shall we?). Sure seems the only fair thing, even if it means some rich mo-fo with 12 Caddys and a stretch limo gets more...look at parents of teens who probably have 4 cars going. They need help too.
Now I don't promise to send $500 to the Dems if they go this route. I'll send half or $100, whichever is greater. But I do like the plan. We need to create one of those "don't break the chain or you will break out in spots and go to hell" letters and start spreading it. Guarenteed to work. Any volunteer writers?
Good evening, Wild Clover.
Now there's a novel supplement: a chain letter to move the donation process forward. Perhaps as the time to execute this plan draws near, I shall do some ghost writing to that end.
Ghost writing comes rather naturally to a wraith, y'know.
The Dark Wraith haunts the halls of power.
Good evening, Mr. Goat.
That is something of a problem, welcome though it might be: to whom should one donate? I cannot be promoting one target over another, but it seems to me that surrendering $100 should be done in such a manner as to elicit the greatest satisfaction in having done the deed.
If that's any guide at all, it falls under the old principle, "Listen to your heart, then follow your head."
Given the Dark Wraith's advancing years, he should probably check to make sure his heart is still beating before following that advice.
UPDATE: Mr. litbrit loves the Dark Wraith's plan and will tell his friends. As for colleagues who support the Great Decider and Company, he will also tell them where they can put the money.
Good evening, litbrit.
Tell your husband that he has officially joined the Clan of the Wraiths.*
*All-black clothing is optional... except at the occasional neo-con sacrifice/autumnal love celebrations.
The Dark Wraith figures that ought to weird him out just a little bit.
*All-black clothing is optional... except at the occasional neo-con sacrifice/autumnal love celebrations.
Hey! I was never invited to these!
You bastard...
You'll have to make the trip from Kiwiland for this year's, Phoenician. It's chilly at the end of October, but the bonfires provide a lot of warmth.
- oddjob
Heya Dark Wraith.
It sounds like a good idea. Count me in.
This was my suggestion with dubya's first $300 vote buying scheme in 2000.
Personally, I think the $100 stupidity could be better directed to an X-Prize type contest to develop a renewable, mass-producable synthetic gas for less than the current cost of petroleum based. A $9B bounty on OPEC, basically. I'll bet that "current" price would quickly become a moving target, in a downward direction.
Given the Dark Wraith's advancing years, he should probably check to make sure his heart is still beating before following that advice.
Good idea, and please let us know what you hear. (I am assuming that your heart is making more noise than the current democratic leadership.)
I see that the repgus (Frist) are now backing off from idea of the rebates being fund by Frist's proposed tax accounting change, but the rebates will still be pushed.
There has got to be a good bumper sticker here for the making; something like:
Bandaids for votes: The great gas rebate of 2006.
Good Afternoon Dark Wraith,
I love William Bollinger's X-prize idea, sounds like it would net more for us than giving billions to Exxon-Mobile anyway.
I'm definitely in. Glad Shakes Sis steered me this way! What a brilliant idea.
Good afternoon, Helen Wheels. Thank you for visiting The Dark Wraith Forums.
I have a vague recollection of visiting your blog, Just Ain't Right, some time back, but I'll surely stop there more often in the future. I got quite a grin from your May 2 post with the graphic about the song Feliz Navidad.
Anyway, from the sounds of all the support for this idea, we'll definitely stir up some trouble for the Republicans if they decide to go through with this rebate bribe.
The Dark Wraith thinks the Republicans have come up with a great way to rid Washington of themselves.
And by the way, SB Gypsy, I forgot to thank you for complimenting me on the graphic for this article.
Lord knows, I do try to use visual devices to supplement the information I convey here.
The Dark Wraith believes the graphics add an air of dignity to this blog.
Good Evening Dark Wraith,
The New York Times is reporting most recently that the $100 rebate proposal is all but dead.
Oh well. I was looking forward to sending Mr. Frist a nice photocopy of the endorsed check along with a cheerful personal greeting. *sigh*
Good evening, litbrit.
This afternoon, I did an update of my article. It appears that all that's dead is the plan the Republicans had to increase taxes on the oil companies. The rebate is still on the table, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is planning hearings next week.
What the Republicans were planning was to offset the cost of the rebate with a change in the way crude oil inventories are accounted; the change would have decreased chargeable expenses for crude oil, thereby increasing taxable income on oil products made from the crude. It was actually just a switch that's done every now and then because of inflation, but this time the reverse effect would have happened, and oil companies would have to have coughed up more tax money.
Apparently, the oil companies went positively butch on the Republicans for even thinking of something that would raise oil company taxes.
My quick calculations indicate that the accounting change would have dented oil company profits; but even with the dent, they would have remained in record territory. My suspicion is that Bush would have shot down the tax increase anyway.
It doesn't look to me like the rebate idea is dead quite yet. Honestly, I don't think the Republicans have anything else they can think of right now in the way of an attempt to show voters that they care... whether or not they really do.
I'm working on a pair of articles (almost fearing that they're starting to merge into one behemoth) that points to a desperate gambit that's beginning to play itself out as the Fed starts moving to inflate the economy in advance of the November elections while at the same time scrambling to figure out how to keep the U.S. dollar from going into a full-blown free-fall.
The truly scary part is that there actually is a way the Fed could pull this off to save the Republicans or at least give them a fighting chance going into November. I hope to God the Fed isn't going to try that desperation move, though. I think to myself, 'Even Bernanke's not that much of a shill...'
Then I think to myself, 'Dear God...'
The Dark Wraith is glad he sleeps only a few hours a night; otherwise he'd be losing a lot of sleep.
Good evening, once again, litbrit.
I do have to tell you that, from what I've read in a number of places over the past half-hour or so, Frist seems to be standing alone right now on the rebate.
As I noted, I don't think the idea is completely dead, yet, but it sure looks like Frist's cookies are hanging out to dry.
That's actually sort of funny in and of itself when one thinks about it.
What I'm wondering now is if there will be a second pass at this rebate, but the next try will be with the pot sweetened. I'll bet a $250 level or higher would get less of the angry backlash from people.
Again, as I noted above, I don't see a whole lot of ways the Republicans can mollify people short of handing them a really serious paycheck. The only other possible quick-fix is a holiday on the federal gas tax, but that's not all that much relief compared to the total price per gallon at the pump. Worse yet would be if a 60-day holiday were to expire while oil prices were heading toward a hundred dollars a barrel. The price shock on the way back up would give consumers a collective heart attack along with some serious motivation for dragging the Republicans out into the street for a good old-fashioned public mass execution.
It looks like trouble for the Republicans all the way around.
The Dark Wraith isn't going to gloat, however.
[No, I'm NOT. This is SERIOUS, people. It really is.... hee-hee-hee.]
good evening dark wraith: it's just like what went down with oscar wilde and the young society lady. . .she wasn't offended by the offer of <£>500 but took umbrage at 10 shillings. so everybody got uppity at a measly c-note? give 'em more, that'll shut 'em up. . .
p.s. thank you so much for posting your html for dummies thingie. . .i'm slogging through, trying to learn. serves me right for doing my computer studies back in the stone age of punch cards. . .
Good evening, Stephen Benson.
The punch cards were more recent than the Stone Age. I began in the era of the machine language with switches. The punch cards were awe-inspiring, and JCL was almost as cool as the FORTRAN rountines in the body of the deck.
Going to the CRTs was something of a let-down for me. It became too visual, but Lord knows, we did have fun even when PCs started to take hold.
Sadly, HTML is almost dead, now. I really liked its simplicity and its deep connections to the centuries-old art of publishing. Mark-up really hadn't change fundamentally since the the 17th Century.
Now, everything is CSS. I used to make a joke that someone was trying to make it so that the coding within the BODY statement would end up being so minimal that there wouldn't be any allowance for actual content. I thought that was a funny joke until I realized that was exactly where modern Web coding was headed.
I don't think it's funny anymore. It took me ages to get AJAX routines to work properly, and I still have some content in the BODY of this stupid template.
W3C can kiss my old assembler-level rump, as far as I'm concerned.
The Dark Wraith thinks computers were more fun when their entire purpose was for hacking.
I want my money back from the $2.7 Trillion unaccounted for by the DoD. That's about $8000 for every man woman and child in America.
Send me a check for $8000. That should cover my gas for the year.
$100 my fucking ass. If I do get some fricking check for $100 I am sending it directly to Russ Feingold.
Good Evening Again, Dark Wraith,
Yes, I think old Mr. Frist really is standing alone on this one, if indeed he's still behind it after everyone and his grandmother has bailed.
That NYT article I linked to had literally just been published--late this afternoon--and reflected the day's rounds of Republican commentary. I saw Mr. Frist on the Today Show yesterday, and he seemed, in a word, delusional. He is obviously so deeply, uh, connected to his, uh, paying constituents, he hasn't lifted his head long enough to take measure of the weather, much less the climate.
This is where the uniquely funny word douchebag seems so appropriate. Like none other, in fact.
You know, PoliShifter, I've had two interesting 'hit clusters' on this post. The two clusters pique my curiosity because of their city of origination: Washington, DC.
The first cluster came this morning: three hits, one of which was from the Shakespeare's Sister's link to this article, the other two were about 30 minutes later, one of them originating from what looks like a link in an e-mail message, the other of indeterminate entry path. The second cluster was four hits, all within about an hour, all indeterminate as far as entry path.
More stealth stuff than usual yesterday and today, too. Most of it was pretty weak; just a little was strong.
I usually don't look at the logs unless I've had an attack. No attacks yesterday or today, interestingly enough. As a matter of fact, the attacks have gone down markedly in the past month or so. Part of that might be the robust responses I instituted, but something else seems to be going on, too.
Ridiculous bandwidth pull these days. It's turned absolutely stupid. This blog isn't popular by any means, and yet I'm now open at 4 Gigabytes for May, and I'm already pretty sure I'm going to have to put another five on top of that before the month is out. Feedburner is reporting 11 readers, but my internal logs are showing closer to 40, about a dozen of which are sucking bandwidth like an industrial pump. I blocked off two killers last month, and it looks like that was the least of the problems that are developing. I know this whole bandwidth issue has been building big-time over the past couple of years, but it never occurred to me that it would become such an issue for me.
Like I said, this blog isn't that popular. It's an economics blog, for God's sake!
Now I'm rambling.
Or maybe I'm prattling.
One way or the other, the Dark Wraith apologizes for grumbling out loud.
Good evening, litbrit.
It's funny how some of the Republicans are trying their darnedest to come to grips with the reality that they are no longer the Golden Children of the American people; but I swear, Frist is coming off like he's daft: the man seems Hell-bent on looking like a full-blown twit standing alone while his fellow Republicans run for cover.
This thing is even more of a fiasco for the Republicans because it's terribly obvious that the their whole scheme got them in hot water with Big Oil, which just increases the disdain a lot of former supporters will have for them.
I'll tell you, litbrit, this is turning into pretty darned good theatre.
The Dark Wraith does like an off-Broadway show once in a while.
Hi Dark Wraith,
are you saying that some assholes are purposely using up your bandwidth? How so? By keeping your site up on their browsers all the time?
I've picked up afew DC readers myself over the past few months. I don't think the Government likes talk of revolution too much.
Then again, I like to think it's some disgruntled staffer sneaking a peak at pissed on politics for a little sanity.
How do you know someone is sucking bandwidth and how do you block them?
Just curious because I recently bought another domain name and plan on building another website (someday). I don't want to get eaten alive...
Perhaps I should take a class at the junior college...
Good evening, PoliShifter.
No, I hope this isn't malevolent bandwidth pull, although that's an old trick to shut down a site.
This pull seems for the most part to be legitimate, but I can't be sure of that. This, of course, wouldn't be happening if I were still using Blogger or some other free host: those places simply absorb the bandwidth demand, no matter how severe it becomes. That's one thing that makes me wonder how Google can keep offering the free Blogger service. It simply must be handling bandwidth demand that boggles the mind.
The problem is that simply blocking the IPs of some of these RSS readers is bad policy because, although most of them are small-time stuff or just individual users, some of them are very serious opportunities to get blog content into the heavier rivers of information flowing around the Internet.
There are a number of software packages out there to manage RSS demand, but the only good ones of which I know cost some money, and I try to maintain a policy of not getting into buying every bell and whistle a Webmaster and sysadmin might dream of having. That turns into a spiral of costs adding on to the already fairly serious cost of maintaining server level quality.
I don't know, though. Just starting off a month knowing I'll be hit for more than four gigs of bandwidth isn't what I was expecting. Maybe I'm just behind the times on what's typical these days.
That's quite possible. No matter how hard I try to keep up with everything that's going on, I feel more like a fossil with each passing day. Eventually, I suspect I'll end up in some lousy museum where people can marvel at how such dinosaurs could even function.
The Dark Wraith just hopes the maintenance people dust him off occasionally.
Oh Dark One-
Nothing like a bit of political Ju-Jitsu to refresh the spring of hope.
Is it true that leaving your browser open on a site eats their bandwidth? Even if you're not hitting refresh?
...that points to a desperate gambit that's beginning to play itself out as the Fed starts moving to inflate the economy in advance of the November elections while at the same time scrambling to figure out how to keep the U.S. dollar from going into a full-blown free-fall.
I'm sure if they think it can be pulled off it's in the works. Everything that this administration has done suggests very strongly that they plan on maintaining their stranglehold on us.
I think that the chances of me getting a rebate check are slim to none. I wasn't eligible for the last bribe either.
Good morning, Auntie Roo.
No, leaving your browser open on a Webpage doesn't eat bandwidth unless the browser, itself, is "polling" the site or the actual Webpage has an automatic refresh protocol at intervals specified in a META statement. (There are other ways for a Webpage to auto-refresh, but the old refresh META tag is the basic trick.)
So, if you open The Dark Wraith Forums and simply leave this page open (obviously to give your computer a nice, enduring theme that says you're a tasteful, intellectual blog surfer), it doesn't affect my bandwidth unless you have a browser setting of some kind that does auto refreshes.
On the other hand, if you open, for example, CNN.com and just leave it open, you'll notice after a few minutes that the page refreshes on its own.
When I first started this blog, I had a refresh protocol set at five minutes, but several of the early regulars here (including, if I recall correctly, OddJob and cam), asked me to pull that feature. It hadn't occurred to me that it was really annoying; but once they said something about it, I realized that they were right: it really is distracting, especially if you're in the middle of reading something and all of a sudden the whole page refreshes right before your eyes. As I said, I killed the feature immediately upon their request.
No, the bandwidth honk is coming from muscular RSS readers. These aren't the simple PDA and similar types; I'm thrilled to have those because it means people want to read what's going on here even when they're away from their computers. The ones that are beating me up are these RSS pulls that hit almost continuously. One that I finally had to block was actually a pretty low-end affair: the fellow who was running the pull had something in his code that was using amazing bandwidth approaching a gigabyte by the time I finally blocked his IP. At his end, he couldn't figure this out; he claimed that his logs indicated that he was pulling about that much from all two thousand or so of the feeds he was picking up. The problem as I understand it was that what he was seeing was the end result of his polling, but a multiplier effect was occurring at the other ends. For one thing, his hits were ranging over the entirety of all the posts and all the comments of the entire blog looking for updates.
Unfortunately, as I noted previously, blocking that site solved my problem only for a few weeks at best. It seems like a hydra beast: for every bandwidth eater I kill, several new ones show up.
I know I'll have to go to a bandwidth manager sooner or later. A basic manager simply takes requests as they come in and then holds them all until a specified time (maybe once a day, twice a day, or something like that), at which point all receive response together. In other words, even if the same IP address polls once every fifteen minutes, it gets a response once every evening and maybe once every morning.
The danger as I see it is that this would have to be a gateway that affected only those requests I told it to manage. I certainly don't want regular readers of this blog being denied entry if they want to visit every half-hour or so just to see if there are any new comments or posts. That traffic is very common on blogs that have a dedicated readership; in fact, that's what causes normal hit meters to spin like crazy on some blogs, which is why I use heavily managed hit meters: the one measures only brand new, never-before visitors (that's the big blue one at the bottom of this blog); the other hit meter doesn't count a visitor's pageloads more than once in any 48-hour period (that's the smaller, gold number meter at the bottom of the blog). That latter meter is beginning to worry me because I have so many policies in place on it that it's one of the culprits slowing down the loading time so much here at The Dark Wraith Forums. That meter rules out hits from me, for example. It also rules out counting hits from similar IP addresses since that activity could be the result of a single user on a network. All in all, I've customized the bugger so much it's more trouble than it's worth. As I mentioned previously, I might just have to give up on it. Anything it's telling me, I can find out from internal logs, anyway. The blue meter is the jewel, though: that's the one closest to measuring what in print publications would be the sum of subscriptions plus rack buys.
Good Heavens, Auntie Roo, I've been blathering for quite a while here. There's a lesson in this: never ask me a tech question, especially one that can be related to this blog work. I may not know what I'm doing, but I'll sure talk about it like I do.
The Dork Wraith puts the audience to sleep once again.
[And that stupid vowel replacement policy got me again there at the end!]
Tax cuts, rebates, why don't the Republicans just cut to the chase and hand out a pint of whiskey on election day?
LOL!
- oddjob
I suspect that the Republicans would not hand out whiskey on election day because they do not trust inebriation, in and of itself, to sufficiently impair judgment for them to win the day.
The Dark Wraith is perhaps too optimistic, though.
Thanks for the explanation. It's been a long time since I studied computer science (got my associate back in 1984) and they didn't teach much about networking in regards to the internet then so I admit my ignorance willingly. I did think that it would be bad programming protocol and a horrible waste of resources if merely parking on a site ate bandwidth.
Ahem. Itchy trigger finger. I meant to say:
I did think that it would be bad programming protocol and a horrible waste of resources if merely parking on a site ate that much bandwidth.
Good Afternoon Dark Wraith,
*WHEW* It's good, I don't have to feel guilty for leaving the Dark Wraith Message Board up in the background all the time...
Oh, and when are you coming back to the message board, your wraithliness is missed...