The Bush Lie-Ticker: a potentially effective debate tool?

[sofa king]

Hi folks.

In http://democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x851988">this thread, a few of us batted around the idea that we could turn the Presidential debates into a real-time demonstration of the President's dishonesty and incompetence.

Here's the basic idea. Send out a web broadcast of the Presidential debates on a slight delay. Have a team of researchers on hand to identify and correct President Bush's lies, distortions, and gaffes.

Put a scoreboard up in the corner, and punctuate the audio with humorous sound effects as the President swerves his way through the debate. Here's a shot of what it might look like:




(This is just a bad Photoshop .gif file. I have no idea how to do this for real.)

We might even get the project to pay for itself if we can get viewers to pledge a certain amount of money for each identified Presidential prevarication. Earlier I suggested $10 for each lie, to be donated to the Kerry campaign or to soldiers' benefit programs. But I also think we might be able to sell the idea to a broadcaster by suggesting that some of the pledge money could go to pay for the broadcast.

This idea isn't fully formed, so we need your input right away. Here's some of the things that I think we're going to need:

* A team of fact-checkers to have ready-made citations available for the broadcast. For example, when the President lies and says that the war in Iraq is going well, we have figures that show that more Americans died in Iraq this summer than during Iraq's "liberation." When the President brags that he lowered federal taxes, we show that state and local taxes have gone up to compensate for the revenue loss.

* Prognosticators who can accurately guess what will be discussed in the debates so that the fact-checkers can prepare.

* Technicians who can put together such a broadcast and remotely coordinate all team members.

* A benefactor with the cash, resources and bandwidth to put out the broadcast.

* Marketers who can advertise the operation and turn it into a genuine event with the broadest possible exposure.

* A security team who can protect the broadcast from attacks from our Freeper friends, who are reading this thread right now.

* Fellow participants with high bandwidth connections to support the broadcast team, so that we can run the operation from locations other than the IP addresses we use to discuss this operation. Don't volunteer for this in this thread, or the bad guys will know where you are!

* Money, and people willing to donate a helluva lot of free time.

I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg, but I have a lot of faith in DU and John Kerry's tech-savvy support base. So don't hold your tounge if you see something we're leaving out!

I'm not the person to run this job. I don't have the technical or managerial skills to do it. I would, however, like to volunteer as a fact checker.

Special thanks to crispini, who within minutes of the original post of my idea was on board to help. I hope you can help, too.

[Chichiri]

1. How would you get a feed of the debate to broadcast?

Presumably whoever carries the debates will be copyrighting their broadcast or whatever, and modifying it would be illegal.

A better idea would be some kind of program that can connect to a server and display the information that the fact-checkers put out, either in real-time or whenever the end user hits an "Update" button. People can have it up on their computer screens while the debate is going on TV. I'm guessing that that would be less expensive as well.

The interface could look something like this:


THE GEORGE BUSH DEBATE LIE TICKER

GEORGE BUSH LIES: __

GEORGE BUSH RECORD DISTORTIONS: __

GEORGE BUSH INCOMPREHENSIBLE: __

GEORGE BUSH DOESN'T REALLY KNOW: __


Last 5 entries (click here for the full list)

Sept. 30th, 09:12:55
Bush Lie: "Bush's words bush's words bush's words"
The truth: "truth truth truth truth"
Source: http:/source.com

Sept. 30th, 09:10:14
Bush Incomprehensible: "Bush's words bush's words bush's words"

etc...

[sofa king]

2. That would be whole lot more simple, wouldn't it?

The only thing is, you'd have a much shorter update window if you wanted to try to sync it up with the actual debate. You probably couldn't do it.

But, it would make a devastating wrap-up tool, particularly for *ahem* lazy reporters who are facing early morning print deadlines. Dangle a big, fat, well-cited rebuttal out there virtually before the debate is finished and it might prove irresistable to many.

[zbdent]

3. What we really need is a "blogger" in good with "the media"

(ha, ha, ha)

Since you know that some geek in his momma's basement was spinning the Burkett documents to Faux-friendly sources AS THE SHOW WAS ON THE AIR, you also know that the Drudge wannabes will be jerking with one hand and trying to spin everything Kerry says as a lie with the other.

So, what we need is a real-time contact with the media to have our fact finders attacking Bush's lies in "real-time".

[crispini]

4. This is true, the rebuttals could just as easily be in blog format.

So very little new development of a website would be involved, i.e. theoretically no custom coding...