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MR. TODD: The actual term itself, by the way, is short for Web log. And, you know, you drop the W and you get the blog. I’ll just describe what Howard Dean’s blog since it’s the one that has the most traction and the most attention. It’s essentially like a digital bulletin board saying, “Hey, look, this is what we’re up to today. This is our message today. These are some of the things we’re doing today.” And then it allows a section to comment about what’s going on during the day. And this is where you find out who the bloggers are. These are these troops of people—Howard Dean, on any given posting, will have 150 to 200 comments per these posting. That means there’s probably about 80 to 100 people at any one time, they’re just chitchatting. It could be that they’re immediately responding to seeing Dean on television or they’re probably blogging right now while they’re watching us talking about them right now. No doubt probably they’re getting mad at us. They’re very anti-media. Reading the Dean blog is like reading Republican message points from years past and they’re anger toward the media. They felt very mad at NBC News and Lisa Myers over the last couple of days over the story, felt like somehow NBC News took his comments out of context. So it is a little...
MR. RUSSERT: Which Lisa Myers did not...
MR. TODD: No, not at all, but it was...
MR. RUSSERT: ...and the Dean campaign will acknowledge that.
MR. TODD: They acknowledge it. They did, but...
So, wait, has the Dean campaign acknowledged that his comments weren't taken out of context? In my world we define taking them out of context as, well, stripping them of context in a way which alters the meaning, which would be different from, you know, like just making stuff up or doctoring the quote. This post at the Dean blog surely makes it seem as if the quotes were taken out of context, or at the very least makes it seem that the Dean campaign believes the quotes were taken out of context.
So, is pumpkinhead just making stuff up?
...and then this Todd person says:
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MR. TODD: Well, building off of Ron’s point, you know, this whole growth of the Internet for Dean support, it was exponential in the summer and in the fall, and you know what? It’s really slowed. This week, you know, they throw up these fund-raising goals and they do it as a bat. It’s like the old Red Cross goals where you see the progress as you go. They had the Sweep The Seven. On February 3, 700,000, Sweep The Seven. You know what? It was one of their slowest fund-raising bats we’d seen. They didn’t allow the goal by midnight Friday to even show up. They changed it. You know, they realized something wasn’t working, they changed it to say, “Thank you, Tom Harkin” and they made it to about 800,000.
But the campaign did reach the original 700,000 by the original deadline.