A few days ago, a guy named
Steve Friess who writes for Politico called me to interview me
for an article. The cool thing was that he didn't do this because of one of my parody sites, or the "legitimate rape" thing, or anything I've done that's gotten press attention. He was doing a piece about political domain name squatting for 2016 and saw through a "whois" search that I own around 100 domains through several pseudonyms. So that was kind of cool, the idea of being newsworthy for multiple, separate things this year.
Unfortunately he didn't mention me in the article. He used some of the stuff I told him (as well as the
Seinfeld-referencing title of the article, possibly), but he mentioned a bunch of other squatters instead. I think my narrative of it being tied in with autograph dealing, and parody websites, and Intrade for me didn't fit his article. I also talked about how people just typing in urls will become less and less common and political domain squatting will mostly die and what remains will have to be about search ranks eventually, like my Santorum site. And his article was already long enough, I guess. But he did lead the article off with one of my domains! ClintonCuomo.com.
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Here's an unrelated political cartoon I made an edit to, to break up the text in this post. In the original one, disdainful Obama is not farting onto Romney's face. |
It's scary how many good Democrat domain names I have, particularly Clinton. I have many good ones that start with her name. I like to imagine selling a domain to a Democratic campaign and then donating the money back to it. I don't know if I could keep that money. It's a lot less morally ambiguous to take money from Republicans that they would have spent on other campaign stuff, and thus hurting the Republican Party. I don't want to do that to the Democrats. I just couldn't ignore these domains and let somebody else scoop them up. Maybe I'll rationalize it by saying the Democratic Party is too conservative or something, but that sounds like bullshit.
The picture drawn by Politico's resident cartoonist, who won a Pulitzer recently, includes a couple of my domains too! That's kind of neat. Also, the writer of the article did tell me afterward that he's going to revisit the topic in more depth and will keep me in mind.