Letters to the Editor
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@Rowan
Just a wild guess, but could be a cookie ... do you have cookies disabled? If not or if you don't want to, you can look in your cookie file for a matching offender, say zedo.com, and delete it. If you have an antivirus program like Norton, you might also have an option to delete those files. Hope that helps.
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WSJ: The warning from social conservatives
Posting at length for those who do not have WSJ subs ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/capital_journal.html
At a time when Sen. McCain badly needs to consolidate the support of the Republican base before the general-election campaign begins in earnest, leaders of the party's social conservatives are letting it be known -- quietly, for now -- that they aren't happy with the way their desires are being met.
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The most telling sign of unhappiness on the right was a letter sent by social-conservative leaders to Mr. Bush last month, complaining that his administration was consistently rejecting federal funding for organizations that run programs promoting sexual abstinence among young Americans. Many social conservatives believe that abstinence training has led to a drop in teen pregnancies and contributed to a decline in abortion rates. But the five-page letter cites a series of cases in which private groups that promote abstinence have had grant requests turned down by the administration, principally by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The letter says those grant decisions are "weakening" the president's policy supporting abstinence training as vigorously as contraception efforts, "with concomitant harm to American youth." It was signed by 50 Republican leaders representing a who's who of social conservatives.
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Item No. 1 on the list of complaints from Dr. Willke and other conservative leaders is Mr. Bush's failure to compel the Senate to vote on the federal judges he has nominated. If approved, those nominations would put a new set of conservative judges on the federal bench for years to come, regardless of the outcome of this fall's elections. The White House says some 30 judicial nominations are awaiting action in the Senate.
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Mr. Bush ought to instruct Republicans in the Senate "simply to close up shop until this constitutionally correct set of people is given a shot at a vote," Dr. Willke said. "And he's done nothing."
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All told, Gary Bauer, president of the advocacy group American Values and a veteran of Republican cultural debates, points to "a certain fatigue factor" among social conservatives that amounts to "a big problem for the Republican Party overall." The danger for Republicans isn't that they will lose social-conservative votes to either Democrats Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton but that they will fail to generate the kind of energy and turnout that put Mr. Bush over the top in, among other places, Ohio in 2004.
More than that, social-conservative fatigue means Republicans are caught in the classic dilemma of needing to simultaneously shore up support on their right while moving toward the center to win over independent moderates -- who might be turned off by harsh messages on social issues.
But Mr. Bauer argues that the California Supreme Court just handed the Republicans the solution to this dilemma, with its decision giving gays the right to marry. Though polls show a gradual increase in support for gay marriage overall in recent years, Mr. Bauer argues that "this is an issue where a lot of those self-described moderates don't want the courts to redefine marriage." Supporting "traditional marriage," in other words, is one of those rare acts that can score big with both the Republican base and key pockets of swing voters, Mr. Bauer argues.
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@ Rowan Berkeley
It's hard to say, but it may not be Salon which is at fault. If you're on a Windows machine, there are -- or have been -- all sorts of vectors for malware which exploit buffer overruns in Internet Explorer -- mostly through Active X content -- or in Flash, or via assorted downloadable graphics files, such as PDFs and JPEGs, which crash the programs used to view them, and lead to similar exploitable access to system memory.
Once an exploit is successful, ads can be run which escape the usual blocks in Firefox, etc. All of this assumes, of course, that the machine owner is less than diligent in keeping up with system patches, anti-virus software, etc. Perhaps there's a Windows guru on UT who could provide you with more specific suggestions.
If you're using a Mac, there's currently only one Trojan I know of which can do what you describe, DNSChanger / OSX.RSPlug. As far as I'm aware, the only anti-virus software which is capable of removing it at present is Intego's VirusBarrier.
I suspect that this info is too general to be of much help, but if you have someone savvy near you who can actually look at your machine, and check its configuration, he can eliminate any normal causes, and begin a search for possibly abnormal ones. Such things are awfully hard to diagnose from a distance.
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Take the William Kristol challenge: finish reading his column
http://www.236.com/news/2008/05/05/take_the_william_kristol_chall_1_6326.php
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william, it only happens here at Salon
I visit thousands of sites a week, and it happens nowhere else. There is nothing wrong with my system software or hardware wise.
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take the william krystol challenge
I read the whole thing in one go, when I was first directed to it. But I also read all 33 pages of the WaPo responses to Kathleen Parker. I think I am trying to make up for my general unacquaintance with the non-Jewish aspects of US politics, but forcing myself to wade through all the muck. This effort on my part is a testimony to how much I like you all, or almost all.
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In that case....
QuickStrategy's advice is probably the best. I'd advise getting rid of any cookie which has a recognizable zedo string in it, and setting FireFox to reject any cookies which aren't set by sites you navigate to directly. (This may cause you to be unable to view some desired content also, but it's worth a try.)
I'm not seeing popunders myself, but since I'm a paid subscriber to Salon, it seems unlikely that I'm being sent the same advertising data as you are.
You might also try asking Salon itself if what you're seeing is normal, i.e. if they're in fact using zedo.com to push flash content to you. They might be reluctant to 'fess up, or they might not, but it couldn't hurt to ask.