John McCain ‘Endorses’ Gay Marriage on MySpace
For a brief time, Senator John McCain’s MySpace page contained a message endorsing gay marriage:
Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage . . . particularly marriage between two passionate females.
It was a prank. Michael Arrington explains:
They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.
McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.
So, Davidson replaced the image (below left) with one containing the above statement (below right):
Classic. Someone at McCain’s site got the message and replaced the image with one, presumably, hosted on their own server.
via Taegan Goddard
Mike made it clear on his post yesterday that the lack of credit for his contribution was not an factor in his decision. Mike did not actually hack McCain’s web site; he only changed his own. If McCain’s staffer had done his job & removed the automatic link to Mike’s site (which cost Mike more money), Mike would not have posted the blog.
This is just one more goof that candidates or their staffers have created, doing minor damage to their own campaigns. Within 12 hours, a McCain staffer corrected the mistake by removing the link. Like most of the responders reported, I was LMAO.