David’s posterous

The Internet is a rich place for politics. It's spawned a whole new
generation of dedicated grassroots activists. It's also spawned a new
generation of lobbying firms pretending to be dedicated grassroots
activists. The latter are often called "astroturf" groups, because
they specialize in fake grass-roots activism.

I happened to click on an ad in a Daily Kos article for "Californians
Against Food And Beverage Taxes" at
http://nofoodandbevtaxca.com/. It's a rather odd add placement
given Daily Kos's readership.

The organization campaigns against food and beverage taxes, oddly
enough, that could help curb obesity, the way cigarette taxes attempt
to deter smoking. For a grassroots group, their opinions seem oddly in
agreement with the food and beverage industry.

Any time you see a political organization that has the words
"citizens" or "people" in their name, you should immediately get
suspicious. The "About Us" page doesn't give an address. Odd. They are
supported by pro-business organizations like the American Grocers
Association and the Pier 39 Ice Cream shop, precisely the kind of
people who would be affected by these taxes.

There's no physical address given on their site, but I did do a lookup
of their URL. Not only is the address registered in Washington DC,
it's registered to a lobbying firm called Goddard Claussen.
Apparently, they're the "go-to guys in issue advocacy," or so claims a
quote from Fortune on their Web site at
http://www.goddardclaussen.com/. They were also behind the "Harry and
Louise" ads that helped derail health care reform in the '90s.

Goddard Claussen, strangely enough, makes no mention of their
affiliation with "Californians Against Food and Beverage Taxes."

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I'll admit it, I'm a geek, and like most geeks, I'm no stranger to the
command line. I defined a couple of shell functions the other day that
let me pull down Web pages and search within them.

I wrote these in zsh, but they should work in other Bourne-ish shells
like Bash. You need to have Lynx (http://lynx.isc.org/) installed for
them to work. Feel free to share and enjoy.

Getpage takes a URL as an argument and spits it out on the screen. You
can also pipe it into a file so you can do interesting things with it.

Webgrep simply takes the output of Getpage and runs the trusty grep on
it. Stand back, Web! I know regular expressions!

Here are the actual fuctions. Just copy and paste into your .bashrc,
or .zshrc, or .profile, or whatever.

# Display web page on STDIN
getpage() { lynx -dump $1 }

# Search for regexes in Web page
webgrep() { getpage $1 | grep $2 }

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