Kicking Amazon

Hi, folks. Spike's man-thing, here, making a rare Circus post to rant about a few related things and throw some links at you.

First off, those of you who hold any kind of strong political leanings at all will want to check out BuyBlue.org. This site--and a few other sites--are performing the invaluable service of researching exactly to whom various companies are handing out campaign contributions, and summarizing the information for our benefit.

Whatever your political leanings, you're likely to find a lot of bad news on any of these sites. But the worst news for me is that Amazon.com gives 61% of its political donations to Republicans. Amazon, who I do all my goddamned Christmas shopping through, simply because of the convenience of their wishlist system.

Yeah. This is a problem.

So I've been looking into alternatives. There are a number of vendor-independent wishlist / gift registry services out there, and the one that's looking the best to me at the moment is WishCentral. It's a little bit beta, and adding items to the list is, naturally, more complicated than just clicking a single link, but the advantage of being able to choose whatever items and sources you want is pretty great. Looking through other people's wishlists, I've seen people asking for general categories of gifts like "Bath & Body Works stuff," and even things that aren't simple buy-it-off the web products, like "a visit to a neurologist." (I shit you not. Get a load of this guy.) It's also kind of cool that your friends and family can "reserve" a gift without actually having to buy it from the vendor that you suggest. That's handy for folks like my dad who'd rather buy stuff from brick-and-mortar stores (a practice which, with Amazon's system, led to my brother getting two copies of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City last year).

So anyway, I've put together my own list to kinda test the thing out, and I made the process slightly more complicated than it needed to be, checking mySimon to find cheap sources for the stuff I want, and then going back to BuyBlue.org to make sure wasn't linking any red companies (naturally, Amazon and Wal-Mart were right out).

I'm tentatively recommending WishCentral to everybody who doesn't want to make their friends and family contribute to Republican political efforts through an Amazon wishlist. Please check it out, folks, and tell us what you think about this service, or if you know of a better one. Hell, feel free to post your own wishlists, too.