Courtesy of the genius behind The Daily Show andShoot the Messenger, Lizz Winstead, we give you one of those late night commercials that might even tug on the heartstrings of Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan.
Cover your keyboards first, kids. If you didn’t think they were lying liars before….And BillO is particularly talented in keeping a straight face for this one:
While this video of the ad goes after Rep Nancy Boyda (D-KS) (btw, whose response so far has been really good), she is just one of many “Freshman Dems” targeted by this fear-mongering ad campaign so far. As the Minnesota blog Bluestem Prairie notes:
Other Freshman Dems targeted that we know of so far: Joe Courtney and Chris Murphy (CT); Carol Shea-Porter and Paul Hodes (NH); Jason Altmire (PA); Ron Klein and Tim Mahoney (FL); Gabrielle Giffords and Harry Mitchell (AZ); Jerry McNerney (CA); Melissa Bean (IL); Joe Donnelly (IN); … Michael Arcuri and Kirsten Gillbrand (NY) ; Steve Kagan (WI). […]
Defense of Democracies is affiliated with the non-profit, non-partisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focused on defeating terrorism and promoting democratic values.
The ad is similar to one posted last week by House Republicans on gop.gov, that also misleadingly blames the expiration of the “Protect America Act’ on the Democrats. The fact is that “there is one reason, and one reason only, that the Protect America Act expired. Its name is “George W. Bush.”
Not surprisingly, the group The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies‘ list of “Directors, Fellows, Personnel” includes many PNAC-neocons like Kristol, Krauthammer, and Perle (a lot more on the group here). The list also includes, however, several prominent Democrats, which begs the question: Why would Democrats be affiliated with a group that would be running these ads?
Who’s behind the shadowy organization isn’t entirely clear, but it is definitely an offshoot of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, an organization that until a few days ago listed among its board of advisors Donna Brazile, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), Rep. Jim Marshall (D-GA), Zell Miller, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY). Engel, Schumer and Brazile have all resigned from the board, with Brazile making this statement
VoteVets.org has a new ad out to confront John McCain’s warmonger stance and question–in flesh and blood terms–exactly where his priorities lie. From their email:
The ad features, for the first time, a female Iraq veteran and her small child. Rose Forrest served 12 months in Iraq, and gave birth to her little son, when she came home. In the ad, Rose challenges John McCain to tell the truth about what endless war means for her child, and all of our children. Senator McCain needs to give us some straight talk about how much endless war in Iraq is going to cost. We don’t have an endless pot of money, or an endless supply of troops and equipment.
So what are Americans going to have to sacrifice if he has his way on Iraq? Health care? Decent jobs? Border security that all those National Guardsmen in Iraq could be performing? Rescue and cleanup after disasters like Katrina and tornados in Kansas and Tennessee? Are we going to have to sacrifice our chance to cripple Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in Afghanistan? We can’t do it all, but John McCain seems to pretend that we can.
We’re airing this ad in the hopes that Senator McCain finally gets honest with the American people. We’re putting it out there so that the media and power-brokers start to ask the same questions. Endless war in Iraq means drastic sacrifices for Americans in their everyday lives, and in terms of our own security.
VoteVets needs your donations to keep ads like this going through the election season. If you are able, please consider donating here.
Al Franken for Senate announced today that two television ads will begin running on all four major broadcast networks, as well as on cable. The first ads can be seen Tuesday morning, January 15, in the Minneapolis-St. Paul and Duluth markets.[..]
“We’re excited to begin this conversation with Minnesota voters,” Communications Director Andy Barr said. “This campaign is about Minnesotans who need a voice in Washington - a voice that will stand up to the special interests and stand up for them on the issues that matter. Throughout this year, Al will be spending a lot of time listening to and highlighting those concerns. To change this country, we need to change a political culture in which people feel like they don’t matter. In the Senate, Al will use his voice to make sure that they do. And that starts with this campaign.
“That said, as we begin this year, we think it’s important that people know who Al is and why he’s running, and we’re thrilled that Mrs. Molin was able to help us do so in memorable fashion.”
It’s hard for me to believe that the same people who elected Paul Wellstone could possibly still be supporting Norm Coleman, but according to TPM, Al has jumped from a 22 point deficit in February of last year to a statistical tie by November. Go Al!
Rudy Giuliani is taking a new tack on his campaign in Florida, where he has bet “all in” for campaign relevancy. His new ad suggests that voters ignore the pundits and feel the truthiness of a Rudy Giuliani presidency. I got to hand it to Mr. “A Noun, A Verb and 9/11″, telling people to ignore the media reporting his lackluster performance so far is a unique approach.
However, it probably wasn’t the best idea to put Keith Olbermann in your commercial. After all, it was Keith who was responsible for the best smackdown of your continual fear-mongering. And how do you think your BFFs at FOX feel about you telling voters to ignore them?
Do you think Hannity, O’Reilly, Dobbs, Dick Morris, Juan Williams, Fred Barnes and Brian Kilmeade are a) happy to be sharing the screen with us; and b) happy to be thrown under the bus as “pundits, politicos and talking heads” by Giuliani? I mean, Hannity might even stop hosting Giuliani campaign events. Plus, knowing the Giuliani spiel, doesn’t a commercial that mentions the economy sort of veer off from his one and only message?
Fascinating post by Jesse Wendel at Group News Blog regarding the kind of language the Democratic frontrunners are using to describe themselves and their campaigns:
Workers are all about competence. Why? …Because workers sell their ability to make and keep promises. [The Worker Candidate] talks of her competence and experience, promises she will do what she’s always done, and has the policy plans and papers to prove it…Clinton uses the language of a worker, the language of deep experience and competence…She tells us you can trust her judgment, knowledge and understanding, her years and years of being on the job, wisdom and training. She is no doubt genuinely baffled that anyone would choose someone who doesn’t have the competency and vetting she has.Managers aren’t about declarations. Managers are about requests…[The manager candidate] requests you elect him to fix problems, lobbies for a change so he can fix the system. Edwards is an old-style Union man so even when his words are canonically declarative, if you listen carefully, what he’s really doing is making a request for you to elect him because he can’t deliver on his vision unless he’s President.Executives make the fundamental declarations of the enterprise: …What business are we in? Who are we competing with? Who is our long term strategic ally? [The leader candidate] speaks in declarations, inspires, leads. …When Obama speaks, he creates a future of an America in which all of us together will take on the troubles we know in our heart are coming and repair the damages which have occurred. Every time Obama opens his mouth, that future is more and more real. It happens AS he speaks. Obama’s speaking makes it so. By declaration.
Obama is breaking out now because he speaks the language of a leader.
On Wednesday’s Tucker, the hopefully soon to be unemployed host gets riled up because Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, had the nerve to mention homeless veterans and those less fortunate in his holiday ad. Tucker calls it the Scrooge ad, and then attacks Edwards for not being Jesusy enough, and mocks him for being wealthy. Tucker, as usual, is offensive, annoying and wrong.
As a favor to those of you who can’t stomach Tucker, I have posted Edwards’ holiday ad below. Enjoy…
If you want to survive the apocalypse, buy a HUMMER! It looks like they hired either Tom Tancredo or Ari Fleisher’s Freedom Watch group to produce this ad. It has all the fear factor elements and major disasters that have defined Bush and the GOP. Now HUMMER is using them on the American people to sell their product. It’s just wonderful darling.
A commercial just aired during Meet The Press featuring a montage of natural disaster clips. The very last clip showed a city street flooded with water — and a Hummer cruising through the water.
The tag logo? HOPE: HUMMER OWNERS PREPARED FOR EMERGENCIES. This is followed by a view of the planet from space. Eff you, Hummer and eff you, Meet The Press, for airing the worst commercial ever.
Today, in addition to being the biggest consumer debt orgy shopping day of the year, is Buy Nothing Day.
Now in its 15th year, the popular Buy Nothing Day is celebrated every November by environmentalists, social activists and concerned citizens in as many as 65 countries.
Timed to coincide with Black Friday (this year on Friday, November 23) in the United States, and the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season internationally (on Saturday, November 24), the festival takes many shapes, from relaxed family outings, to free, non-commercial street parties, to politically charged public protests. Anyone can take part provided they spend a day without spending.
Perhaps we should all wait until tomorrow, then, to buy a ticket to “What Would Jesus Buy?”a documentary produced by Morgan Spurlock of “Super Size Me!” fame. It’s billed as “the movie Santa doesn’t want you to see!”
Tancredo: If you are going to ask people to actually vote for you for President of the United States of America, you’d better tell them what you are going to do about this problem, because I’m telling you it supercedes all other … It’s more important than healthcare. It’s more important than education policy. It’s more important than trade. It’s more important than anything, because what does all of that matter if you do not do what is necessary to protect this country?
Really? More important than healthcare? More important than anything?
Pardon me for even entertaining the specious link he makes between illegal immigration and terrorism, but let’s walk down that crooked path just a little, ok? Not to say the threat of terrorism isn’t real or that we shouldn’t do anything about it, because of course we should, but we should have a rational, sensible policy based on the real threat, not an over-hyped perception of one. The fact is that even “if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, … your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.” Terrorists would have to pull off six 9/11s every year to equal the roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year coming from the more than 40 million uninsured (pdf) in this country, and if there is a terrorist with the will and the capability to pull that off, there will never be a border fence that will stop them, and nothing could be more dangerous to this country than a paranoid politician whose brain is so ate up with Lou Dobb’s Disease that he’s willing to sell every other issue down the river in search of a cure.
