Watch this video from the CBS Evening News last Sunday, December 4. At this point it was clear that Herman Cain was ending his run for the presidency and a new Des Moines Register poll had just shown that Newt Gingrich was the new front runner. Iowa is one of the first states to select its convention delegates, and thus it is closely watched by all involved in and interested in politics.
So according to the report, it’s now a three way race between Gingrich and Romney. This in spite of the fact that second place in the Des Moines Register poll went not to Romney, but to Ron Paul. He’s pretty much ignored in this report. I first noticed the phenomenon when it was pointed out on The Daily Show on August 15, 2011 just after the Iowa straw poll and Pawlenty dropped out of the race. In this clip, Jon Stewart notes the media’s reluctance to treat Paul as a serious candidate, even on ultra-conservative Fox News.
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Tag Archives: satire
Campaign Ads, Satirical Magazines and Religious Intolerance
I’m used to negative politics and personal attack ads. The strategy of attacking your opponents character is probably as old as politics itself, but it’s gotten particularly virulent in recent years. Unfortunately, it’s seldom elucidating in terms of someone’s ability to govern. Women and men who have made mistakes in their past or who have truly disastrous personal lives, may well be effective policy makers. At the very least, though, we ought to be able to expect these personal attacks to be factual, and far too often they aren’t. Just follow FactCheck.org or Politifact.com and you will see far to many examples of ads called to task for being untrue.
Sadly, I’ve grown used to these. They disgust me, but they don’t infuriate me. What does enrage me is negative campaigning the resounds beyond the campaign and affects our society more broadly. This is advertising that plays on fear, intolerance and ignorance, impugning the character not only of an individual candidate but of an entire race, religion, ethnicity, or other group. In a particularly egregious example, popular Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, a Democrat and a Muslim, is now being challenged in the race by Gary Boisclair, an anti-abortion activist, and member of Randall Terry’s Society for Truth and Justice (STJ), one of 25 candidates they are running in carefully selected advertising markets, less in hopes of getting the candidate elected than as a cover for running explicit anti-abortion tv advertising. It’s a sleazy but clever strategy, one that the organization itself cops to. I kind of admire it. But Bosclair is also using campaign ads promote a Islamophobic agenda, running ads that explicitly attack Ellison’s religion, and that is unacceptable.
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Culture Jamming Anti-Ads
These are spoof ads from Adbusters Magazine,
a not-for-profit, reader-supported, 120,000-circulation magazine concerned about the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces.
I think they are amazing. Funny, yet tragic. They point out the absurdity of advertising that promises to fulfill all our desires and yet only creates and enlarges desires that can never be filled.
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Ugh!
So Republican Congressman Jim DeMint from South Carolina said this in a conference call with 104 people from the group “Conservatives for Patient’s rights .”
this health care issue Is D-Day for freedom in America. If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him,” he said.
The group and others like it are attempting to stall debate and congressional voting on health care reform until after the August recess when the will on Congressional representatives is likely to be shaken by conflicting voices from constituents.
Obama responded as follows:
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This isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics. This about a health care system that is breaking America’s families, breaking America’s businesses and breaking America’s economy. And we can’t afford the politics of delay and defeat when it comes to health care. Not this time, not now. There are too many lives and livelihoods at stake.
I am with the President on this. Every day we fail to act more of the uninsured or under-insured suffer without care or go into debt paying for it. Every day more is wasted on unnecessary tests and procedures. Every day insurance companies fatten themselves off of our illness. And it is insurance companies that ration health care.
We should not stall action on this. Republicans, Democrats and those representing any other party should get around the table, negotiate and get to work.
Donkey Suits, Online Satire and Censorship in Azerbaijan
Late last month, a group of Azeri bloggers posted their latest tongue-in-cheek opus, a video in which a donkey holds a news conference before a circle of gravely nodding journalists. Last week in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, two of those bloggers, Mr. Hajizada, 26, and his fellow activist Emin Milli, 30, were arrested, the New York Times reports.
In Azerbaijan, as elsewhere in the region, Internet use has risen as press freedoms have dwindled. With the Azeri government buoyed by sky-high oil prices in recent years, opposition voices have all but disappeared from public life. It also has order viagra no prescription a pattern in the drug market. And cialis prices in australia made that pleasure affordable for more people. It all depends on the health conditions of the people and thus you can order whatever you desire, but it must be accurate according to your body need. viagra prescription free The victim purchase viagra of PTSD may have experienced or seen an event that induced extreme fear, shock and/or a feeling of helplessness or hopelessness. Television, once financed by competing oligarchs, has come under solid government control, and advertisers have pulled back from newspapers critical of the government. Web sites — especially those registered on foreign servers, which cannot be blocked by the government — became “the last source of information,” said Magerram Zeynalov, 27, a former newspaper reporter.
The arrests are believed to be a signal that the government is cracking down on the this outlet, as well.