by David Burn | Oct 11, 2004 | Politics
“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” – George Orwell
Republican strategists–notably Ken Mehlman, Andrew Card and Karl Rove–are wildy successful takover artists. Their greatest conquest may be the English language itself. To deflect the glaring weakness of their ideas and the candidates who spout them off, the minds behind the scene shamelessly accuse their Democratic challengers of the very things they themselves are without question guilty of.
Karl Rove, a.k.a. Big Brother’s little helper
1) Bush-Cheney have attacked both Kerry and Edwards for missing key votes in the Senate, when no President in U.S. history has taken more time off than Dubya.
2) Bush-Cheney claim Kerry is unfit for the role of commander-in-chief, while they have five draft deferments and one absent without leave between them.
3) Bush-Cheney claim to be fiscally conservative, when in fact they are spending our money like drunken sailors.
4) Bush-Cheney accuse the mass media of liberal bias, yet there is not one name-brand journalist (except Lou Dobbs) willing to consistently challenge this administration.
5) Bush-Cheney assert that the world is a safer place today, while the nation of Iraq is in complete chaos and daily being flooded with more terrorists, Iran and North Korea are arming their nukes, genocide is occuring in Sudan and Russia is regressing into totalitarianism.
The question I have is why Democrats are not better prepared to expose these blatant lies, and belittle the liars who tell them. Some might say it’s important to honor the office, if not the man. No! We cannot honor those who willfully destroy the truth, The Constitution, the economy, etc. Doing so only contributes to the problem.
by David Burn | Oct 11, 2004 | Digital culture
Official corporate blogs are still rare, said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, largely because “corporate marketing and branding is often an exercise in hypercontrol of a message, and that doesn’t work well in a blogging context.” -from New York Times
Robert Scoble of Microsoft has put together a helpful guide to corporate blogging. Microsoft is a firm that has hundreds of bloggers on staff. These bloggers opinions are not official company doctrine, they are personal opinions. Yet, Microsoft encourages the activity by hosting many of these blogs and also by linking to them from company web pages. Scoble’s guide applies to this loose framework situation, but even more so to firm’s considering making a blog part of their marketing strategy.
As Palfrey suggests, very few corporate blogs exist at this point in time. I have but four listed in my Blogroll here. Please notify me if you know of others.
by David Burn | Oct 10, 2004 | Politics
“Daily the corporate supremacists pull Kerry–through money, Wall Street advisers and sheer power–in their direction. If the liberals do not demand from Kerry commitments in detail that pull him toward the necessities of the people, guess in which direction he will continue to move. If he wins the election without mandates, corporatist dogma will follow him decisively into the Oval Office.” -Ralph Nader, in today’s Washington Post
Ralph Nader is the only Presidential candidate who has worked his entire life to help people by battling corporate greed. But because he’s marginalized by the mainstream media and now also by frightened Democrats, too few people are prepared to vote for him.
Ralph was on C-SPAN today and spoke eloquently and persuasively, as he always does. It took a caller who emigrated to the U.S. from Ethiopia to point out that throughout American history, the Dems and Republicans have been little more than flimsy fronts for corporate interests. Ralph picked up on this and described the crucial role third parties have played in moving some of the biggest issues we’ve faced as a nation forward. Issues like slavery, women’s suffrage, and workers’ rights. I understand it is work to pick up a history book, but if we’re going to get out from under corporate control and reinstitute American democracy, it will be necessary.
Loyalist Democrats are asking what Nader hopes to achieve by running for President this year. I think the answer to that question is pretty plain to see. He wants the Dems to adopt his agenda. To achieve that goal one must apply pressure. Nader’s candidacy is holding them accountable, and in my estimation it’s some of the most important work of this ubercitizen’s life.
by David Burn | Oct 9, 2004 | Politics
Yesterday on CNBC Ana Marie Cox, a.k.a. Wonkette questioned whether Bush was wearing a wire during the first Presidential Presentation (to borrow Lou Dobbs’ phrasing). I though it was a joke, for Cox is hilarious and being funny and outrageous is her thing. Now, today I see there is more to it. The idiot-in-chief was very likely being fed his answers, which is strange enough, but what truly baffles is why his answers were so lame. Why cheat if it does not further your cause?
by David Burn | Oct 8, 2004 | Advertising
from Adweek:
The New York office of Portland, Ore.-based Wieden + Kennedy won the first Yahoo! Big Idea Chair Award, which honors unconventional ideas in advertising, for its campaign for Sega’s ESPN National Football League video game. The work centered on Beta7, a fictional video game tester who claimed playing it made him black out and tackle people at random, and thus the game should be banned. TV and print ads were also part of the mix.
“What we were trying to do with the Beta7 work was really create a multidimensional storytelling experience, something that people could not only watch but actually participate in,” said Ty Montague, an Andy judge and Wieden creative director about the Beta7 campaign.
“It’s so ahead of its time it’s almost unjudgeable,” added judge Guy Seese, creative director at Cole & Weber/Red Cell in Portland. “It’s a campaign that manifests itself on a grassroots level and proliferates online.”
—
Here’s some of the award-winning ad copy from the Beta-7 site:
Sega is a deceitful corporate juggernaut that will stop at nothing in it’s short sighted pursuit of the almighty dollar, even if it means destroying the lives of innocent people.
And I DON’T mean Sega destroyed my life as in, “Their games are so addictive I sat on my ass playing them until my girlfriend left me and I weighed 450 lbs. so now I want a hefty cash settlement.” No friends, my VERY REAL problems, which are a direct result of the very real and deliberate actions by the Sega Corporation include:
-Bruises and welts on and about my head, neck, torso, arms, and legs, as well as a debilitating sprain to my right ankle and cuts on my right forearm.
-Threat of further physical violence.
-Destruction of my personal property.
-Loss of my job and livelihood.
-Unpredictable, uncontrollable, violent outbursts that I have no memory of, which have made me a stranger to my friends and family.
Sega thinks they can just use human beings as guinea pigs in their sick experiments, then toss them aside like trash and forget about them. They MUST NOT be allowed to get away with this, and with your help they won’t.
—
Naturally, customers*, in this case gamers, might find this approach confusing, as never before in the history of advertising (to my knowledge) has a firm taken this bold of an approach. I’m still formulating my opinion as to the campaign’s merits. For sure, this is an interesting development, and one that involves the customer directly. That part I salute. But it concerns me that the central character in this drama is fictitious, not because of the fiction itself, but due to the fact that consumers were not clued in to the fact that it was fiction. This is advertising masked as something else. I envision a much different, more honest use of blogs and other media, as the future of marketing.
In a prelude to this hoax, Seattle agency Wong Doody introduced Skyhigh Airlines on the web, ostensibly to benefit their client Alaska Air, but the Skyhigh site is obviously pure humor with no deception.
Many thanks to my former colleague, Jay Roth of Integer Denver, for bringing this work to my attention.
*There’s reason to believe this supposed consumer’s site, is actually part of Sega’s Beta-7 campaign. For one, I just sent an e-mail to the address provided and it bounced back.
by David Burn | Oct 7, 2004 | Politics
Many otherwise intelligent Democrats are still, to this day, concerned about Ralph Nader costing them another election. This despite proof that Nader did not cost Gore the election in 2000. It’s been my contention all along that Gore cost Gore the election, via his very own brand of ineptitude, including his absurd distancing from Clinton. But don’t listen to me. Al From, founder and CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council, wrote in Blueprint Magazine (1-24-01) that according to their own exit polls, Bush would have beat Gore by one percentage point if Nader hadn’t run in 2000. In other words, Nader draws voters from both parties, independents, and from people who would otherwise not vote.
Aside from Gore’s glaring weakness as a candidate, there is substantial evidence that Republicans, most notably Jeb Bush, cost Gore the White House.
“In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this “scrub” list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, more than half–about 54 percent–are black or Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number ultimately purged, but there’s no argument that this electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush’s operatives gave the White House to his older brother.” -from Gregory Palast’s article* in The Nation
Then there’s the fact that the broadcast media in this country is firmly in the hands of the right, or else strong-armed by the right, as is the case with CBS. As previously reported here, and elsewhere, John Ellis, a venture capitalist, freelance journalist, blogger and first cousin of both Jeb and George Bush, was the man responsible for calling the election for Bush on Fox News after a conference call with his two power-hungry cousins. Every other network quickly fell in line with this erroneous pronouncement. From there it was for the courts to settle, and settle it they did.
*Palast also reveals that nationwide, 1.9 million votes were never counted in 2000, for reasons of spoilage.
by David Burn | Oct 7, 2004 | Politics
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.” -Mario Savio, speaking in Berkeley in 1964
A group of private citizens in Nelson, British Columbia are planning to honor “the courageous legacy of Vietnam War resisters and the Canadians who helped them resettle in that country during that tumultuous era.” The organizers of Our Way Home National Reunion Weekend also planned to unveil a monument in Nelson, B.C., during their July 2006 two-day festival. That is, until Fox News got wind of their plans. Now Nelson’s political leaders, concerned with losing American tourism dollars, say “Not in our town.”
In direct opposition to this retro-fearful approach, we have Berkeley, California celebrating the 40th anniversary of The Free Speech Movement this week. More than 50 events are being held to mark the movement’s 40th anniversary, including an echo of the captive police-car episode. The week’s highlight will be a noon rally Friday atop a police car in Sproul Plaza with former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean among the speakers.
Mario Savio
by David Burn | Oct 6, 2004 | Politics
Given the dire seriousness of Bush-Cheney’s repeated lies told to the American public, I find it odd that the Veep would allow such a careless slip during the debate last night. In his desire to disparage Senator Edwards, a man he claims has outsized ambitions for a first-term Senator, Cheney said he had never met the man from North Carolina, despite his weekly trips to the Senate. In fact, Cheney has met Edwards three times prior to last night.
Edwards and the Veep at a prayer breakfast in 2001
In an even crazier twist, Cheney asked people who doubted him (I forget on which point) to go to Fact Check dot com. He meant to say, Fact Check dot org, a nonpartisan site run by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. The Fact Check dot com people (who run a for-profit advertising site based in the Cayman Islands), deluged with traffic, slyly redirected their site to George Sorros dot com. Billionaire investor George Sorros, is a powerful opponent of the sitting administration. Ah, the internet.
by David Burn | Oct 6, 2004 | Advertising
“Everyone likes to seek praise. But criticism is much more useful: it gives you progress. In concrete terms praise doesn’t add anything. You know, never be afraid to ask because first you get to know and secondly there’s always someone happy to tell you. Seeking criticism goes against our culture but I don’t understand why: praise just allows you to prove to yourself that your work is good. It will probably be OK. But it won’t be great. It’s better to ask, ‘What’s wrong with it?’”-Paul Arden, a surly Brit with 40+ years in advertising
Paul Arden looking the part
by David Burn | Oct 5, 2004 | Literature, Nebraska
Ted Kooser, the nation’s new poet laureate, is another in a long line of Nebraska wordsmiths* to find respectability outside da Corn.
Selecting A Reader
by Ted Kooser
First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
“For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.
*Nebraska’s famous writers include Ron Hansen, Loren Eisley, John G. Neihardt, Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, Wright Morris, and Bess Streeter Aldrich. Essayist Megan Daum recently made rural Nebraska her home. And Lincoln native Ana Marie Cox, a.k.a. Wonkette–now working from suburban Washington, DC–is clearly one of the nation’s hottest bloggers.
