Category: Politics

The American Museum of the Moving Image is hosting an exhibition called Living Room Candidate — dozens of political ads spanning 1952 to the present illustrating how presidential candidates have used the medium of television to convey message through the years, and how those ads have mirrored the TV styles of their times. Most of the early ads seem so naive by today’s standards — silly cartoons of marching elephants, donkeys, and hard-working Americans, or pretty girls singing content-free political ditties. Some are just plain bizarre.

A surprising number feature life-long devotees of one party or another switching party loyalties, like this 1964 Confessions of a Republican (I hear this ad was later criticized for being scripted and played by an actor). Fast forward to 2004 – ads cover 5 subjects in 30 seconds, and end debating who still has shrapnel in their leg from Vietnam.

Anyway, the site is a great record of a half century of TV politics. The clips are like peanuts, hard to stop watching.

Zell Miller should learn to check snopes — or at least google — before busting a blood vessel in front of America. Turns out that a key chunk of his twisted, toxic speech at the RNC was lifted directly from a widely circulated chain email supposedly demonstrating Kerry’s record on defense spending, but soundly unraveled by snopes. I’m sure Miller’s explosive retort: “Get out of my face!” to Hardball’s Chris Matthews isn’t helping his image much.

Thanks Martini Republic.

If passed, the Induce Act would make it possible to sue anyone who makes a device that can arguably be used to “induce” a consumer to infringe copyright. That, by many people’s reckoning, would apply to DVD burners, iPods, copy machines, word processors, and even the pencil.

Ernest Miller points to a mock lawsuit (fake Apple complaint) drafted by EFF attorneys to show what a case against the iPod might look like under the Induce Act.

Before the introduction of portable digital music players, the value of the music files derived from infringing sources was limited by the fact that computer users generally had to be sitting at their computers in order to play and enjoy them. Defendant Apple knew this and hence made the calculated decision to intentionally induce and enhance the attractiveness of infringement by providing these infringers with a device to enhance the rewards of their illegal labors – the iPod.

Good discussion following Miller’s post. But Brad Hutchings note that the RIAA has actually endorsed Apple’s FairPlay DRM model is beside the point — open this door and The Man gets an opportunity to block any manner of innovative technology equally capable of respecting or breaking the law (the crowbar and spraypaint also come to mind as examples of technologies that have both legal and illegal applications).

Thanks mneptok.

This Modern World has scanned evidence that “Bush was an asshole even in college.” Here seen violating major groundrules of rugby – both feet off the ground during a tackle, tackling above the shoulders, and oh, um, slugging a player hard in the face. “I’m sure by next week Karl Rove will have a collection of rugby players claiming that John Kerry was even worse…”

During the free speech sit-ins at UC Berkeley in December 1964 (two months after I was born), Mario Savio said:

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; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

The Free Speech Movement Cafe at the center of campus is where I get my coffee every day. The interior is decorated with blow-up images from the free speech movement, memorializing it for the current generation so we don’t take it for granted, and so we are reminded that the relative freedom of speech we have today was hard-won, and that the threats to civil liberties we experience today are nothing new under the sun.

Via saladwithsteve, an excerpted transcription of Bill Clinton on NPR, speaking on Bush’s 2003 tax cuts:

“And to make matters worse, we gave half of the money to the top 1 percent and an extraordinary amount of the money to the other 200,000 americans like me who paid income taxes on over a million dollars last year and I just think it’s wrong. I think it is so wrong. We’ve got national guardsman fighting over in iraq and the administration doesn’t even want to make them eligible for military health care benefits if they’re not covered by their own plans. We’ve increased the cost of veterans benefits at health centers by 500%. We’ve cut 300,000 kids out of health care programs and I’ve still got my tax cut? That’s my sacrifice in the war on terror? I think it’s bad ethics and terrible economics and it’s something we’re going to have to pay for a long time to come.”

What I tried to do was to leave my generation, the baby boom generation, with the security of knowing that their children would not have to support them instead of their grandchildren. It was a huge economic gift to the next generation of Americans. Now we’ve thrown all of that away on what I consider to be highly self indulgent tax cuts for upper income people. I think it’s selfish and I think it’s wrong. […] We should have targetted these tax cuts to middle class people and small business. They could have even been bigger. […] I would liked to seen an expansion in earned income tax credit for lower income working people. They could have been permanent. Most of this stuff is just wrong. It’s bad economics. It’s personally selfish for really wealthy people to have this kind of money. I know no pertinent millionaire in New York, and I know a lot of them, Republican and Democrat, who thinks this is right. I don’t know anybody who thinks this is right.