40 Powerful Issue Ads
Many of these issue ads deliver a vivid jolt. As indicated by the title of the article, many of these do make me stop and think.
Duck (And Cover…)
By now those who don’t know about Phil Robertson and the debacle at A & E are most likely among those who have no access to any kind of media. They have no idea what the world is doing, because they have no way of knowing what to pay attention to. [More ... ]
Military Voting Philosophy
I remember the presidential election of 2004, during which the armed services were flooded with the message that it was seditious to speak out against your Commander in Chief, and certainly bad to consider voting against your own commander. Luminaries of the time like Ann Coulter published the principle that anyone who casts doubt on ones president is a traitor. This was a solidly accepted conservative plank.
But the message fed to members of the armed forces has changed for the 2012 election:
This image has been going around on Facebook, among other sources. I suspect that the message they receive about their Commander in Chief is different than before. There also is a busy meme insinuating that Democrats are busily working to deny military members their right to absentee vote.
Does this mean that the military is a Republican organization? Or does it cleave to one of the Three Tea Party branches?
Australia makes cigarette companies paste graphic warnings on packs of cigarettes.
In 2009, Congress gave the FDA the authority to regulate tobacco. The FDA responded with gusto:
The Food and Drug Administration wants large, graphic warning labels to scare smokers, but tobacco companies say that violates their right to free speech.
Diseased lungs, gnarly rotting teeth, even what appears to be the corpse of a smoker are some of the images that accompany the bold new cigarette labels the FDA requires to cover half a pack of cigarettes, front and back. The written warnings include: "Smoking Can Kill You" and "Cigarettes Cause Cancer."
As you might expect, the cigarette companies fiercely oppose this approach, and the federal courts are grappling with this issue. In Australia, the High Court just ruled that the cigarette companies must place gruesome labels on their packs of cigarettes.
The High Court rejected a challenge by tobacco companies who argued the value of their trademarks will be destroyed if they are no longer able to display their distinctive colors, brand designs and logos on packs of cigarettes.
How Rights Become Privileges: MO Amendment 2
The 2012 Missouri primary had several important lessons to impart. The first, which I may have discussed in previous election years, is that the way to bring the "correct" voters to the polls is to have an apparently innocuous but important candidate or issue and a loud, contentious issue or candidate that only seems to matter to one side.
In this primary cycle, there was a preponderance of hotly contested Republican seats, and a very dangerous, never advertised Tea Party constitutional amendment. Republicans came out to vote overwhelmingly, and the Amendment passed resoundingly.
The full body of the amendment is at the bottom of this article.
Basically on the ballot it read as if it was just reinforcing the first clause of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
- In reality, it says that people have the right to worship the (singular, Christian) Almighty God (but not all those others) including to pray whenever their conscience dictates (such as during science classes).
- Public meetings can now be started with exclusionary prayers as long as the officiant is invited by someone.
- I have not yet figured out how the mandatory publishing of the Bill of Rights in schools will be twisted, but I expect as a precedent to posting the Ten Commandments adjacent (as an alleged inspirational source)
- Students cannot be punished for refusing to do assignments that might conflict with their faith (evolution, geology, astronomy, etc).