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</rant (for now)>

So, all that being said, there are some really funny / cool ads out there.  Ones that boarder more towards art / comedy than just pure brainwashing.  Ones that make interesting use of the medium they’re presented on.  For a while now, I’ve been reading a blog called I Believe in Adv (it cuts off there everywhere except in their page titles).  It collects the good ads – some funny, some serious, but all pretty effective.  So (point of the post) here’s some of my favorites:

• Toy soldiers
• Beer flow chart
• Haul ‘em in
• A collection of ticks

• Transitioning from Palin to the media (sort of)…
  
• This next video was an interview on CNN that was described on Talking Points Memo as, “CNN’s Campbell Brown performed what amounted to a live vivisection of Bounds on live television. It was pretty rough… Okay, when we went back to the tape. And the whole thing was so brutal, we decided to bring you the entire foreign policy segment of the interview.”
  The media has gotten to the point where “Give me an example” is considered a hard hitting question.  And “Please answer the question I asked” is “brutal”.  Following this interview the McCain campaign canceled McCain’s scheduled appearance on Larry King (also CNN) because they said Campbell Brown, the interviewer above, behaved improperly.  In other words, you can only talk to the candidates and our surrogates if you agree to solely be propaganda for them.  And really, Larry King?  They canceled an interview with Larry King?  He is the ultimate in slow pitch softball interviewing.  There are stray cats in the world that ask tougher questions than Larry King.Also, Bound’s “belittling” comment is also a great example of the constant switching between baseless attack and mindless victim hood in political arguments, especially within the current Republican party.
• In case you’d like a refresher on what real questions sound like, here an interview with McCain by a small town journalist in Maine: here.  (Sorry, I wanted to embed it, but for some reason it would autoplay as soon as you opened the page when I did.)  As a side note, Georgia attacked first, not Russia.  I hate that people keep letting it go when politicians say that Russia was the aggressor.
• After the RNC here in the Twin Cities, and the various police brutality and ignoring of civil rights that accompanied it, one of our local TV stations, KSTP, an ABC affiliate, took a rare editorial position – praising the local law enforcement.  The editorial came from Stanley Hubbard, the largest contributor to the Republican party in the state, and who let the RNC use his 125 foot yacht.  Oh yeah, he also owns the station.  Strangely, “no KSTP journalists were detained by police during the RNC and that Hubbard Broadcasting, Inc., was a sponsor of the RNC Host Committee.”  More here.  Quite the independent media we have here, huh?
• A good article on the role of the mainstream media in shaping how Americans see our foreign policy here.  Is it too early to start praising how open and free journalism is in China yet?
• On Cracked.com – Dear Media, What’s This Election About? A good commentary on the ACTUAL POLICY CONTENT of the average media outlet.  A fairly representative bit:
  

  High School students out there: The next time you have to write an essay about the energy crisis, include that exact line above in your concluding paragraph. And then let me know if you just failed the class or if you were classified as legally retarded. I won’t know what to call CNN until you get back to me, so step to it.

  Pretty well sums up my feeling on the mainstream media at this point.

• Once again, Jon Stewart is dead on:
  
• I’m kind of starting to feel like the main stream new outlets see themselves as the audience in an infomercial.  No real questions, just “tell us more”, and “but is that all you’ll do”, and “I don’t think that will work for me, will it?”  Instead of saying “Hey!  We don’t need this crap.  It’s garbage.  We’ve bought other things from you and they fell apart.  We trusted that you’d give us a good deal.  We trusted that you wouldn’t collect all of our credit card information for your own later use, and you lied to us.  You ripped us off, and now you’re feeding us the same garbage because we won’t fight back if you do.  We’ll guess what, it’s done,  we won’t have you on, or even talk about you like your a real candidate until you start answering some real questions.  You answer to the people, and the media are here to investigate for the people, not to be free advertising for you.”   They even have installment payments/buy now pay later (the national debt), the order in the next fifteen minutes and you won’t have to think about third party candidates,  and the we’ll lower the price and give you more, half the price, get two and a bonus gift – less taxes, but more government programs to leech off of.  And people keep thinking they’re getting a good deal.  Change the channel.
• So far, one of the best interviews with a candidate I’ve seen was David Letterman.  Really.  McCain was supposed to be on Letterman, and then called 90 minutes before the show, saying that he had to fly back to Washington immediately to save the economy.  McCain then stayed in town, did an interview with Katie Couric, and stayed over night in New York before going back to Washington. Letterman went on a tear.  Every single night after that, basically the whole Letterman show was a dissection of McCain.  Non stopped.  An example:
  
  McCain eventually agreed to come back on the show, I can only assume to stop having an hour of negative press, every single night. The entire show leading up to the interview with McCain was Letterman tearing apart McCain.  And I sort of expected to have McCain come on, and Letterman would roll over for him like everyone else does.  Nope:
  
  And really I would say it was rougher than that, they cut out parts to make it shorter.  I thought the really interesting part of this was also Letterman going back and forth between being goofy, and asking dead serious tough questions, and by doing so (and having the ability and guts to implicitly threaten a few more weeks of non-stop bashing on his show), he actually gets some decent answers.  It sort of struck me as the jester / fool character in Shakespeare plays.  The one with the least to loose, who is taken the least serious, can speak the truth in ways no one else can.  At the same time, the fact that Letterman wouldn’t mind bashing him for a few more weeks, or totally ignoring him in a way the news channels would never dare do, gives him an authority and a respect from the candidate that the news channels never have.