Most creative election ad of 2016?

We don’t agree with his policies, but this ad is funny and very effective: Gerald Daugherty, a Republican county commissioner in the Austin-area Travis County, has produced one of the best ad-spots of the season, depicting him as a politics-obsessed public servant whose long-suffering, side-eyeing wife can’t wait for him to be re-elected so she …

Andrew Boyd

“I think there is something affirming of our humanity in culture – in the community building side of things. A connective tissue, quilting all of us together and creating meaning as you strive for these outcomes. That is different from operational politics – when you’re just trying to do turn out or get numbers or …

Play the Game!

Grand Theft Auto gets patriotic In the interests of efficacy, a great deal of politics in recent years has been professionalized. Experts devise policies, lobbyists make the case to politicians, politicians fight for legislation, and lawyers file lawsuits in the courts to either enforce or overturn regulations. On the level of pure results it is …

The Donald gets duped: Harvard Lampoon tricks Trump with phony endorsement — and he’s not happy about it | Salon

The Donald’s been duped. In what’s been called a “a prank of presidential proportions,” the staff at Harvard University’s humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon, targeted Donald Trump for their latest prank in a longstanding rivalry with the University’s daily student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. Trump, the real-estate mogul turned Republican presidential frontrunner, inadvertently became the center of …

Overcoming political polarization… but not through facts

Ethan Zuckerman has posted a beautiful piece that stitches together many of the ideas we deal with in How To Win and the Center for Artistic Activism. I can’t recommend it enough: Overcoming political polarization… but not through facts It ties together polarization, confirmation bias, the media, David Simon and The Wire, and the need …

Diggers: If you can act it out, it’s real.

We thought: culture is much more important than politics. Let’s just start getting people living the way they wanna live. You wanna live in a world where you don’t have to work? Let’s make it. You wanna live in a world where you can get food for free? Let’s make it. You wanna live in …

Culture Gap – New York Bike Lanes

Duncombe and I have said more than once “you can change the laws, but it won’t matter if the culture doesn’t change with it.” For lack of a better term, I’m going to call this – for now – a Culture Gap. A change may be “the right thing,” environmentally, economically, socially, for justice, but …

In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Green Energy – NYTimes.com

Attempts by the Obama administration to regulate greenhouse gases are highly unpopular here because of opposition to large-scale government intervention. Some are skeptical that humans might fundamentally alter a world that was created by God. If the heartland is to seriously reduce its dependence on coal and oil, Ms. Jackson and others decided, the issues …

Again, the truth doesn't matter

A smart lefty is frustrated that the right is getting ahead by asserting lies and the left sticks to the truth. We know the answer here don’t we? Use the truth but tap into the same outrage? Or? An excerpt from the folks at Poplicks: I know that there will always be fierce opposition to …

Miami's Community Avengers

Have No Fear the Community Avengers are Here! As the right wing mob mobilizes to shut down democratic debate on health care reform; as Van Jones is forced from the White House through distortions of the truth and plays on racial and political fears; as the recession deepens – the masked marauders known as the …

The power of the symbolic win (do-over)

apparently I added the wrong video the last time I tried to do this, so let me try again. http://blip.tv/play/gaEW3O5ygpNs Mainly for Jay and Duncombe. I think at the core, one of the things he’s talking about, is if all that work getting Obama elected actually mattered…

Candy Raver Russian Revolutionaries

Not everyone has much faith in art-activism, but you can’t please ’em all. Do symbolic protests accomplish anything more than raising morale for the protesters? If not is it enough to simply raise morale? Or do actions like this War prank create temporary autonomous zones and manifest, albeit briefly, the type of reality the activists …

Bill Ayers on Fresh Air

Bill Ayers on Fresh Air with Terry Gross This is an except from the end of the interview that I thought was relevant to the questions we’re asking in How to Win. Gross: Do you think some of the tactics that you took on were in some part this youthful expression of anger, something that …

Marketing Lessons from Obama's Campaign – BusinessWeek

In recent weeks, I’ve ended up more than once amid marketing executives discussing, with apparent seriousness, what the purveyors of ordinary products can learn from the campaign that sold America on Barack Obama. To which my response is, well, they can learn lots. As long as they, too, sell something that makes people cry when …

Politics as Product

Happy Spokesmodel Selection Day to one and all. I am certainly not the first to comment on the commodification of American politics in general and this race specifically, but a little more can be said before we’re on the next distraction tomorrow. This election has been primarily a contest between the values of experience and …

LIVERMORE / Anti-nuke activists lose out on bid to run weapons lab

A bid by Bay Area anti-nuclear weapons activists and the New College of California to take over Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been rejected by the U.S. nuclear weapons agency. Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment) out of Livermore, New College in San Francisco and two allied groups filed the bid for the Livermore …

Larry Flynt Producing 'Palin porno' political parody

I think the key line here actually comes at the end. “Whatever you think of Larry Flynt, the man knows his First Amendment,” Kelly concluded. Seriously, that smut monger is a true champion of the First Ammendment, and we should all remember that the freedom of speech is the freedom to be offended. Now is …

I’m Rubber, You’re Glue …

by Jonathan Alter Published Aug 23, 2008 From Newsweek magazine issue dated Sep 1, 2008 It’s hard to predict what will stick. ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ was a hand-scrawled sign hung in Little Rock. When NEWSWEEK reported earlier this summer that the McCain family owns at least seven houses, few outside the hothouse of politics …