I (and a few-thousand of his closest friends) received this email from Lawrence Lessig today regarding p2p-Politics.org:
- So this is some political spam, which you've earned by either (1) being in my address book, or (2) having sent me a question, comment, or criticism in the past. Consider this small request the price of our contact.
A bunch of us have put together a p2p-politics.org site which I'd be grateful if you could look at, and more importantly, pester the campaigns about.
The idea of the site is to enable people to send clips — both video and audio — about the candidate they support to people they know, asking them to listen to or watch the ads sent before they vote. These ads can come from the campaigns, or from anyone who wants to make an ad for a campaign. And as this email does, the site permits people to ad text to the message.
We were very successful in collecting ads supporting Kerry. Moveon.org had a bunch licensed under a Creative Commons license we we could get automatically. And the Kerry campaign then gave us a few more to include.
But despite our repeated requests, through many channels, we've not yet been able to get a reply from the Bush campaign.
So here's the request. If you go to the site (linked below) and think it worthwhile, can you send a brief email to the Bush campaign (there's a link on the site) or the Nader campaign (if that's your persuasion)?
If that's too much, then enjoy (or be frustrated by) the ads I've selected here. They are all tied to a theme I've written about — the effect of this election on the next generation — inspired, no doubt, by my confronting my own next generation, now just 13 months old.
It's a great idea - a clearinghouse of political ads, but this is just embarrassing that the Republicans haven't submitted a single ad. Republicans, if you want to be taken seriously as citizens of cyberspace, as tech-savvy, as blog literate, you have to get with the program and participate. Get-the-hell-on-it - consider yourselves pestered.
Article comments
1 - David Flanagan
If I were a political strategist for the Bush Campaign, there is no way I'd give permission to have Bush ads listed alongside all the 527 ads. The fact is, those all of the 527 ads are currently illegitimate because of the fact they are not conforming to the same campaign finance laws that the Bush and Kerry Campaigns must follow.
That might change in the future, but until it does, running legitimate campaign ads with illegitimate 527 ads is a huge mistake. Not suprisingly, the Kerry Campaign is making that mistake.
Go figure.
David Flanagan
Viewpointjournal.com