"NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The GoDaddy.com commercial that ran in the first quarter of last night's Super Bowl was hard to miss.
In it, a buxom brunette appears before a censorship committee to defend a proposed spot for the company, a reseller of Internet domain names. The commercial was meant to be in-your-face, a parody of how skittish network executives have become in the face of a government crackdown on bawdy programming.
For anyone who may have missed the spoof, it was supposed to run again in the second half.
From www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050113/NEWS/501130322/1003/NEWS02
"CONCORD, N.H. -- Helen Johnston is an 80-year-old retired pediatrician who hardly considers herself much of a risk for being sued.
That's not how her insurance company sees it, however.
Johnston is losing extra coverage she bought years ago while she still practiced medicine -- not because she's a retired doctor, but because she is active in Francestown politics.
The Providence Mutual Fire Insurance Co. sent her a letter last month notifying her it is not renewing her $1 million umbrella policy next month due to "the political positions the insured holds."
We've just completed the latest data on companies bankrolling the '05 Coronation on the 20th. There are more than a few surprises on the list. The biggest one is additive, though, because it just emphasizes how pitiful "campaign finance reform" is. We have campaign finance reform, and we have over $17,000,000 in executive contributions tracked. An end to soft money, yet we've conservatively tracked $49,866,298 in...uh...soft money, aka 527 groups. And nearly eight million bankrolling the Coronation (in that case, shouldn't the whole thing be free of charge for all Americans to get in to, and not just be a form you have to fill out and see if you are on the "list"?)
We found lots of interesting stuff (including a persistent, ongoing inability for the Presidential staff to spell correctly) from the most recent list of donors to the inaugural. There's some surprises in here for me, not sure about you, but it's definitely more good info to use when trying to avoid buying from Republican-oriented companies.
We are putting together a list of who is supporting the Inauguration in '05. Apparently, they are well ahead of schedule, judging by this note on their site:
"* UPDATED AS OF THURSDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2005"
We have a list of companies financially supporting the Corona-er - Inauguration - some of which are useful to consumers wanting to shop blue, most of which should already be on the shopper's ignore list.
I just attended a meeting of our local food co-operative. It was my first, and rather unnerving. The only reason I went was to ask them why some of the brands on their shelves - which are generally considered by consumers to be good, wholesome organic-if-possible products from local and regional producers around the country - why some of these brands were in fact subsidiaries of Philip Morris/Altria, General Mills, J.M. Smucker, Nestle, and Kellogg's.
We've just added to our volunteers page at http://www.cobb24.com/ (formerly freenortheast) and need people to jump on, sign up and fill out as many blue-friendly local/regional companies as they can come up with (or let us know brands we missed from companies we already have).
Just sign up at http://www.cobb24.com/volunteers.php . You will get an access sent by e-mail which will give you a password, and from there you can enter the volunteers section.
I just entered the contributions info for Amerada Hess, expecting it to be like any other huge oil company. Boy, was I surprised. No PAC listed for Hess on Opensecrets, and 99% democrat soft money in 2002. 2000 was more traditional for the "best" of the gas companies, 29% dem and 71% republican...and then I checked our 2004 list. It's showing about 96% democrat in soft money, mostly from John Hess, who donated to:
Barack Obama
John Kerry
Wes Clark
Chris John
Erskine Bowles
Robert Menendez
Tom Daschle
DNC Services Corporation
Ken Salazar
as well as Bush and the RNC, and John McCain. Have we at last found an oil company which we can agree with?
FreeNortheast/Cobb24 has put together a site listing the major companies who we feel deserve progressive support this holiday season at http://www.projectbluechristmas.com/ Like our lists, we'll be adding to this as necessary. Ir is a list of common brands/companies for Christmas gifts whose parents are not donating heavily Republican (a lot of them have shown no inclination either way).
Well...I just plowed through the FEC 2003/2004 soft money/individual donor database and it looks like an Ohio recount, what a mess of 2 million plus records.
Anyways, I think there are some really good companies (all of them are listed here) I'd feel safe shopping with, as well as some specific ones that deserve mention.
Hi - with just over 400 corporations and 4000 brands catalogued, the action database at FreeNortheast is almost ready to go for the holiday season and more. We're going to encourage people to support neutral or at least non-damaging-to-progressive businesses in lieu of very Republican ones for the holiday season and everything else, and we need as many brands/chains/products as possible to make this possible.
GayCom/PlanetOut (the ones that brought you interesting information you didn't know about Republican staffers) just sent out their recommended list of employers. Some interesting points, including the disturbing revelation their customers seem to consider Wal Mart a great employer for gay people. I put together a detailed analysis, and would like comments, over at my blog which is still a bit hiccupy due to DNS move earlier.
Updated: I have probably bollocksed it up, but http://www.dkosopedia.com/index.php/Money_Changes_Everything is the Kosopedia thread which gives people more of an idea of the why, what, how of this project.
It's finally live: http://www.freenortheast.com/ has a database of around 2500 brands, searchable and categorized, with links to who owns them and where the money went. In this final version of the database:
250+ corporations and 2500+ brands/chains
Shows companies who support Republicans including six really bad Republicans and Bush
Broken down into good, bad, and worst companies
Includes regional/national companies who've no PAC and no soft money organization
Yes, not politically related...but I am working on attaching a blog to the Freenortheast database...and the documentation is useless. Just want to be able to get this up and running, and it will not show a "post comment" box, or a section list. So, if anyone has any idea wheere this is, please let me know :-)
I'm beginning to wonder if we aren't supposed to hate FOX news as a part of News Corp's marketing strategy. I was all set to to flame them to death as far as contributions - but figuring out what the hell was going on proved a bit strange. Overall, from what I can find, mind you, which includes an invisible corporation in Delaware, FOX/News Corp has a profile that would seem to be a very conservative corporation - not extremely so based on the figures I've been seeing from other corporations.
Please don't flame me - I just am trying to figure out what the hell is going on here. Looks to me like FOXNews' corporate strategy was to build brand recognition based on hating their anchors and coverage without backing it up with huge Rep support.
Based on a lot of comments and suggestions, I've updated the list of red-supporting companies drastically. Still a bit more to go, but the important part of this database is mostly online except for brands whose owners contribute too much to the reds. I am looking for lots more input. Anything I can do to make this clearer or cleaner would be great, and once this is live I think it can fuel a lot of specific action-oriented campaigns.
I have just put up, in rather rapid fashion due to the requests, a resource for Blue Staters wanting to know about Red-supporting products. There's an article and a table, plus a few other articles. I set this resource up primarily focusing on the Northeastern blue states, so it does have some slant but I think it gives a very good idea. Once I get more requests, I can add research to this easily. The main site is http://www.freenortheast.com/ and also has related information about blue/red numbers.
I've posted this before but it ended up near the bottom of an archive. One of the features of Parliamentary Governments is that with umpteen parties, none of them gets a majority so they have to form coalitions.
I, and I assume many others of us, have seen the inherent shortcomings of the two-party system. What do you guys think about this: against the Republican Congress, and in the State congresses, we focus energy not just on Democrats running for office, but other, similiarly liberal parties like Greens and Progressives, who especially in local politics might be able to gain more traction since they will be appealing to their base whereas Democrats don't always do that.
