Sunday, November 4, 2012; 9:56:09 AM Eastern
Crowd-sourcing the election
- A note for next time, let's not let Shelly Adelson have all the fun. :-)
- One thing we've learned in the last few years is that if you have an idea that tickles the imagination of enough people, you can raise a lot of money online to develop the idea.
So, when a video like this one comes along, that mixes a Republican crowd mocking climate change with scenes of the Sandy disaster, we could put $50 million behind running it where ever we like.- The cool thing about this is that we could decide to run ads that our candidate would never run. We could run them in non-battleground states. Or we could run ads to make sure an issue gets discussed in debates that our favorite candidate is trying to side-step. We can make winning about making politics do for us what we want it to do, instead of settling for the compromises that come from letting individual fatcats do all the pushing. You and I may not have a billion dollars, but if we pool our resources, we can act like we do.
- Or we could run ads that shame the big spenders, reveal things about them they don't want revealed, give them an incentive to crawl back into their holes and stop pushing the rest of us around. I'm looking at you Thomas Peterffy.
- I believe that Citizens United actually opened a big door that we can all take advantage of, not just Republican dickheads.
- And yes, I know the title of this piece is funny. The founders of our country were the original crowd-sourcing guys, and voting is the ultimate form of crowd-sourcing. We've just gotten out of the practice of being proactive with our vote. We only vote on the things the rich guys let us vote on. Well, we have the tools to change that, imho.