Marketing For Good or Evil?

So a co-worked passed this link to me today — a group is trying to shame McDonald’s into not giving out toy Hummers with their Happy Meals. If you’re so inclined, you can also make your own McDonald’s road sign there.

Like this:

Ronald McHummer

But oddly, after I was done checking the site out, I started thinking “wouldn’t a hamburger for lunch be a good idea?”

Not that I would have gotten said burger at McD’s, but still, it got me thinking. Maybe that Ronald McHummer site is in fact an evil marketing ploy designed to get people going to McDonald’s!

Oh, and for the record, I ended up having schwarma for lunch. Yum yum.

Priorities

Apparently, despite this week’s unpleasantness, the Bush administration has its security priorities in order …. NOT:

While the British terror suspects were hatching their plot, the Bush administration was quietly seeking permission to divert $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new homeland explosives detection technology.

Congressional leaders rejected the idea, the latest in a series of steps by the
Homeland Security Department that has left lawmakers and some of the department’s own experts questioning the commitment to create better anti-terror technologies.

And this is not an isolated incident:

For more than four years, officials inside Homeland Security also have debated whether to deploy smaller trace explosive detectors

Lingering Ghosts of the 60s

Today seems to be one of those days where I spend more time admiring what other people wrote instead of coming up with something of my own to say. Bad me. But still, this paragraph of Digby’s is too good to pass up:

But when it came to the war there is one blindingly obvious fact that nobody seems to think is significant: the Vietnam War split the Democrats because it was run by Democrats. The Pentagon papers didn’t indict a bunch of Republicans, after all. It was Lieberman-Lamont writ very, very large and with much bigger consequences.

The fact is that most Democrats, not being natural authoritarians, don’t put up with this crap from their leaders, of either party. They hold them accountable. Now I realize that for some twisted illogical reason that means they are seen as unserious and irresponsible in American politics, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s the right thing to do. When your country is engaged in dangerous wars based on lies and obscure reasoning, it is immoral to say nothing simply because you are afraid it will make you look bad.

Read the rest. To the people who stop by this corner of the Internet, it’s preaching to the choir, but a well-written sermon is worth it.