Communication Professors Speak Out is an open letter from several political communication professors to the McCain-Palin campaign, protesting efforts by the campaign to “other” Obama I agree that the Republiclans are stoking the fires of racism while avoiding direct racist attacks, but I do wonder how effective messages from academics like this are in improving political discourse.

I’m blogging in a variety of different places this semester. I’m reposting this from a blog related to my assistantship, the Digital Media @ Colab blog.

This week, US citizens began noticing billboards promoting Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. This would be nothing new, except the billboards appear in the XBox 360 game “Burnout Paradise.” The Obama campaign has sunk a portion of its funds into advertising in online games. The skeptic in me doubts that these ads would have much effect in electoral outcome, but, instead, encourage younger voters to become more engaged with politics and extend Obama’s branding as a new kind of politician.

Of course, if Obama wins, seeing the president’s face in your video game could very well seem Big-Brother-ish, rather than revolutionary.

Over at Talking Points Memo, David Kurtz has a good explanation of the difference between push polling and opinion polling designed to test negative campaign messages. in short, push polling does not use sampling – it’s just phone canvassing disquised as a poll – while more legitimate opinion polls might present a barrage of politically tilted questions, but are actually used to gauge responses to the tilt. A few years ago, I was polled by an outfit out of Utah, asking questions like, “Do you support the repeal of the death tax.” At the time, I assumed it was a push poll because it was clear that they weren’t trying to get a real sense of public opinion, but now it seems like they were interested in what I had to say. I hung up on them, but I suspect they could use that data as well.

The good folks at Talking Points Memo created this video to contest Sarah Palin and John McCain’s claims of being earmark reformers. (Earmarks are provisions in federal spending bills that direct money to specific projects – porkbarrel projects.) I’m posting it here because I think it’s good information design the number of hogs and the cash-register audio cues do a good job of reflecting the scale of earmarks in Alaska, even if the representations are a bit imprecise.

Talking Points Memo also created this nice graphic to mock the faux outrage from Republicans over Obama’s use of the common expression “lipstick on a pig.” I wonder how the Republicans would have reacted if he had said “frosting on a turd.”

Over on Eyeteeth, I saw this video where activists swept up in the police actions during the RNC describe their experiences with the police. In particular, what’s interesting about this video is that some subjects show the injuries the cops’ less-lethal weapons gave them.

MnIndy video: RNC police brutality press conference from Chris Steller on Vimeo.

Although I do suspect we’re getting pretty one-sided accounts from some of the subjects, it’s pretty clear that the police swept up far too many people during their RNC actions. I find it frustrating that there seems to be no accountability for police when their clear goal is to suppress First-Amendment rights in the favor of paying customers like the RNC. Yes, there are civil-rights lawsuits after the fact, but municipalities often take out insurance policies covering any litigation damages during events like the RNC, so there is no incentive for police to treat activists fairly and respectfully.