The California Democratic Party came up with a brilliant way to "welcome" Sarah Palin to her rally in LA on Saturday. They rented a giant electronic billboard across the street from the rally, and posted questions for Palin submitted via text message! You gotta see this: Great work, CA Dems. How about kicking them a few bucks?
(Thanks to Gizmodo for hipping me to this in the first place.) UPDATE: If you have trouble getting the embedded video to work, try the direct link here: http://www.ustream.tv/... (h/t Hillblogger)
For those of you who can't see the video, here are some of the texts that were displayed:
"Are you worried you're in over your head?"
"In light of current events, I believe privatization of Social Security should be off the table. What are your thoughts?"
"Do you still believe that abstinence-only sex education is the best way to decrease teen pregnancies?"
"If you are so responsible, why did you leave Wasilla over $20m in debt?"
"You are proud that, in your words, your daughter decided to have her baby. Why take this decision away from every other woman in the U.S.?"
"Stop hate mongering."
"Say 'nuclear.'"
"Do you believe dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time?"
Et cetera. I'm sure the CA Dems did some moderation of the submitted comment; in any case there was some snark but mostly they were respectful and issue-oriented. I can imagine it was very effective.
UPDATE 2x: Wow, my first time on the rec list! Thanks everyone! Now go throw the bastards an anvil!
UPDATE 3x: Since we're still on the rec list, I thought I'd call out some of the great comments below.
First, credit where credit is due: navajo pointed out that it's Malacandra, a fellow Kossack, who wrote the code to parse the mobile phone feeds and get the questions up on the big screen! From a comment Malacandra left on an earlier post:
I'm a lone wolf...
... no, I won't use the "M" word. It's been tarnished forever.
I don't know about karma... but staying busy keeps me from melting down over the mendacity of the Republicans.
I do wear a fair number of hats: graphic designer, database programmer, as well as Flash/Actionscript, Javascript/HTML/CSS & PHP programmer, logo designer, and campaign tool builder.
Like the Forest Gump, you never know where I'm going to crop up. For example, the California Democratic Party had a huge Jumbotron set up across the street from Sarah Palin's rally in Southern California last weekend. In the days preceding the event I wrote the code that parsed the RSS feeds - generated from mobile phone messages - to display graphically on that big screen.
The big grid at the top of the DailyKos homepage with the tracking poll numbers? Yep, that's my graphics and CSS work.
That's on top of the constant drumbeat of stuff I do for Charlie Brown, Dan Seals, Jerry McNerney and Julie Bornstein's websites... and the graphics for all those Courage Campaign email blasts...
So, yeah, I really am that busy.
I notice that there's never enough money for health care... but there's always enough for war and bailouts.
by Malacandra on Mon Oct 06, 2008 at 11:23:37 PM PDT
Also, people had various complaints about the video. Yes, it's 45 minutes long, and don't expect any surprises, it's pretty much just great questions the whole way through.
And yes, it's Ustream, which is not as good as YouTube, but that's the only place the CA Dems put it, so it'll have to do, as I don't have access to the original video. It seems that the traffic from Kos broke the stream for a while, but it does seem to be working now. fivefouranonymous posted an alternate Ustream link which might work better for some people.
Finally, I can't resist a little bit of promotion for a previous diary which featured a song I wrote, The Senator Goes To Hell. Please take a listen if you have a minute. Maybe it can be a morale-booster for those of you working for Jim Martin or Al Franken or Bruce Lunsford!
DJD