Agenda
- Leif Utne – guest speaker
- Break
- Discussion leader – Paolo
- Post-mortem: Initiative campaign
Lecture/Discussion
- Leif Utne
- Paolo
- Mobs in action: Cooks Source
Money in politics:
Sen. Evan Bayh is retiring this year. The Democrat didn’t lose his race, and he wasn’t down in the polls. He’s just, well, leaving. And one of the reasons is that he’s tired of the money. “It’s miserable,” he says. “It is not uncommon to have a fundraiser for breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner, and if you have spare time in between, you go to an office off Capitol Hill and you dial for dollars. Then the weekend rolls around, and you get on a plane and travel the countryside with a tin cup in your hand. And it gets worse each cycle.” – Ezra Klein
The next election will bring an explosion of political money — perhaps hundreds of millions more than ever before — without effective spending limits, a fundraising bar raised sky high by Barack Obama in his presidential campaign in 2008 and multimillion-dollar fuel added by Republican outside groups this year. The $5.3 billion spent in 2008 and $4 billion anticipated tab this year? A hint of things to come. – AP
Who’s Buying This Election? Close to Half the Money Fueling Outside Ads Comes From Undisclosed Donors … Overall, for every $1 a liberal group has spent on these expenditures, a conservative group has spent $2, the Center’s research shows. - OpenSecrets
Irony alert: USAID “Money In Politics” primer for emerging democracies (pdf)
- OpenSecrets.org
- FollowTheMoney.org (state politics)
- Money In Politics – Ohio Citizen Action
- MapLight.org
Maplight Results Currency Reform Act
Reading posts
- Betsy: Will the time come when change is real, and not just a slogan for an incredibly powerful presidential campaign?
- Dan: With a shrinking mass media presence (particularly print media) in most American communities, the ability of a bystander equipped with a smart phone with a digital camera has the power to document electoral irregularities in real time and report the raw images or video to mass media outlets immediately and from multiple perspectives.
- Paolo: If this is the promise of the Internet, it’s not Trippi’s promise. We’re not seeing revolution, we’re seeing more “dumbed down” debate and the Internet’s playing reruns of children playing, pollution and old people in church.
- Thor: Give me Howard Dean with some index cards over Barack Obama and a TelePrompTer any day.
Other posts
- Gary: poll watching with iPhone apps
Post-mortem: Initiative campaign
- Andrea: I-1105
- Betsy – I-1107
- Dan – I-1100
- Gary – I-1082
- Paolo – I- 1098
- Shane – money recap
- Thor – I-1098
Discussion
- Why the difference in FB and Twitter use/followers?
- What does it mean to have no/limited YouTube presence?
- Why campaigns still spend $$$ on TV and direct mail?
- What was the impact of money?
To Do
