TV Will Dull Your Mind

...and ruin your eyes, if my mother was right.

Today's Tami Reading choice

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6340638/

I'm in favor of private groups being able to make political ads. All political ads are more one-sided than a... damn I can't come up with a pithy comparison, they're just one-sided, OK? So, the one-sided nature of ads being accepted as a given, it doesn't matter to me if special interest groups throw their hats and money into the ring. Let them spend!

The fact is, a political ad is a political ad. In order to really know a candidate, you have to have either been following their record, or want to do a lot of independant research. Things like voting records, or bills authored, or moneys appropriated or accepted, this is all recorded somewhere, and finding out the facts is the only way to know the truth.

And yet, most people in the US do not have the time or inclination to go check and see if the people running the government are actually doing all the stuff they say they are. They rely on media to give them their information in spoon-fed doses. It leads us to things like large groups of people not knowing the facts, and not caring. It leads to emotional responses instead of intellectual ones.

What I'm saying here, is that I don't think that the public should actually believe ads as much as they do. It's sad, and it's scary, and it's one of the reasons that I claim that people are all idiots. I do include myself in that, by the way, this is despair, not a sense of superiority.

I think I've made my point, and you get where I'm coming from: blindly believing advertisements can hurt you. Since that's out of the way, let me finally get to the article quote that I wanted to include.

Others are targeted toward particular constituencies -- which, in a tight race, could make a difference. "John Kerry's not a hunter -- he just plays one on TV," says NRA chief lobbyist Chris Cox says in a spot showing a rifle-toting Kerry in camouflage -- giving way to a picture of a French poodle in a Kerry sweater.

Man. A French Poodle. That's pretty damn funny. And it's because of precisely this type of humor that I'm in favor of privately funded ads. Go ahead, people, amuse me!