Wampum

The ad that People for the American Way made for the Maine (and New Hampshire!) broadcast media market can be seen here (.mov format).

The ad messages around protection of the minority, which polls 3 x MoE above the "extremist judges" message and 4.5 x MoE above the generic preservation message. Details on message and polling data are in Maine Poll on the Filibuster, posted April 14th.

Also coming to the Maine (and therefore New Hampshire broadcast media market) is John Edwards, to help the MDP Senate and House caucuses. Maybe he'll stay out of Portland (city of factions) and just work the media market, and the Kittery-Sanford, Lewiston, Bath-Brunswick, and Augusta-Bangor axii of The Two Maines.

John is also working Oklahoma (third behind Wes Clark by 1,200 votes in the last cycle, and I wish I hadn't been quite so helpful to Clark), as well as Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, and South Carolina. He's started a new website, One America Committee, as a "Raising the States" (see list above) initiative. We'll vist the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when we get in Dwight's neck of the woods.

The PPH is quoting John Pike, who linked to us on Tuesday. We've had .8k readers from John's site this week -- www.globalsecurity.org, and about the same number of readers using Google (search key "BRAC list"), and twice that who already knew which article (1953, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1974 and 1976) they wanted to read, or about 3.2k of MIL interested readers, some from "away". I use John's current site and his prior site, www.fas.org (Federation of American Scientists) quite a bit. For comparison, a link from Juan Cole's Informed Comment last month on Iran and Michael Klare was 2.3k readers, and an link from Duncan Black's Eschaton is about 30k readers.

Unfortunately, the PPH then goes on to suggest that because toxics clean up typically runs for years, that the sky won't fall until 2012, or 2102, or 2120 or 2210, and if all the planes leave the Brunswick NAS for the Jacksonville NAS (Florida), that a-bunch-of-random-buildings-with-no-airfield is going to survive the next BRAC (not to mention get up-listed from "realign" to "close" in this BRAC, which is a real possibility).

So far nothing substantive from the Congressional delegation. If either Olympia or Susan come calling I'll make coffee and cut off a slice of pound cake. I'm a compasionate insect.