Posts Tagged ‘commercial’
It’s halftime in America — and Chrysler says it, again!
There are beaucoup conservative politicians in this nation who – if they had their way at the start of the recession – would have kept anything like this commercial from ever being produced. Because Chrysler and General Motors and tens of thousands of American workers would have been shoved off the economic scoreboard.
But, our government came up with loans and aid, folks in the MidWest and around the country pulled together. The loans are being repaid. Cars are rolling out onto the highways, again. The American car industry and the people who work there weren’t allowed to die.
We get the same old 1930′s ideology every night on the news, in trite debates – from people who still don’t give a damn about American workers or American products. I wouldn’t vote for those losers even if they paid their taxes.
Keep on rocking in the Free World.
Oops!
We’ve all said something this dumb one time or another:
I don’t think our extended family has a single Chevy pickup anymore. Most of the pickups are Dodges, preferably diesel. But, the commercial makes me chuckle everytime I see it.
Deodorant commercial banned as offensive to Christians
South Africa’s advertising watchdog has banned a television commercial depicting angels falling from heaven because they are attracted to a man’s deodorant after a complaint from a Christian.
The advertisement for Axe deodorant (known as Lynx in Britain) features winged, attractive women crashing to earth in an Italian town.
The scantily-clad women are then drawn towards a seemingly unremarkable man preparing to get on a moped. They regard their quarry lasciviously while sniffing the air before one by one smashing their halos and advancing towards him.
A viewer who complained to South Africa’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the suggestion that God’s messengers would literally fall for a mortal being because of a deodorant was incompatible with his belief as a Christian.
ASA agreed, and ordered Unilver SA, which sells Axe deodorants, to withdraw the advertisement.
As such, the problem is not so much that angels are used in the commercial, but rather that the angels are seen to forfeit, or perhaps forego their heavenly status for mortal desires,” it said in a statement.
Idiots. Not just the dweeb who made the complaint, of course; but, the petty bureaucrats who made the decision to ban the commercial.
I wouldn’t expect either to have a sense of humor. That would allow for normal human emotions to overrule obedience to either social strictures leftover from the Dark Ages or government administrators assigning priority to democratic decision-making in the commercial marketplace.
Like – if you don’t like the commercial don’t buy the fracking deodorant!
I’m not a pushover – either!
The AARP rolled over for the Bush/Cheney corrupt-athon on what’s called the donut hole in drug benefits. They caved on the issue of negotiating drug costs the way the Pentagon and Congress both do. For those reasons and more, thousands of senior citizens left the AARP. Including me.
I belong, now, to the ARA, Alliance of Retired Americans – which gets most of its sponsorship from the AFL-CIO. Another stodgy organization getting off their duff after decades of coasting downstream.
However, I would be a fool if I didn’t compliment and endorse the series of commercials which the AARP is producing to fight against the alliance between the Party of NO and cowardly blue dog Democrats that is trying to cut benefits we worked and paid for over the years while they kiss butt for corporate America.
The commercials are accurate, strong and show some of the spunk missing for a number of years from a once-principled organization.
Bravo!
Lots of exciting proper football, this weekend -
- unless you’re a fan of clubs in North London. But, I saw this commercial late last night and recalled I’d never put it up at eideard.com:
Sponsored by kickoutpoverty.org.
Homeless Veterans sue Feds over land dedicated to vets
It is a 387-acre campus of green fields and low-lying buildings in a prosperous neighborhood, donated to the federal government more than 100 years ago for use as a Pacific Coast home for wounded veterans. But over the last 20 years, as Los Angeles has become inundated with homeless veterans, advocates for the homeless say the campus has become a symbol of a system gone wrong: as veterans sleep on the streets, many of its buildings lie abandoned and one-third of the land has been leased for commercial use.
On Wednesday, advocates for the homeless sued the Department of Veterans Affairs, seeking to compel federal officials to use the campus to care for and house mentally ill veterans.
In the class-action suit, filed on behalf of four mentally distressed homeless veterans, lawyers contend that the department has violated the terms of the agreement in which the property was deeded to the government in 1888. They also contend that the department is required — under a federal statute barring discrimination against the mentally disabled — to provide housing to help mentally ill veterans…
By any measure, the lawsuit — the first of its kind, lawyers said — is a significant escalation in a battle that has simmered here for years, as homeless advocates contended that the Department of Veterans Affairs was bowing to residents of the property’s prosperous Brentwood neighborhood and commercial interests by refusing to rehabilitate abandoned buildings and use them to help veterans.
For the first 100 years of its existence, the campus was used entirely to provide housing and services to veterans; that began changing in the 1960s and ’70s, as some of the buildings were abandoned and the Department of Veterans Affairs leased about one-third of the property for use by, among others, a car rental agency, a laundry for the Marriott hotel chain, a golf course, a dog walk and a baseball stadium for the nearby University of California, Los Angeles. It now has a limited number of geriatric beds for veterans.
“It is a piece of land that has accommodated the interests of powerful people in L.A. for a long time,” said Bobby Shriver, a member of the Santa Monica City Council and one of the people pushing the suit. “Now, we are going to make it accommodate the interests of these veterans.”
RTFA. The lawsuit is overdue. The debt owed America’s veterans is one that politicians often speak of – without doing a damned thing to pay up.
Saskatchewan to build carbon-capture coal-fired power plant
The pilot plant for the planned new project
The Western Canadian province of Saskatchewan, which depends heavily on burning coal for power, will build one of the world’s first commercial-scale power plants that will capture carbon dioxide emissions, the provincial government said on Tuesday.
Saskatchewan said the power utility it owns, SaskPower, will proceed with a long-planned C$1.24 billion conversion of a generating unit at its Boundary Dam Power Station at the city of Estevan as the province moves to comply with new Canadian requirements for cleaner coal power.
The project will have capacity to produce 110 megawatts of electricity per year, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 1 million tonnes — the equivalent of taking 250,000 vehicles off the road each year, the provincial government said…
The province, which is rich in oil, potash and uranium, had been holding off on final approval of the project as it awaited details of new federal regulations for coal plants.
SaskPower’s three coal-fired power plants account for half of the utility’s electricity production…
The new standards will force electricity producers to phase out older, high-emitting coal-fired plants and require newer facilities to match the lower greenhouse-gas emissions of more efficient natural-gas-fired plants. Unless operators make substantial investments to cut emissions from aging coal-burning facilities, they’ll be required to shut down.
TransAlta Corp, the country’s largest operators of coal-fired plants, is developing a near-commercial-scale demonstration project near Edmonton, Alberta, that will also capture carbon.
SaskPower, meanwhile, is working on deals to sell its captured carbon to oil drillers, which can use it to extract oil from the ground, a spokesman for the utility said. Cenovus Energy Inc currently imports carbon from the United States to extract oil at its Weyburn, Saskatchewan, oilfield.
Looking forward to seeing what can be done on a commercial scale. I’ve noted pilot plants here in North America and in Europe; but, I’m curious to see what can be accomplished in the real world.
Why do Kool Aid Party Republicans hate trains?
Michelle Bachman’s last train ride from Duluth
“Stop the Train” was, literally, a rallying cry for post-Tea Party Republicans this past November.
Newly elected GOP governors in Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida have canceled already-funded high speed rail projects.
Much of the opposition to rail projects appears to stem not from economic arguments, but from fundamental cultural values on what “American” transportation should be. A perusal of online commentaries about passenger rail stories reveals a curious linkage by writers between passenger rail and “European socialism.”
Never mind that the majority of European passenger rail operates on a commercial basis. Many critics of passenger rail emotionally identify it as an enabler of cultural values they fear.
For example, passenger rail inherently requires central administration. After all, trains cannot depart from a station without authority from a central dispatcher. This very need for central authority is unique to rail and frightening to those who yearn for an individual freedom from authority…
Second, a passenger rail project labels a route as an “urban” corridor, and provides the infrastructure and incentive for even more urban development. This contradicts a vision of America, held by many, as a small town society centered on the automobile. In reality, rural towns continue to decline. The 2000 U.S. census classifies 79% of the U.S. population as “urban…”
It is difficult for many to accept the impact of these population trends. Many legislators who are otherwise hostile to passenger rail accept that Amtrak’s operations in Boston-New York-Washington are “profitable,” or commercially viable, but characterize the East Coast as a region not representative of the United States. It’s full of Yankees…
Third, most opponents to high speed rail simply have no experience on which to base their opposition. Those wishing to “Take America back” frequently glorify America between the Eisenhower and Reagan administrations, the peak of automobile enthusiasm in the United States…
Take a look at China. China was still operating steam locomotives 10 years ago. China has invested $292 billion in its railways in the last five years. By 2014, China will have twice as many miles of high speed railway as all the rest of the world combined.
For some, the Chinese investment in passenger rail signifies a forward-thinking investment in the future, and something to be envied. For others, it is further evidence that passenger rail is only appropriate for a planned economy, and incompatible with the American way.
But, then, what would you expect from dimwits who would rather drive a new version of their father’s Buick instead of something that reflects real family size, how and where you travel – and costs less to run?
