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Bushin30seconds.org is a liberal web site sponsored by MoveOn.org voter fund. The website showcases the results of a political advertising contest that was open to the public in November 2003, in which the goal was to criticize key points about George W. Bush and his policies in just 30 seconds of airtime.
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty and equality. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support civil rights, democracy, secularism, gender equality, racial equality, internationalism, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and free markets.
MoveOn is an American progressive public policy advocacy group and political action committee. Formed in 1998 in response to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton by the U.S. House of Representatives, MoveOn.org has raised millions of dollars for progressive candidates in the United States of America. It also runs a petition website similar to Change.org.
George Walker Bush is an American politician and businessman who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. He had previously served as the 46th governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000.
The Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest was created by MoveOn.org Executive Director Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org Cultural Director Laura Dawn, Lee Solomon, and multi-platinum selling pop star Moby.
Eli Pariser is the chief executive of Upworthy, a website for "meaningful" viral content. He is a left-wing political and internet activist, the board president of MoveOn.org and a co-founder of Avaaz.org.
Laura Dawn is an American political activist and singer/songwriter. She has been the cultural director for MoveOn.org since March 2004 and was named the organization's national creative director in 2007.
Richard Melville Hall, better known by his stage name Moby, is an American musician, animal rights activist and author. He has sold over 20 million records worldwide, and AllMusic considers him to be "one of the most important dance music figures of the early 1990s, helping bring the music to a mainstream audience both in the UK and in America".
Ads were judged in different categories, such as funniest ad, best animated ad, best youth ad, overall best ad, and overall best ad runner-up. In the end, there were 6 winners and 26 finalists. In the branch-off categories, the public picked winners from four choices. Two entries stirred controversy by comparing Bush to Nazi Germany and were rejected by MoveOn after they received complaints.
Nazi Germany is the common English name for Germany between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party (NSDAP) controlled the country through a dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany was transformed into a totalitarian state that controlled nearly all aspects of life via the Gleichschaltung legal process. The official name of the state was Deutsches Reich until 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945. Nazi Germany is also known as the Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", the first two being the Holy Roman Empire (800–1806) and the German Empire (1871–1918). The Nazi regime ended after the Allies defeated Germany in May 1945, ending World War II in Europe.
The overall winning ad was "Child's Pay," by Charlie Fisher, 38, of Denver, directed and shot by Per Dreyer. Charlie Fisher is an advertising executive who was a registered Republican until the end of the first Bush administration, in 1992. It features young children working jobs – washing dishes, hauling trash, repairing tires, cleaning offices, assembly-line processing and grocery checking – followed by the line: "Guess who’s going to pay off President Bush’s $1 trillion deficit?"
Denver, officially the City and County of Denver, is the capital and most populous municipality of the U.S. state of Colorado. Denver is located in the South Platte River Valley on the western edge of the High Plains just east of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. The Denver downtown district is immediately east of the confluence of Cherry Creek with the South Platte River, approximately 12 mi (19 km) east of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Denver is named after James W. Denver, a governor of the Kansas Territory, and it is nicknamed the Mile High City because its official elevation is exactly one mile above sea level. The 105th meridian west of Greenwich, the longitudinal reference for the Mountain Time Zone, passes directly through Denver Union Station.
The ads were judged by a panel of celebrity judges, consisting of Jack Black, Benny Boom, Donna Brazile, James Carville, Margaret Cho, Hector Elizondo, Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, Stan Greenberg, Ted Hope, Michael Mann, Moby, Michael Moore, Mark Pellington, Tony Shalhoub, Russell Simmons, Michael Stipe, Gus Van Sant, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Jessica Lange, and Eddie Vedder.
Benny Douglas,, professionally known as Benny Boom, is an American director of film and music videos. He is best known for directing the comedy film Next Day Air (2009) and All Eyez on Me (2017), a biopic of late rapper Tupac Shakur, for Morgan Creek Productions.
Donna Lease Brazile is an American political strategist, campaign manager, political analyst, and author. She is a member of the Democratic Party, briefly serving as the interim chairperson for the Democratic National Committee in spring 2011, and assumed that role again in July 2016, until February 2017.
Chester James Carville Jr. is an American political commentator and media personality who is a prominent figure in the Democratic Party. Nicknamed the Ragin' Cajun, Carville gained national attention for his work as the lead strategist of the successful presidential campaign of then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. Carville also worked as a co-host of CNN's Crossfire. After Crossfire, he appeared on CNN's news program The Situation Room. As of 2009, he hosts a weekly program on XM Radio titled 60/20 Sports with Luke Russert, son of Tim Russert who hosted NBC's Meet The Press. He is married to Libertarian political consultant Mary Matalin. In 2009, he began teaching political science at Tulane University.
Along with the finalists, the top 150 ads are now available online, ranging from the serious to the absurd.
All of the works are created under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright but are based upon it. They replace individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, which are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management, with a "some rights reserved" management employing standardized licenses for re-use cases where no commercial compensation is sought by the copyright owner. The result is an agile, low-overhead and low-cost copyright-management regime, benefiting both copyright owners and licensees.
The winning ad was to be aired on CBS during the Super Bowl half-time. However, CBS refused to air the ad, and it was aired on CNN instead.
