Vote No for Yes…Yes for No…Huh?

Having a conversation today with a co-worker about a question  we ask around here often:

Should we do direct mail for this campaign or not?

We both are thinking no. It’s expensive. It doesn’t work as well as it used to, and really, who reads their office mail anymore?

He suggested starting a campaign he’d call Propostion 1, with the message:

Vote No on Direct Mail.

But I told him, if it were a true proposition, you’d have to make it a YES vote for no direct mail, and a NO vote for direct mail, so it’s written in true political backwards speak.

He’d have to get the postal service and various state groups to support a NO vote in an attempt thoroughly confuse people.  Then he’d need various other state groups, two or three random guys and the Pulp Paper Commission to support a YES vote. And, of course, he’d have to run incomprehensibly stupid ads on radio and TV that support both sides but do nothing more than make people want to avoid voting at all.

So remember, this November, vote YES if you don’t want direct mail, NO if you do.

Who couldn’t see this ridiculousness as a real proposition on the ballot?

Nebraska Loves You. And Your Kids.

Have you heard the news out of Nebraska? They’re the last state in the U.S. to pass the “safe-haven” law. A law that allows parents to abandon unwanted children without question within a variable (by state) amount of time, usually 72 hours from birth.

Only instead of giving parents 72 hours, Nebraska’s law gives the parents 19 years!

Imagine the ad campaign for this law:

Kid sucks? Drop ‘em off.

Your child a druggie? Let us deal.

Tired of cleaning up after your little slob? We’ll take on the task.

Give us your disrespectful, ungrateful, selfish, self-centered monsters. No questions asked.

What’s even crazier about this law, is that anyone can give the kid up. If you take a vacation and leave your child with a babysitter, and they decide the Friday rave is better than caring for your little beasts — poof! They can be given up!

When I was a kid, my mother’s big threat was: “Wait till your father gets home!” Today it would be something like “Wait till I pack you up and drop you off at the fire department!”

Nuts.

Update (November 26, 2008): Since September, 34 kids were dropped off at Omaha hospitals and none of them were infants (the olders was 17). The law has been rewritten to only permit children as old as 30 days to be dropped off. Finally, some with a brain was taking action.