Dixieland Brass and the 2006 Elections

Say No To Pombo writes about Howie Klein of Down With Tyranny's project to put a music track to use in the midterm elections. Howie wrote me about this project as well. It's a pretty good idea. Basically he got Rickie Lee Jones and the Squirrel Nut Zippers to do a new version of the Zippers' song "Put A Lid On It" called "Have You Had Enough."

The mp3 is here.

Howie is trying to leverage the song and create 30-second ads with it that specifically target particular races, like Rep. Richard "Let's Sell Off Our National Parks" Pombo's race against netroots candidate Jerry McNerney:

We're doing our best to get it on the radio so people start to get familiar with it and we've offered it for free download on MySpace and in 2 weeks it will be available for free on all the big digital services. The goal, though-- and why you've gotten this e-mail from me-- is a little more involved. We've made 30 second radio spots out of the song. For targeted districts, with particularly terrible incumbents and particularly excellent challengers (like Jerry McNerney taking on Dirty Dick Pombo in Northern California and Victoria Wulsin taking on Mean Jean Schmidt in Ohio) we've replaced the line "it's time to throw the rascals out" with "it's time to throw Pombo out" or "it's time to throw Mean Jean out."

The districts we're targeting are not in New York City or L.A. or Chicago or Boston or other expensive media markets. Many are in remote rural districts, what we call "dollar a holla" media markets. A very little bit of money can go a relatively long way. Our hope is to get our ads up on the radio during October. I'm trying to raise $250,000.

They have a Blue America PAC where they are fundraising to get up the ads. It's a fun way to deliver a message without making a long issue-ad or even a wonky blog post. I like it.