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Terri Ann Wintermute, running for Illinois State Senate, is all over the news shows with her TV ads. She's a Republican, though you'd never know it, since the fact isn't mentioned in audio or even on an end tag in her commercials.

The campaign must have calculated that Barack Obama's approach in tying John McCain to the president is paying off because Wintermute borrows the line and brings it down to the state level in stating that her opponent has voted with the governor 90% of the time.

Now a new ad rides on the faux coattails in another way, by charging that her opponent wants to give tax breaks to the wealthy. Come on!

Advice to the low-info voter:

• Wintermute is a Republican.
• Republicans always want to give tax breaks to the wealthy (they still want you to believe it will trickle down to you).
• Her opponent is Linda Holmes. She's the Democrat. Vote for her if you live in Illinois's 42nd District.

What a crazy mixed-up set of ideologies this financial and McCain meltdown has thrown us into. GOP candidates are likely to lay claim to any old position that sounds like it might be popular. Voters will have a hard time sorting it out since McCain -- who should serve as the party's leader -- is no compass for them. He's eager to play populist and to please the base at the same time. He's all over the place, and so is every other GOP candidate.

What's a voter to think?

Just vote a straight Democratic ticket. It's a much safer bet this time around.

While the cool kids talk of nothing but socializing, Microsoft and Google, with their health records initiatives, will be going to the bank.

When I heard each and every Democratic candidate say in a recent debate there will be required electronic recordkeeping in healthcare, I thought "somebody's going to clean up."

Don't you think sometimes the Silicon Valley gang is so obsessed with shiny and hip consumer fluff that it misses real business opportunities -- and that it's part of a myopia that makes the bubble bigger and more fragile? I'd even go so far as to say that what they often seem to be selling is youthful coolness itself, a frighteningly intangible commodity!

With Dems in real control of the U.S. government in a couple of years, it would be smart to anticipate a ton of reinstated and new regulation, and think about the online opportunities. Many Web 2.0 principles could apply. Consider mandated training, for example. Lots of government regulations require organizations having a given number of employees to offer training on safety and other topics. Much of it has gone online, but companies have to buy it. What if it were offered on a free model, like social apps, which could be supported by advertising?

OK, I just reminded myself I was going to try just that with harassment training, based on free materials from California. Such training is required in California, and is starting to spread to other states. The training also can be used voluntarily by companies who care about these matters (or wish to appear to care).

I'll use Moodle. I'll let you know how it goes.

Keepers of Harry Potter fan sites were invited to a conference call promoting a new movie starring Daniel Ratcliffe, who plays Harry in the Potter movies.

Of course they're going to feel flattered and write about it -- a lot, and probably rave. Really smart. Find the bloggers who care and give them access. So much better than astroturfing nonsense that tries to create community rather than find and tie in to existing communities. So much smarter than working to thrust crafted marketing messages on carelessly chosen lists of bloggers. Expellimarus, Bacon's!

An ad on the paidContent.org site might indicate that Web 2.0 design principles are creeping into advertisements. I popped over there from my aggregator to see if there was more on the Lucent story. Yes, but alas, no. There's only a link to a subscribers-only Wall Street Journal article. Lucent's an important employer in Naperville, my town. Or it was. It's sad to see the empty parking lots around those big buildings.

The Origami team's take on its buzz campaign is reported on the team blog.

Is a public broadcasting-style sponsorship mention as objectionable as an ad in an RSS feed? This one doesn't bother me. It doesn't even have a link and it's quite subtle.

LOL! I ran across this story on one of the AdWeek blogs: "Does the Super Bowl really need more tampon advertising?"

For some reason on first glance I twisted it to mean advertising printed on tampons! That would be one way to get a consumer to internalize the message.

This is the first podcast I've ever seen advertised in an web ad supplied by... you know, the progam I can't talk about, or I violate the agreement by encouraging people to click. So don't click on the you-know-what. Just go there directly: Urban Coffee Podcast. I wonder how much they're paying per click?

Heather Green from Business Week interviewed the Mommycast talent in her new series of podcasts about commercial podcasts.

Paige and Gretchen are the current posterchildren for podcast sponsorships, having recently signed a 6-figure deal with Dixie (of Dixie cup fame), a unit of paper giant Georgia-Pacific.

One of the moms mentioned in the interview that they provided a media kit early on, prepared by whichever husband is the advertising guy. I looked for it but the old URL is dead.

I did find a media kit in PDF for the Skepticality podcast. It contains a lot of the demographic charts media planners like to see, but I couldn't find any numbers on audience size, which is the one number I'd think the planners would insist on seeing. (I sold radio advertising for a couple years a long time ago.)

Either Richard Bluestein or his Madge character recently said (s)he didn't think the podcast audience was here yet. That rings true with me, if you're talking about a mass market sized audience, and it makes me wonder if some of these early advertisers are trying it just to be trailblazers. Maybe they are not really expecting to see a return yet. A huge deal for a podcaster represents a teeny drop in the ocean as a share of a total national advertising budget, so big companies could afford to experiment.

I think I'll work on my quiz podcast template over the holiday with so much time off work. I think I'll be sorry if I don't. I'll tell you about it as I go.

Maybe G4 is targeting another psychographic my younger son has told me about in adding The Man Show.

(If you follow some of my ramblings you'll already know that my little guy likes to help me understand subcultures and is as much of an avocational collective behavior analyst as I am.)

Aaron knows the type from interacting with them in MMORPGs, and he calls them "the 30-year-old loser living in his parents' basement." The LoserBase30 type is only a type. He can have a job and a wife and kids and still loosely belong to the type, albeit part-time.

Have you ever noticed how a cable channel will debut with a wonderfully niched offering, then gradually get greedy and broaden the scope? Witness A&E. I can't imagine it coproducing Pride and Predjudice with the BBC as it did in 1996. What about the "science" channels that dipped into the home makeover fad? And I don't know what Spike is. Guy stuff, reportedly, but do the same guys like DS9 and detective shows? Maybe, but it seems all over the place to me.