{"id":1090,"date":"2007-07-25T04:25:35","date_gmt":"2007-07-25T09:25:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1090"},"modified":"2007-07-25T04:25:35","modified_gmt":"2007-07-25T09:25:35","slug":"they-bore-easily","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1090","title":{"rendered":"They Bore Easily?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years back, before secondhand smoke was the plague that was going to destroy all of us in Saint Paul if we didn’t get on top of it, billboards were the great scourge.\u00a0 A group of motivated, well-connected people devoted tons <\/em>of time and energy to trying to ban billboards <\/em>and their advertising in Saint Paul.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And I know what some of you might say; “you can’t compare the two issues; they’re different groups of people”.<\/p>\n

No.\u00a0 In fact, the two groups were largely the same.\u00a0 But for the likes of the American Lung Association of Minnesota, the cast of players was nearly identical (and for all I know the ALAMN people may have been involved in some astroturf “American Visual Pollution Society of Minnesota”).<\/p>\n

Anyway, the city (operating at the behest of the well-connected activists) tried to seize the billboards (they are private property), and fought and lost a lawsuit in pursuit of that niggling goal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Saint Paulicy notes<\/a> that times would seem to have changed:<\/p>\n

Como Zoo, Conservatory and “Como Town” are prominently advertised in all of the square footage that can only be achieved through a….. billboard!\u00a0 Has the city had a change of heart or are billboards no longer the political hot potato they used to be?\u00a0 After eating the juicy SPicy almost felt like maybe the\u00a0city did not mean it after all and\u00a0it would be o.k.\u00a0to light up a smoke, no forget it.<\/p>\n

SPicy wonders if\u00a0the anti-billboard folks completely forgot about billboards in Saint Paul while they pushed their smoking ban, they are the same people you know.\u00a0 Maybe they too realized the power of advertising. After SPicy\u00a0 and SPousy parked the mini, we walked around the corner and\u00a0saw a\u00a0billboard on the bus stop\u00a0promoting the virtues of quitting smoking.\u00a0 This group must not know what to do with themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few years back, before secondhand smoke was the plague that was going to destroy all of us in Saint Paul if we didn’t get on top of it, billboards were the great scourge.\u00a0 A group of motivated, well-connected people devoted tons of time and energy to trying to ban billboards and their advertising in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}