Name The Gimmick(s) Vol. 2

You can view volume 1 here.

Now one wouldn't think a political group like P.E. would use gimmicks, but they actually used more than a few.  Flavor Flav being first and foremost on the list.  The clock, the glasses, everything about Flav was just a gimmick.  Second the militant dancers.  Third the legendary PE logo.  One could claim the political stance was a gimmick, but Chuck has put in enough work to say that claim is outlandish...

Name The Gimmick(s) Vol. 1

Gimmick- (noun) A trick or device intended to attract attention, publicity, or business. 

So what are we looking for?  Anything added to the product that doesn't improve the quality of the product, but is just there to make the product stand out, is a gimmick.  What is the product here?  Ostensibly the music, while one could rightly argue that having a video for a song is itself a gimmick, lets just assume the video is a part of the presentation of said music.  So everything else can be considered a gimmick.  The artist' image?  Gimmick.  A trademark fashion?  Gimmick.  Controversy surrounding the artist or song?  Gimmick.  In fact anything attached to the music/video that isn't about the quality of the music or the video is a gimmick.  Just for fun try naming the gimmicks before you read them.  If I missed anything feel free to point it out in the comments.

Did Eminem make any sense?! aka "Hi Rhianna"

I never watch the Nigger Network Hip Hop awards, as a dear friend of mine put it, I'm too much of an "Uppity High Class Negro" for that.  Shout out to Huey Freeman.  While I never watch the actual "award show"  I always check out the cyphers the next day, I am an Emcee after all, I gotta see what's what.  Without a doubt the Shady camp's cypher was the highlight of the night, Royce 5'9's verse being my personal favorite "Hi Rhianna..." At any rate a fellow Emcee made the claim that Em's verse was a bunch of nothing, while he is a known Em hater, I none the less wondered "what planet do you live on?!" and so I will undertake the task of breaking his verse down.

You Want To Cut Spending? Start Here

Around the World with Christiane Amanpour debuts as we approach a decade of war in Afghanistan, and the question on the lips of Americans and Afghans alike is "what's next?"
Ten years after the attack on World Trade Center, Osama Bin Laden is dead, but how will this chapter in the longest war in American history be written?
ABC News foreign correspondent Nick Schifrin joins Christiane Amanpour from Kabul, Afghanistan, taking the pulse of that country amidst an explosion of violence at the hands of the resurgent Taliban.
Then a revealing interview with Ahmed Rashid, the world's foremost authority on the Taliban, about the very real concerns over potential violence between the United States uneasy ally Pakistan.
The critical question must be asked: Is war with Pakistan a real possibility?

[Source]

Ten years, trillions of dollars and no real end in sight? Why are we even there?  Bin Laden is dead, Al Qaeda is in Pakistan and The Taliban is still running things.  "We" had a chance to establish a lasting peace there but W decided to start another war instead of finishing what he started.  That chance has been blown, and those cost are sunk, it's past time "we" admit that and cut our losses.

OccupyWallStreet Rant

It’s illustrative to look at how the media has covered the origin and growth of the tea party movement with the OccupyWallStreet protests. Even a handful of self-identified tea party activists, with tea bags stapled to their tricorn hats and misspelled signs, were covered breathlessly as the birth of this new populist movement, angry with the direction of the country, and rising influence.
That, of course, was all completely untrue. The tea party movement was an astroturfed movement from the beginning, funded and organized by conservative organizations under jingoistic and quasi-populist names like “Americans for Prosperity” and "FreedomWorks".
Compare that to the OccupyWallStreet protesters. Truly grassroots, the media—when they do pay attention—deride them for not having a clear, unified goal (as if the tea party could be more precise than “take our country back”), for being disorganized (which is what happens when Dick Armey isn’t ordering up the signs) and for their inability to effect change (because it’s completely reasonable to expect 10 days of protests to change the status quo of 30 years of Reaganomics on Wall St). Moreover, the truly populist concerns are largely ignored by the media, who are almost monolithically more interested in what’s happening to the privileged few inside the Washington Beltway than the 99% of people who live outside it.

[Source]

        I'll never forget something one of my more radical professors back in college said to me, "the reason people tolerate extreme wealth in this nation is because they all want their turn.  No matter how unlikely it is, they all believe they too can one day be one of those on top looking down on the rest of their countrymen."  Those words proved themselves to be true a million times over since he said them to me.  

People never see something as a problem until it effects them personally, and then when it does they wonder why no one did something about it sooner.  They look down on the people trying to address something they don't see as a problem.  Millions of people may be effected by something but until you become one of those millions chances are you don't care about it.  Right now you have a group of people trying to do something about a problem that effects the entire country.  You would think we all would be on board with this.