Oh, I see what they did there. This video is not for us, it is for Joe Sixpack, the same Joe Sixpack who was scared into supporting the war on Irak and got laid off from GM, and while supportive of the government but not of its officials and who might remember the Reagan red scares of his youth, so he will be moved into sending a letter to his representative.
That is, the kind of person who can't understand the numbers (even if he would agree with them if he could) but hopefully can do *something* about this whole issue. Assuming that most of the people who can understand and can do something are either locked into CxP by interests, or fragmented all over the place between the options (including CxP because they just don't wanna admit their hero has mud feet), I wouldn't say DIRECT is stooping to a new low - DIRECT is opening a new battlefront. Welcome to the world of politics, something it had valiantly tried to avoid before, but you cannot be the only waterboy in a world of dragons.
That said, I think that, under that perspective, the political/public relations intonation of the video is brilliant, except for the little fact tha Joe Sixpack can barely sit for a 30 seconds ad, let alone an almost 20 long minute infomercial. In that it fails miserably.
Ah, and Moonwalker, "anti-propaganda"? "Letters of dismissal"? WTF dude, are you George Abbey or something? That's precisely why NASA HSF has been reduced to a sad mess since the start of the shuttle program, what brought us Challenger AND Columbia and all the trouble with CxP, because when people wanted to say that there was a problem, the big wigs either didn't listen or made them pay for saying something they didn't want to hear. That's precisely what kills "mutual trust." And astronauts.