The woman sued the company years later, after she discovered the DVD’s existence. Even with the delay, it should be an open and shut case. The woman did not consent to the illegal act of public nudity or the assault of being touched non-consensually.

But in Bizarro-world, the justice system works a bit differently.

A St. Louis jury ruled 11-1 in favor of “Girls Gone Wild,” the foreman saying: “Through her actions, she gave implied consent. She was really playing to the camera. She knew what she was doing.” WTF?

Let’s be clear: This was sexual assault. Worse, this was sexual assault for profit.

If I lift your skirt or pull down your shirt without your consent, it’s sexual assault. If I do it in front of a camera, and the cameraman does anything but turn the footage over to the authorities, he’s a scumbag and criminal, too. If the cameraman turns it over to a production company who releases the footage for profit, then all involved are accessories to felony assault.

It doesn’t matter that the woman didn’t leave when the camera got there, and it doesn’t matter that she didn’t press charges at the time. It doesn’t matter that she only sued year later, when she found out about the DVD. She has a moral and legal right to object to any or all of what happened to her.

Let me see if I can explain it to the slow ones: My body does not belong to you. You have no right to view it or profit from it without my permission. You have no right to touch my body or clothing without my permission. I don’t surrender those rights when a camera enters the room. I don’t surrender those rights when I drink a beer, and I don’t surrender them when I dance. I own myself.

If you violate these rights, I have rights of legal redress. If I fail to report this violation as a crime, I still retain the right to seek civil redress. And if a troglodyte jury dredges up some “asking for it” bullshit, it doesn’t mean shit. You should hope Jane Doe takes this all the way to the Supreme Court, for all of our sakes. Unless you want to be exploited next.

The two sides in these disputes often seem like they are speaking two languages that use the same words. Freedom, Democracy, Respect, and Authority seem to beckon from both sides of the disputes over slavery, civil rights, or the environment. Like Shaw said of Britain and America, we seem to be “two countries separated by a common language.” The most important factor in the insolubility of these fights seems to be the impression, on both sides, that the other side lack respect for the most basic values. The orthodox factions are accused of lacking reverence for the undeniable fact, to Heterodoxists, that we are all part of an indivisible system of living systems. There can be no separation of my interests and yours or of us and them. Zero Sum games are impossible.

The Role of Authority in American Political Thought

To the Orthodox, this is a dangerous illusion. There is a range of sources of Orthodox ideas from the frankly irreligious to the most committed fundamentalist scriptural literalists. The common thread is the recognition of the necessity of power and authority. To the Orthodox, rigid authority is necessary for the most basic social functions. Orthodox thinkers are influenced by Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature as the war of all against all. Human societies are prone to the most violent upheavals and bloody atrocities. Humans are disloyal, untrustworthy, and riven with uncontrolled drives that render them functionally insane. Only the constant threat of force keeps ordinary people in line.

The more tightly bound a community is by commonalities in ethnicity, religion, class, and profession, the more likely it is to survive these upheavals. From this view, the civil rights revolution was at best missing the point and at worst represented nothing less than a deliberate assault on the cohesion of American society. By threatening that sense of reverence other ethnic groups were supposed to feel for the WASP core of American society, the Movement fragmented society and destroyed the cohesion necessary to survive in a hostile and unforgiving world. This is why the Right has consistently refused to believe that the leaders of the Movement were not witting or unwitting agents of Moscow.

Reverence, awe and fear are the cohesive forces in society. By maintaining fear of the State, wealth, men, or Whites, the continual strife of human life can be contained. Maintaining this state of fear sometimes requires force, but the alternative is the Hobbesian state of nature where meaningful human life is impossible, so virtually any sacrifice is justified.

External Reverence

In more settled times, reverence for external authority figures becomes an indispensable tool for social cohesion. Ultimately, God, Jehovah, or Allah would be the object of reverence for religiously-committed orthodoxists. For their more secular counterparts, the object of external reverence might be a (conservative) President, the Constitution, American power in the world, or in extreme forms, force itself. Regardless of the specifics, the source of authority must be external to the rest of society. It cannot be embodied within the people, collectively or singly. In the Orthodox view, all people are orthodoxists at heart and share their view that only the overwhelming power of an external force can capture the allegiance of the community. All other claims to legitimacy are invalid on their face.

In this paradigm, the use of power is a virtue regardless of its end. Limits upon power threaten the vitality of civilization. Private or public power may be revered depending on the interests of the individual apologist, but concentrated power is a common value of the Right, even if it comes wrapped in Libertarian language.

Movements that usurp centralized spiritual, political, or economic power in favor of decentralized power as seen as dangerous and beside the point. By placing power out of reach of the vast majority of Americans, Orthodoxists can preserve social order in a number of ways. By minimizing the footprint of power, the pace of social change can be limited. By moving power out of sight, it can be a nebulous ideal that promotes obedience and deference rather than functioning as an engine of conflict. By removing power from the community, its imperfections can be masked. By hiding the petty disputes and insecurities at the heart of conflicts over power, external authority can be portrayed as impersonal and godlike, thus preserving its legitimacy. Decentralizing movements are therefore a threat to social cohesion and are tantamount to treason. This helps explain why civil rights and labor movements have been attacked as Communist regardless of the political orientation of their leadership.

External Reverence and Power

In contemporary America, the most common objects of external reverence are an imperial President, God, or a powerful and wealthy CEO. God is an archetype of power who may serve as a template for other holders of unlimited puissance. Churches are protected from external interference in any number of ways, and the most entrepreneurial and evangelical among them are the most likely to preach submission to god-like power as a socio-cultural ideal. In recent decades, churches that promote this view have been far more successful than those that focus on the ethical obligation of the believer to the physical and emotional well-being of other humans. This helps to explain the consistent policy successes of orthodoxists, regardless of changes in party power.

In this mindset, ethics diminished in importance. The perceptible consequences of human action are ignored in favor of the overwhelming importance of submission to external authority. In modern American history, the focus has been on sexual morality. Flouting of God’s plan to marry and reproduce in favor of fleeting pleasure is seen as ultimate insult to ultimate authority. The preference for the trivial over the monumental is a threat to the cohesion of society and to the Kingdom. The most egregious form of offense, of course, is homosexuality, but orthodoxists have defended the remnants of laws that prohibit non-reproductive sexual acts regardless of sexual orientation.

In political matters, the ultimate value is submission to the practically unlimited power of an Imperial President. The political Right, consistent allies of orthodoxy, has its own mythology about the meaning of the Constitution that persists in its appeal despite the paucity of support in the text. Regardless of copious evidence that the document was intended to limit concentrations of power in favor of competing centers, conservatives insist that the phrase “commander in chief” embodies limitless executive power in all matters except domestic social programs, which are mostly opposed. The fact that limits on executive power are not considered dangerous during Democratic presidents is not evidence of inconsistency. Democrats are seen as outside the cult of power, filled with naive and dangerous ideas of interdependence and the solubility of conflict that, in conservative minds, threaten the foundation of social order and render them unfit for political office.

The appeal of the Imperial Presidency is inextricably linked to the attachment to force as the ultimate political value. The role of the State is the preparation for and prosecution of war. The promulgation of threats is either a reason or excuse for the rush to war, but in either case, war is seen as having a value of its own. By promoting the values of the cult of power and the danger of external threats, continual war increases the cohesion of society and negates the appeal of heterodoxic values. Adversity in war serves this function, but defeat is unthinkable as it would threaten to discredit the values that motivate it. Therefore, the actual threat and power of the enemy places the function of war at jeopardy. This impetus draws the State into war with a series of weak states and non-state actors. These wars with tribal forces generate their own cycles of vengeance and counter-vengeance which explain much of the violence and disorder that characterize much of the last decade. Orthodoxists value these wars precisely for their tribal nature, knowing that despite their use of ideological and historicist language to promote these conflicts, the effect they have on American society is to tribalize those classes that comprise or sympathise with the warriors. By removing any stance between support for Us and for Them, these meaningless tribal conflicts promote the power totemism of orthodoxy and prevent the reemergence of heterodox values in mainstream thought.

The remaining form of revered power is the power of the modern Corporation. Large corporations employ many Americans, particularly in the politically vital suburbs. They dominate the American economy and culture. They supply most of the money for research and development and they make and sell the products and services which form the texture of modern life.

Most important for our purposes, however, is the role that corporations play as the primary contemporary practitioners of the art of Propaganda. American business has been using Psychology to convince Americans to buy things they don’t need since soon after the First World War. Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, pioneered the use of subconscious appeals to tie specific products to primal drives. In doing so, he was applying techniques he helped to develop while serving in the Office of Public Information during the First World War.

Before these developments, advertising was focused on the promotion of necessities by their functional virtues. This placed sharp limits on sales and on growth. Besides being a threat to the profits of corporations and the wealth of their shareholders, this was touted as a threat to the social order. By limiting economic growth, this focus on necessities tended to decentralize power and posed the danger of individual and community independence at a time that America was becoming a world power. By helping to nationalize the economy and channel economic and cultural energies toward consumption, an economy based on the manufacture of desire would enforce political conformity and permit the gradual identification of political and economic power.

Commercial propaganda increased in power as the means used to disseminate it became more evocative and less social. Newspaper chains began the process, followed by movies, radio, television, and the Internet. Each technological innovation has produced a leap in immediacy and versatility, giving the practitioners of propaganda more tools to manipulate the emotions of consumers, convincing them that this or that consumer product will fulfill some primal drive, be it sex or belonging or even love. Without these tools, and the economic growth they make possible, the corporate-state order would collapse. Our currency, financial markets, and socio-economic hierarchy are structured to rely on year-on-year growth and large profits that a necessity-based economy can not provide.

Of course, the content that media companies have created to sell these advertisements to consumers have become important components of economic growth in their own right. Movies and television in particular create a vivid cultural space where the primacy of desire and pleasure are promulgated and celebrated. While some products may seem to corrode social cohesion and order, the overall effect is to reinforce the habit of passively accepting the judgements of others and standardizing aesthetics and ethics. By distracting Americans with fictional worlds and manufactured values, mass media serve an important function in diverting individual energy to the ends of economic and political interests allied with the orthodoxy.

Conflicts and Contradictions Within Orthodoxy

Modern American orthodoxy and its institutional allies form a vast complex of interconnected systems that defies easy explanation. There are many mechanisms, however, that tend to support common purpose. By sharing values of power and order, the Orthodoxy ensures that conflicts about legitimacy do not threaten the prevailing order.

The most obvious contradiction within the Orthodox ranks is the alliance of the movement with Libertarian political thinkers. Modern American Libertarianism is, however, a bizarrely specific creed. Only public power is seen as a threat to political liberties, and prominent Libertarians and Quasi-Libertarians seem chiefly concerned with those measures which threaten corporate control over the economy, wasting little time examining such trivial phenomena as the enormous National Security state. In this way, Libertarianism has been effectively harnessed to the broader objectives of the Orthodox bloc even if individual Libertarians may object more to the characterization than the reality.

The hedonistic message of corporate mass media would seem to conflict with Orthodox political and spiritual values, but again this is deceptive. By channeling individualistic impulses into conformist channels, a repeat of the upheavals of the late sixties can be averted. Identity is diverted from action to belongings and appearance. Dissent is thus defanged, proceeding no further than the Billboard charts. The permissive message of media provides a handy fundraising tool for Orthodox political and religious organizations while the pro-corporate values embedded in the heart of the movement ensure that media power is never effectively challenged. The result is a neat symbiosis that provides a steady flow of power to elites.

In all, the cohesion of the Orthodox bloc is the most remarkable achievement in modern politics. There can be little doubt that this cohesion is largely engineered by the corporate elites who have funded the various arms of the movement and who have benefitted so remarkably from its ascent to power over the last 40 years.

Next, we will examine the opposition.

If you’re running in, say, the New Hampshire Primary, and a story leaks about something you said seventeen years ago in jest at a party, and the media and opposition whip it up into a referendum on your character, the functional human response is to tell the voters: “If you’re that stupid, you can go screw yourselves. I’m going fishing in Montana.” Anybody who puts up with that is a masochist or a megalomaniac. And that’s the pool from which we pick our presidents.

Politics is an incredibly complex profession with its own lore, nomenclature, and rules, but unlike other such professions, like law, engineering, or medicine, every angry stockbroker or machinist thinks she knows how to do the job. Try complaining about your cancer treatment being dominated by “career oncologists” and see how silly you sound. We suffer severe cognitive dissonance about our political life, dismissing all candidates for office as crooks and deviants, but expecting them to make us opulent and immortal. We can call Congressman Jones an alcoholic reprobate pedophile in one breath while in the next cursing him for not getting our cat out of a tree. Despite that, we think we’re insiders if we choose a screaming heads show with our meatloaf instead of professional wrestling, as if there were any salient difference.

A career in politics tends to alienate one from the concerns of the public because there is NOTHING more distracting than the political process. The endless rush of compromises and deal making on the Hill, and the relentless drive to raise more money and get more press to stay in the job, combine to make one forget the effects that power has on every living thing on this planet. The labyrinthine process of legislation and the public dance of pundits and polls couldn’t have less to do with one another.

Despite these conditions and against all odds, there are people in office who belong there. They can come through the sewer of modern politics clean enough to eat off, always remembering why they are there and who they are there to serve. They can’t always be honest about that because the people they serve just don’t vote in large numbers, but those of us who watch the process know who they are. They are more precious than gold, because the system really would collapse without them and because the system is specifically designed to shuck them off.

I (sorta) know Kendrick Meek, and everything I’ve seen has convinced me he is one of those people. One of the few safe-seat members to show real statewide savvy, he is a skilled and personable retail politician of the old school. Not only does he vote in ways that make sense given the knowledge he has at the time, he has run his campaign in a way specifically designed to obligate himself to rank-and-file Democrats while still courting the big donors he needs to win in a state with 10 Designated Media Markets. His campaign has kept its cool under chaotic conditions, with three major shifts in the race’s outlook. I really don’t know how he could have run a smarter race. I will never agree with everything any politician does or says, but Congressman Meek is as sure a bet as I can find.

So, just when events shift to permit an African-American Progressive Populist to win a Senate seat in a state frightened by all three things, a wrinkle conveniently appears.

A few years ago, a merely very rich man became impressively wealthy by betting big against American homeowners at just the right time. He likes celebrities, fancy parties, and luxury travel. He married an actress and enjoys his privacy. He made a vanity run for Congress as a Republican in California in 1982, in the wake of the millionaire-pleasing Reagan Revolution. He’s pretty much another innocuous, vanilla billionaire in a country where they’re not that rare.

But, for some reason this man woke up one morning and said to himself, “You know what? Not only am I suddenly a public intellectual, I’m also a committed Progressive Democrat! I’m going to run for the open Senate seat. You know, the one in the state I have lived in for three years.”

Now, I don’t know when this internal monologue took place, but giving him the benefit of the doubt, I have to assume this was more than a year ago. So, instead of forming an official exploratory committee and building a base within the party, he waits a year or more and ambushes Meek in a Primary just when the race changes shape with Crist’s jump, a tactic that cost him several million dollars to plug a name-recognition hole that would not have existed had he taken a more conventional approach. There’s a reason many Democratic activists think he’s a spoiler.

So, this man indelibly associated with Credit Default Swaps in the wake of an economic catastrophe indelibly linked in the public’s mind with the proliferation of exactly those instruments knows he has a political problem. How to solve it? Like an only child who has just broken the cookie jar, he runs the other way and blames the dog. (apologies to Kendrick) Jeff Greene is now an anti-poverty crusader whose base is in Liberty City! Now, that’s political dexterity. I mean, I’ve changed parties a couple of times, but Holy Crap! That’s like Pat Buchanan turning into Noam Chomsky! Arianna Huffington, take notes.

So, he spends enough to start a community redevelopment fund, launches into Kendrick Meek, blames him for the economic crisis, pulls some anti-Fannie Mae rants out of his Republican “past,” criticizes him for not creating enough jobs, drags his mother into the race to swear what a good boy Jeff is, and in general sounds like he’s running against Kendrick Meek for the job of chief economic planner rather than freshman Senator. Now, I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of a class of Democratic Primary voter who is not supposed to be insulted by this reasoning and I can’t come up with one.

Greene is using the old line about rich businessmen knowing more about how to create jobs than “career politicians.” This is a strange argument given that he made his money by exploiting exactly the informational asymmetries that have distorted the economy so badly in the first place. His language comes right out of the Rick Scott playbook, and Democrats can be forgiven for expecting him to be just as Progressive as Mr. Scott. He launches into an economic plan as if he doesn’t know the difference between freshman Senator and President.

Most insulting of all, it seems to be working. The polls have pulled even. It remains to be seen what the actual turnout will be in the Primary (always unpredictable), but if Greene can spend his way into the General, the Republicans keep the seat (a child could do their ads), Meek does something more rewarding than human punching bag, and we are all worse off for it. If money alone can turn Jeff Greene into Cesar Chavez, then I might as well go make some money in some other business where we rip people off retail instead of wholesale.

Ending the practice of working families putting off treatment for serious disease until they reach the point of crisis will save families, employers and government untold billions. Getting and keeping Americans insured will help rein in costs. We will now begin to turn the corner on the epidemics of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.

There is much to regret in the compromises that went into this bill, but its defeat would have spelled the death of reform hopes. Now we need to line up behind Rep. Alan Grayson’s Medicare You Can Buy Into Act. This is not the end, but it is the end of the age when serious reform could be seen as unrealistic. It is for this reason that I am filled with hope.

Yet ROB FIELDS ululates as only a wannabee apparatchik can, like a hog caught under a gate.

Why do the heathen rage?

Because Faye Armitage is “the real deal” and HEATHER BEAVEN is a fake, just like CLYDE MALLOY before her. Like CLYDE MALLOY, BEAVEN seems like a “Stealth” candidate, with no detectable pre-existing positions that would make one believe she is a Democrat.

Is HEATHER BEAVEN a shameless opportunist?

With some of the same staff (and funders), FIELDS is mistaken to dubBEAVEN “the frontrunner” when no one has ever voted for BEAVEN, and 2008 Democratic nominee Faye Armitage earned nearly 150,000 votes last year against reprobate Representative JOHN LUIGI MICA for the Seventh Congressional District race.

Beaven has no staff in common with Malloy. There’s also not more than a thousand bucks worth of donor overlap.

Beaven and Malloy are both lifelong Democrats.

What Mr. Slavin fails to mention is that elections are not tests of character or fairy-tale struggles against evil, they are numbers games, technical exercises in the mobilization and utilization of resources.

It’s rather bizarre that Slavin repeatedly refers to Malloy and Beaven as “stealth” candidates, because it is Ms. Armitage who is running a stealth campaign. Filing in April, she has missed two FEC reporting deadlines. She illegally refuses to report her fund-raising totals and sources. What is Armitage afraid for us to know?

Ms. Armitage has failed to put together the team necessary to beat Mica. This General Election will be more difficult than last cycle, because turnout will be lower. Armitage is serving as a spoiler. She will not campaign, will not raise money, but she refuses to drop out, making it more difficult for Beaven to attract support from people waiting to see what the previous nominee will do. Since the Primary is only two months before the General, this could potentially swing an otherwise contestable election in Mica’s favor.

Ms. Armitage is the stealth candidate, pretending to be a Democrat while helping keep John Mica in office.

By the way, my name is “Field,” not “Fields.” It’s written right in the comment field and everything. I already knew you can’t write, but I thought even a disbarred attorney could read.

It is a matter of air safety. When we fly, we don’t want to die.

While lithium batteries have caught on fire, the number of times this has happened is dwarfed by the billions of units in service around the world. Clearly, the facts do not justify the kind of hyperbolic language on display in this post.

Likewise, Slavin’s spin of this issue as an attack on Beaven was a bit out of left field:

Heather Beaven, the Stealth corporativist candidate from the “monumental, $20 million dollar, growth campaign” that teaches workers nothing about OSHA.

Heather Beaven: unsafe at any speed?

Wait, what?

Reading this kind of bizarre vitriol, I was compelled to respond:

Banning lithium batteries from aircraft would mean eliminating all laptops and smartphones from air travel. This is unrealistic in the extreme, because such devices have become indispensable tools for the business traveler. Airlines have recently added WiFi to their flights in recognition of this fact. Every airport in the US has facilities for wireless networking. These devices allow business travelers to receive, send, and edit data and voice communications with their home offices, out-of-town clients, and suppliers. Banning or confiscating such devices would do much to render business travel impractical.

There have been incidents of batteries catching fire, but of the billions of units in service, the number of documented fires have numbered in the hundreds. Considering the percentage of a device’s life represented by a trans-continental flight, such a ban would represent a gross over-reaction to a very small threat. Even the arch-paranoiac Dick Cheney only applied a one-percent doctrine to his worst-case models. This would be more like a .00001 percent model, and Cheney was talking about nukes!

Look, these things have been in widespread use for a decade, and there are billions of air-miles logged a year. If this were a danger worth imposing this kind of cost, it really would have happened by now.

Furthermore, this issue is hardly the focus of Ms. Beaven’s campaign, and does not justify the inflammatory ad hominem tactics represented in this post. There are plenty of points of disagreement between Armitage and Beaven which could have been explored here, but the Bush-style scaremongering displayed here is unworthy of you or this fine blog.

It’s hard to understand why such an erratic campaigner as Armitage inspires such fervent loyalty. Whatever the political qualities of Beaven, at least she has been running a campaign. She’s been building a team, making appearances, raising money, hiring consultants, and using the media. Armitage has filed no campaign finance reports, has hired no staff, made few public appearances, and refuses to return repeated calls about her status as a candidate. When she ran last year, she showed little aptitude for retail politics. She was able to win the primary based on the personal loyalties of fellow health care activists in her home county, but got beaten by more than twenty points in the most favorable environment  for Democrats in this district since 2002. I’m personally prepared to blame myself for her primary win in 2008, but her idiosyncratic interpersonal style is a strange choice for someone who aspires to elected office. Apparently, her combative and quixotic approach is contagious.

Banning lithium batteries from aircraft would mean eliminating all laptops and smartphones from air travel. This is unrealistic in the extreme, because such devices have become indispensable tools for the business traveler. Airlines have recently added WiFi to their flights in recognition of this fact. Every airport in the US has facilities for wireless networking. These devices allow business travelers to receive, send, and edit data and voice communications with their home offices, out-of-town clients, and suppliers. Banning or confiscating such devices would do much to render business travel impractical.

There have been incidents of batteries catching fire, but of the billions of units in service, the number of documented fires have numbered in the hundreds. Considering the percentage of a device’s life represented by a trans-continental flight, such a ban would represent a gross over-reaction to a very small threat. Even the arch-paranoiac Dick Cheney only applied a one-percent doctrine to his worst-case models. This would be more like a .00001 percent model, and Cheney was talking about nukes!

Look, these things have been in widespread use for a decade, and there are billions of air-miles logged a year. If this were a danger worth imposing this kind of cost, it really would have happened by now.

Furthermore, this issue is hardly the focus of Ms. Beaven’s campaign, and does not justify the inflammatory ad hominem tactics represented in this post. There are plenty of points of disagreement between Armitage and Beaven which could have been explored here, but the Bush-style scaremongering displayed here is unworthy of you or this fine blo

I was cruisin’ the tubes when I came across a blog post on the Atlantic Monthly site about female support (or more precisely, the lack thereof) for Sarah Palin. At the bottom of the comments section was this gem from a “tnorton:”

If she didn’t have a good chance you liberals would not keep running stories daily headlines about her not being qualified, nor would your supporters spend most of their time responding or commenting on how she doesn’t have a chance. Funny how an attractive, intelligent republican female scares you guys so much. Must be because she not the average female liberal, A mullet wearing, PETA supporting lesbian member of NOW. Poor libs cant sleep at night worring about her. GO SARAH!!

If she didn’t have a good chance you liberals would not keep running stories daily headlines about her not being qualified, nor would your supporters spend most of their time responding or commenting on how she doesn’t have a chance. Funny how an attractive, intelligent republican female scares you guys so much. Must be because she not the average female liberal, A mullet wearing, PETA supporting lesbian member of NOW. Poor libs cant sleep at night worring about her. GO SARAH!!

Now, suffice it to say, I had one or two points of disagreement with this brilliant person, but the foremost was the idea that liberals thought that Palin running for President was a BAD THING. I felt compelled to share the following insight:

Are you freakin’ kidding me? I’m wetting myself with glee, and so is everybody I know. She’s our dream opponent. She lays bare everything about your party and ideology that we hold in utter contempt: Your cluelessness, arrogance, utter lack of concern for the vulnerable and the future, your worship of wealth as the determinant of human value, your casual attitude toward the grave responsibilities of public office, your substitution of glib talking points for policy analysis, your mindless jingoism, your rank hypocrisy, your deeply troubled relationship with the truth. She is a better refutation of the conservative creed than anything we could make up. She is a giant gift-wrapped wet dream for liberals who might otherwise be concerned about 2012. I’m on my knees praying to the God I cherish that conservatives are THAT FRICKIN’ STUPID! If she announces, I’m going to launch a fund-raising drive for her among my liberal friends. In the words of my second-least-favorite President: “Bring it on!”

Reading that last paragraph, the only thing I regret is the absence of the word “vacuous.” Feel free to insert it where appropriate.

The Republican Party has experienced hacks and gifted wonks at its call. It has people who can look good in a suit, stare into a camera, and recite a focus-group tested soundbite with the best of them. Can we dare to hope that the rabid base is gullible enough to believe that this human train wreck is the best choice to run against one of the best political operators in the history of American politics? Can we really be that lucky?

Thanks to Matt Bors

On Sunday Morning at the State Conference, after the AG’s debate, The Kendrick Meek campaign held a combined press/new media event with three professional reporters and a handful of bloggers. The campaign’s new chair and the newish new media director were present and began the briefing before the arrival of the candidate. They were delighted about a poll that showed the Crist-Meek gap to be not 18 points, as last month’s poll showed, but a mere 14. Hey, advocacy is their job. They had it partially broken down and showed where Crist’s numbers were soft, which we knew. A great deal of emphasis was placed on an 800 LV phone poll with an MoE of 4.

But it’s hard to imagine a poll can be meaningful 13 months out when one’s opponent is the sitting governor of a state with huge budget liabilities and angry citizens. Crist’s decision to leave the Governor’s mansion and run for the seat mid-term in the middle of a budget crisis has always seemed callous to me. When some of my more Republican-friendly acquaintances told me he was going to do it, I suggested that there were cheaper methods of political suicide. Chalk another one up for the genius.

The real reporters questioned the validity of the poll, and I had technical questions. The real reporters asked inside baseball questions about the emergence of yet more penniless candidates in a crowded field that includes safe-seat fixture Corrine Brown from bizarrely gerrymandered District 3 . By this time, Kendrick had come in and addressed the reporter’s questions in a even, focused tone I found effective. He then went on to criticize a St. Pete Times reporter for a story that reported the empty room the day before without explaining why the room was empty. The effect was deceptive, but Meek was not making his case. There’s no way to complain about coverage and sound above the fray. Reporters go for the superficial. It’s their way of being “fair.” Analysis is spin. Besides, they might all be replaced with fashion reporters next Tuesday, so who the hell cares?

I saw near-universal Meek support among the delegates. Meek stickers were at least as omnipresent as Obama stickers in the parking lot. There is no doubt he will win the nomination, and in that sense the St. Pete piece was deceptive, because it strongly implied the nomination was up for grabs.

Reporters asked repeatedly about third-quarter fundraising numbers, which were still not public. The Chair delayed releasing the numbers until they finished spinning the poll. Then he announced that the campaign raised just under $800,000 in the first quarter, not enough to catch up with Crist. He promised three major fundraisers in the fourth quarter, two with former President Bill Clinton. If he can’t crack a million and a half then, something will be wrong.

One of the odd moments was when a reporter seemed on the verge of asking whether a black man could be elected Senator in Florida. He didn’t want to ask that question and it sort of visibly morphed into whether a man from Miami was electable statewide.

This was my first media event, so I’ll suspend judgement. The overwhelming impressions were the dearth of political savvy among the bloggers, the cynicism of the press, the tightly controlled candidate, and the transparent spin of the campaign staff. Other than two numbers and two scheduled events, I was no more enlightened than when I got there. Since everyone in the room had a Blackberry, it might have been avoided altogether.

Honestly, I’m worried Crist might knock Kendrick off, just by name-recognition alone. But it’s a hell of a long time between here and there. By choosing to get on the ballot by petition, he’s putting his money into voter contact where the response rates are higher. Crist will thus be able to out-TV him in the General. Countering that in the field will take the kind of specialized social-media tools we saw in the Obama campaign and that are as yet unseen in Meek’s campaign. The whole strategy is a risky bet. Large states are always won on television. Clinton won most large states in the primaries. The trend is aggravated by the likely low turnout in a mid-term race. If the petition strategy has a hidden advantage, this is it. Turnout operations are easier when you have all those voter contacts.

Anyway, good luck to Kendrick and his team. Hint: always feed the reporters. Worked for George W.

The aura was interrupted by Gelber’s opening shot on vouchers, which was returned by Aronberg equating the comment with Republican smear jobs. After that, the two candidates couldn’t say too many times how much they liked each other. Aronberg’s answers were consistently, if not overwhelmingly, sharper and more coherent than those of his opponent. Senator Gelber felt it necessary to mention three times that his wife was also a federal prosecutor, seemingly implying that prosecutorial talent can be sexually transmitted and that he was thus twice as qulaified as Senator Aronberg to be AG. Aronberg made the risky move of calling for reforms in sex offender laws but didn’t seem to lose the audience. The crowd, which seemed like a Gelber fan club at the beginning, definitely warmed to Aronberg by the end. One leading YD looked at Sen. Aronberg and said “future Governor.” I think the YD might be right.