FeedsIt's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's a Ron Paul BLIMP!
How horrible/wonderful is this, courtesy of Open Left's Matt Stoller:
Ron Paul supporter are hiring a blimp to fly from Washington, DC, to Boston, and then over New Hampshire. And they are doing it through a for-profit media company, so it's not subject to campaign finance laws. The website cycles through donor names publicly to give people credit for giving, which is radically transparent, and is backed by former FEC Commissioner Brad Smith, whose aim is to gut campaign finance laws by opening the loophole of funneling money through for-profit media companies.
The horrible: circumventing campaign finance laws.
The wonderful: it's a friggin' blimp! A zeppelin! In the words of the gnomes from Warcraft II, he's got a flying machine!
Below the cut is the corresponding video Stoller posted to his blog.
Now, if only the other campaigns could seize on Ron Paul's initiative and take their quests for elective office to newer, greater heights! I would love to see an Edwards zeppelin flying majestically about on the day of the Iowa caucuses, giving his supporters hope and broadcasting his aerial supremacy to all who can see.
Indeed, we must have these other campaigns take initiative and meet Ron Paul head-on. If he's going to have an air force, so must the Democrats. After all, the DSCC and DCCC hold massive fundraising edges over their Republican counterparts. Couldn't part of that edge be spent on a private, zeppelin-based air force? That has to be worth something in both national and local polls.
Hell, even our local candidates could benefit from this sort of initiative. A Sam Adams blimp? Amanda Fritz? It would change Portland politics as we know it.
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Comments from site editors have a darker background than comments from everybody else.I was hoping to send www.ronpaulblimp.com to Michael, but alas he was not online. Glad you posted it up here, as my morbid curiosity is captured by Michael's blimp/Paul dilemma.
But you raise another important consideration. What if other candidates did get blimps, and then they all congregated in the air above Iowa at the same time? Could they perhaps put on a show to encourage caucus go-ers to come out and vote?
And further: How sturdy are blimps? Could the campaign be waged in the air, in a slow-motion high-altitude version of bumper cars? And would caucus voters be prone to cast their votes for the last zeppelin flying? Seems like it could be a democratzing force, unless Hillary tricks hers out with $100m worth of razor blades and blow darts...
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Hi --
Circumventing campaign finance laws is not horrible.
I was a fan of McCain Feingold when it passed but I have changed my mind. I was not a Dean fan, but the Deanies convinced me that you don't have to be rich to vote with your wallet.
Take the blimp -- it really is just a bunch of regular people getting together and speaking out for their guy in a way that costs money. It seemed like a good idea when the other guy was being restrained, but to bar me from chipping in my $25 for a friggin blimp while telling me I still have free speech is laughable.
In the end, what we really object to is not the objectionable messages people push, but the fact that others believe them. The only way to fight that war is not to minimize what others can say but to maximize the power of your own voice. The best way to fight, that is, until we get the Ron Paul Imperial Walker project going...
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Brilliant.
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Just have to turn the spamming botnet into an identity/money stealing botnet, launder the money, and you'll have enough to pay someone to make an Imperial Walker in no time.
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