On Saturday, Nevada Republicans conducted what turned out to be just the first chapter of their state convention in Reno. It was supposed to be a simple process, and completed in one day; with John McCain presumed to be the party’s choice of nominee, what could go wrong?

An earthquake? Well, yes. But perhaps it was only leading the way for other unexpected shifts.

In what clearly was a surprising, organized show of support, Ron Paul supporters showed up to the event in force. They showed up in such numbers, in fact, that they were able to vote through a change of rules that favorably affected the number of delegates Paul - who placed second in the state’s caucuses in January - would receive.

The Republican Party’s reaction? Shut down the convention for a “recess”, and claim that their rental of the meeting room had run out.

“I’ve seen factions walk out. I’ve never seen a party walk out,” said Jeff Greenspan, regional coordinator for the Paul campaign.

State Senator Bob Beers, the convention chairman, received boos when he called the recess, and the shutdown prompted State GOP Chairwoman Sue Lowden to say that while the rule change wasn’t anticipated, there wasn’t any anti-Paul bias at work in the recess. She said the process to select national delegates would be a fair and open one.

According to the Las Vegas Sun, “Jeff Greenspan, Paul’s southwest director, said the Paul convention plan had been in the works for months. They dominated county conventions. And, in Reno on Saturday, they communicated strategy on the convention floor by mass cell phone text messaging, which no doubt kept them a step ahead of party leadership.”

No doubt the Paul supporters are outraged by the game played by the Nevada GOP bigwigs. And they should be. And do should the rest of the voters in America regardless of who they support.

Though no one should assume that a state or national convention is a wholly democratic process - it is, to put it simply, a group deciding its leadership in whatever method it decides upon - there is no reason why an organized, dedicated group who uses the proper channels shouldn’t be able to change things.

It won’t hurt McCain in November if Paul’s supporters claim a moral victory in Nevada. It might, however, hurt his chances with many former Paul supporters still deciding where to throw their support. Given McCain’s stance on the war in Iraq, the Nevada GOP’s shenanigans may have just pushed a large number of libertarian-leaning conservatives into the welcome arms of Barack Obama or even Ralph Nader.

In this election cycle, what we should have learned more than anything is that no vote may be taken for granted, no outcome is a sure thing, and that people seem ready to support efforts which don’t reek of traditional, dirty, bullying politics as usual.

The questions stemmed from a story that broke on the Internet more than a week before, when President Bush admitted on ABC News that he had attended meetings regarding the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other torture methods.

From Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin:

President Bush says he was aware that his top aides met in the White House basement to micromanage the application of waterboarding and other widely-condemned interrogation techniques. And he says it was no big deal.
“I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved,” Bush told ABC News’ Martha Raddatz on Friday. “I don’t know what’s new about that; I’m not so sure what’s so startling about that.”

It’s true that it has been widely assumed and occasionally reported that the CIA’s use of brutal interrogation techniques could be traced back to the White House on a general level. But it was most definitely new last week when ABC News reported that a group of Bush’s top aides, including Vice President Cheney, took part in meetings where they explicitly discussed and approved — literally blow by blow — tactics such as waterboarding. And while Bush has previously defended these tactics — vaguely, and insisting against all evidence that they did not amount to torture — he had not, until now, acknowledged that he personally OK’d them beforehand.

The full transcript of the interview can be seen here.

Since the admission, the story has gone largely ignored except on political blogs and social bookmarking sites such as Reddit.com.

Until Wednesday.

At a press conference, Helen Thomas asked Dana Perino about this issue :

At the end of the questioning, Thomas appears to grow frustrated with fellow reporters, looks around, and admonishes, “Where is everybody, for God’s sakes?

On Thursday, a man named Micah Fitch suggested, on reddit.com, that people take up a collection to send the 87 year-old Ms. Thomas some flowers for her willingness to ask what no one else seems willing to. Fitch started a chipin.com page for the collection, and the donations started pouring in. The idea was to make a statement both to Helen and to her less intrepid colleagues in the Press Corps with a fantastic display of thanks. At this writing, the amount donated stands at over $3,700.00, with the average donation per person at about $8.20.

As the amount neared $2,000, Micah and others on Reddit began to discuss other ways the money could have an impact. He started a wiki page dedicated to a discussion on how contributors wanted the money spent, and what message to attach to the card. You can view the ongoing discussion here.

This isn’t the first time people have gathered money for flowers for Ms. Thomas. In 2006 a group called the Democratic Underground sent her more than 100 dozen roses for her willingness to challenge President Bush on Iraq. Thomas was touched, and gave most of the flowers to wounded Iraqi veterans recovering in hospitals.

In the end, Perino and other journalists may continue to roll their eyes and smile condescendingly at Helen Thomas when she asks “where is everybody?”, but several hundred Internet activists - and counting - have stepped up to offer a gesture that answers, “Here We Are.”

Last night in Philadelphia, the home of the Constitution, ABCNews hosted a debate between the two Democratic frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Just six days ahead of a crucial primary, the debate could have been a final opportunity for voters to see key differences in the candidates’ platforms and visions for the country.

Instead, moderators Charlie Gordon and George Stephanopoulos chose to spend over half of the two-hour time slot throwing out gotcha questions about gaffes and implications of guilty by association. Not a single real policy question was asked until past the one-hour mark.

The first 9 questions (over an hour of the debate) were about the following topics:

• Each choosing the other as VP candidate
• Obama’s “elitist” remarks
• Clinton telling Bill Richardson that Obama can’t beat McCain.
• Rev. Wright: why Obama didn’t distance himself sooner
• Rev. Wright: does he love American as much as Obama?
• Clinton viewed as dishonest because of Bosnia misstatements.
• Flag lapel pins
• Obama’s ‘relationship’ with terrorist William Ayres

After each commercial break, ABC showed articles from the Constitution, accompanied by a serious, deep voiceover. Each time they followed these solemn statements with an inane question about things like lapel pins, it was hard to decide whether to laugh or howl in frustration.

At long last, after these gems came a more serious discussion - of Iraq, Iran & Israel, taxes, gun control, affirmative action, gas prices, and how each would find a role for soon-to-be former President Bush to play (this one got a bit of a chuckle out of both of them).

After the debates, the Internet and talk radio were abuzz with many journalists, bloggers and talk-show hosts excoriating the moderators for shoddy journalism. At the time of this writing, abcnews.com had over 16,000 comments from viewers, most of them appalled by the debate.

Update: evidently, ABCnews.com has deleted the vast majority of the comments.

Many Obama supporters cried foul, saying that the debate was like a 3-to-1 tag team effort against their candidate. Clinton supporters were more calm, smugly noting that it was about time that somebody asked some tough questions of Obama, whom they regard as the object of media adoration.

Regardless of which candidate they supported, most of the disgruntled took aim at the topics covered by the hosts. Rehashing old gaffes or associations that have already been covered ad nauseum isn’t helpful to anyone trying to make up his or her mind about the primary.

Granted, the two candidates agree on most issues, so at some point the moderators run out of ideas for keeping the debates fresh. But they should be more concerned with advancing discourse than with pandering to ratings-hungry producers who expect bloodbaths.

As for the candidates themselves: it appeared to me that each was growing irritated with the line of questioning, though they each grabbed the opportunity to add to the mess rather than rise above.

For example, after Clinton was asked about the Bosnia sniper-fire “issue” and she agreed that her statements had not been “as accurate as they could have been”, Obama began to hint that the media should lay off, that we all make mistakes. It sounded great until he used, as an example, her infamous 1992 quote which sarcastically asked the country whether they thought she should have stayed home to bake cookies instead of having a career. He indicated that he remembered the furor over that remark and thinking that Hillary was being wronged. Of course, in his “defense” of her he’s reminded us all, once again, of the statement.

Clinton was very coy in her ad hominem attacks, getting in her digs but couching them as things the Republicans will use against him. It was all really “Oh, me? No, I wouldn’t say anything bad about Obama. But let me tell you a few things I think those nasty Republicans will use against him…..”

The candidates did shine a bit when they finally got a chance to talk about policy. It’s just too bad they weren’t given more of a chance to do it. Nothing was said about alternative energy, NAFTA / trade agreements, the Olympics in China, the FAA - and that’s just off the top of my head.

So, who won the debate? Probably the McCain campaign, though McCain himself hasn’t tended to stoop to the level of badgering Obama or Clinton for gaffes.

And who lost? Judging by the reaction of viewers and bloggers, the big loser was ABC News in general, and Charlie Gibson & George Stephanopoulis. Oh yeah, and the voters in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and North Carolina. They deserve better.

We all deserve better than this.

(The full transcript of the debate can be found here.

Update: for a much funnier recap of the debate, check out The Colbert Report take on it.

Here we go again, folks. By tomorrow this time, the story I’m about to tell irresponsibly repeat ought to have hit the mainstream media in full force.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that McCain has been accused of being a hothead. After all, he told John Cornyn to (explicit) off last year and has been known to call his opponents - and even colleagues - rude names.

But Cliff Schecter, author of the soon-to-be-released book entitled “The Real McCain”, relates an episode back in 1992 in which McCain goes beyond rivalry by humiliating his wife with an insult in front of reporters and aides.

Here’s the bombshell (censoring is mine, not the book’s):

“Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain’s intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said, “You’re getting a little thin up there.” McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c–t.” McCain’s excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.”

It’s hard for me to imagine a scenario in which a “long” day” would make a man speak so disrespectfully to his wife if he didn’t really mean it.

If this story is true, it could cost McCain valuable independent votes, especially in a year where he might happen to be running against, say, a woman.

But I dug into the story a little bit, and have concluded that we can’t make any conclusions about its veracity just yet. Many, many websites referenced the story, but all of them use the same passage I quoted above. It’s not yet time to roundly criticize McCain for this story.

It should be an easy story to vet, since the author claims that the comment took place in front of reporters and aides in a public place. If it didn’t happen, I hope that it gets cleared up quickly.

If it did happen, should it matter?

On one hand, McCain allegedly uttered the phrase about 16 years ago - that’s almost a generation ago. Should he really be held accountable for something he said, in the heat of the moment, that long ago? Let’s get back to the policy issues and focus on what matters.

On the other hand: you don’t really know much about someone until they’re tested. If a flip, casual teasing from his wife elicits such a hateful response, what should we expect from his diplomatic efforts when he’s representing us abroad? And - if he’s willing to humiliate her publicly as punishment for light teasing - how does McCain treat his wife when no one’s looking?

What do you think?