Here at the yearlyKos convention in Las Vegas, progressive activist bloggers are being accused by other progressive activist bloggers (i.e. those not here) of "selling out" by accepting invitations to lavish parties from people in high places (like the stratosphere tower, where Virginia governor Mark Warner's Political Action Committee hosted a gathering last night). Yet there is a healthy skepticism in the air, with minds unclouded by celebrity continuing to press on issues that matter to us. "If we are selling out, then we've got a bigger problem: our price is much too low," commented one user on the daily kos blog, in a thread on the conference. What the bloggers here hope to do is use their multiplicity of viewpoints and grassroots journalism to expose the machinery of the system that's broken, so people can understand the forces at work and build immunity, kind of like a booster shot, a vaccination against political marketing, to force politicians to evolve into effective communicators like me who can talk directly about the issues at hand without having to go through a complex political calculus to arrive at solutions satisfactory to no one. But evolution, natural selection if you will, can't happen effectively without its most-critical tool: death. So some candidates on "our side" are going to have to be tossed overboard in order to save the Party. We're in the coxswain's seat now, egging the rowers on to greater heights... wait a minute, this metaphor is broken, get me rewrite! Less