Naked City

Go to TexansforLawsuitReform.com and you may get a most unexpected opinion: "Vote 'No' on Prop. 12!" That's because Texans for Lawsuit Reform, the pro-tort-reform group pushing to limit civil jury awards -- which would very much like you to vote "Yes" on Proposition 12 on the Sept. 13 constitutional ballot -- has nothing to do with the Web site. Instead, the domain name was snatched up by Democratic strategist Kelly Fero to push exactly the opposite message. How did he pull that off? "I just registered it many months ago when I discovered that TLR had not bothered to," Fero said.

The page is designed to exactly mimic the actual TLR site (www.tortreform.com), which prompts the obvious question: Has the TLR, um, threatened a lawsuit against Fero? "It's only been a couple of days, and with their lack of knowledge of Web campaigning, it will take them a while to snap to it," Fero said. (Naked City tried to help TLR snap to it, but at press time, a call to TLR head honcho Ken Hoagland had not been returned.)

This isn't Fero's first such foray into Web activism -- last year he imitated the Texas Republican Party Web page with his www.enronownsthegop.com, which brought lawsuit threats that ultimately only drew more attention to the project.