I’m typing this waiting for the final evening session. The final speaker will be Al Franken.
Today, both Pelosi and Reid spoke.
For me, the day was Elizabeth Warren day. If you heard her speak you can understand why she MUST be the head of the new consumer agency the Wall Street Reform Bill sets up.
The final session is beginning. More after the fold.
Pelosi had clearly had the easier task in addressing the Netroots. She can talk about the legislation that the House passes that goes to languish in the Senate.
Reid had the more difficult task. He defused it when he talked about ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Dan Choi is here and the moderator gave Reid Choi’s West Point ring. Reid said he will return it when DADT is finally ended. They both embraced and it was very touching moment.
For me, the best line was when Reid said they are proposing changes in the Senate rules for the next session. That got a big applause. Of course, there were no specifics.
I’m going back to the last session. I will write one more summary tomorrow.
I hope you enjoyed these reports. Thanks for reading them.
I’m sitting in the lunch session on Civil Rights in the Modern Era. The opening speaker made the very, very important point that those of us who have a particular issue must unite to succeed for that issue.
This is exactly the point that Kos made in his first book: Storming the Gates.
This is the third Netroots Nation I have been to: Chicago 2007, Pittsburgh 2009, and now Las Vegas 2010. All three seemed to have distinct themes.
Some thoughts on that after the fold.
I have no idea what the first gathering was like in Vegas, but Chicago in 2007 was exciting.
Those in Chicago were excited. The candidates for President were coming here and NOT to the DLC. We knew, after 2006, we were going to win in 2008 if we worked.
Pittsburgh was in the summer of Obama’s first year. Valerie Jarret came and the vibe, it seemed to me, was what to expect from the Obama administration and the Congress. There were fights ahead, but the question was about what could we expect to do.
This year the theme is clear: why are we on the defensive when we won? That was the underlying theme in the Social Security session I reported on yesterday. This morning I was on a panel about the Kagan nomination. A number of panelist lamented the fact that we have no liberals on the Court. There is an 11% vacancy rate on the Federal bench and the rate of confirmations of Obama nominees is significantly behind the rate of confirmations when Bush took power.
Last night Ed Shultz cried out his frustration over the pace of change and the compromises that have been made.
I have no talked about the memorable speeches.
Governor Brian Schweitzer (D-Montana) was incredible. I have heard no politician in Missouri who can talk about progressive policies in such a folksy manner. Kos talked about him as the obvious challenger to Baucus in 2012.
This morning it was Van Jones. There is a reason why the Right smeared him. For me, Jones had the best line of his convention: Remember Obama volunteered to captain the Titanic AFTER it had hit the iceberg.
I like it but as someone noted to me, “yeah but we expected more.”
There will be no reports on the gambling front. I can still pay next month’s mortgage.
I have the good fortune of being able to afford, both in money and time, to go to Netroots Nation.
This is my third one. I’m now in my fourth session.
I have attended one from Rich Mellman’s polling on the concern people have that we are no longer a manufacturing country, health care reform, social security, and the fights in education standards over evolution in Texas and Kansas.
The one on Social Security is the scariest. I will talk about it below.
The fear, the panelist reported on, is the commission that Obama put together will be reporting in December. With such deficit hawks on the committee, the great fear is that there will be a strong move to reduce benefits for younger workers.
The coalition gearing up to fight any proposals to do that has the cry: “Strengthen Social Security, but Don’t Cut Benefits.”
The group is organizing at strengthensocialsecurity.org.
The message was clear: by changing the cap on the system will survive for 75 more years.
We have to make sure that McCaskill understands that.
Yet think about what happened in the special session. The General Assembly funded a tax incentive program by reducing the retirement benefits for new state workers. That shows how strong the notion is that retirees are too well-off.
More reports coming. The fight will never end and we have to remember that.
All this week, I’ll be posting video and some observations from my week in Pittsburgh as part of the Netroots Nation convention.
Here’s the first one. Kossack TexDem explains how on a Saturday afternoon in a very busy convention we came to be assembling over 300 care packages for US soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some video of the actual care package assembly follows TexDem’s remarks.
If you look at the video carefully, you’ll notice some Daily Kos frontpagers like Bill in Portland Maine and Meteor Blades (two of my favorites.)
The Daily Kos party at Maggie Mae’s on Sixth Street – Photo by The Awful Truth
Meeting Mary Mapes over margaritas at the HuffPo/GQ Party. Watching Jon Tasini dance in a conga line behind a washboard player at a zydeco concert in the Daily Kos party. Marveling at Darcy Burner’s proposals on how the netroots can become even more influential without even raising money. Getting a chuckle out of Jean Carnahan. Sharing slices of pizza with Blue Mass Group’s Bob at a chance meeting (and getting a free book!)
Four days in Austin heat and Texas air conditioning with over 2,000 registered in attendance right smack dab in downtown Austin. It’s difficult to cram four days of nonstop activity into a post, especially activities as varied as hanging out in bars and earnestly jotting down notes in a panel. I’ll have some more specific posts in the days and weeks to come, because there were some intriguing ideas flowing out of the convention that I would like to keep some focus on.
But for now, I’ll just leave you with some more general impressions below the fold.
Convention attendees bask in the glow of temporary satisfaction after preparing care packages for US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq – Photo by Lindsay Beyerstein
This year was a thousand times better organized than last year’s YearlyKos in Chicago. Part of it was the location. Chicago’s convention center is a sprawling beast set away from any signs of nightlife or sightseeing. It sometimes took 15 to 20 minutes to walk from panel to panel, leaving no time for bathroom breaks or chatter between panels. And it took a cab or bus ride to get to a decent restaurant, let alone a bar or club.
Austin’s convention center is decent-sized, but all the panels were adjacent rooms and areas, making the trip from panel to panel a matter of seconds not minutes. The convention center itself is only a short walk from Sixth Street and the Warehouse District, with a range of restaurants, bars, and clubs of every variety and price range. And there were multiple choices of hotels within walkable distance from the convention center.
The selection of panels was also more streamlined and focused. Last year, I went as someone aspiring to learn as much as I could about state blogging, and saw panel after panel with similar information. This year, I went as a stateblogger and as someone consulting for a candidate, and I learned more in a couple of panels about each topic than I did in an entire day last year. Some of the small group sessions I attended were a state blogger caucus and panels on advertising, marketing and monetizing blogs, sunshine laws, blogs and House campaigns, and a special invite-only workshop with Larry Lessig on his new Change Congress project. Of course, I also covered Robin Carnahan’s appearance on a panel I might not otherwise have attended.
The keynote speakers, Larry Lessig and Van Jones in particular, were excellent. I’ll have more to say on them in future posts. Pelosi’s appearance was only decent – she’s not particular good at consistently answering questions to the point in a compelling way. If you hadn’t heard, Nancy Pelosi had agreed to speak at the convention not as a keynote speech with a short Q & A tacked on, but as a full fledged question-and-answer session bothwith questions solicited and voted up by the community in advance, and questions generated on the spot.
Here I want to disassociate myself with the comments of my colleague; there was no effort to quash dissent or prevent Pelosi from being heckled or jeered for a poor response. Gina Cooper announced at the beginning that any organized disruption would bring the Q & A to a halt and those responsible would be kicked out of the convention. That isn’t fascist thuggery; that’s making sure that a disruption doesn’t get in the way of Nancy Pelosi having to answer questions about FISA, the war, and holding the Bush administration accountable.
The Pelosi Q & A also yielded this memorable moment:
I’ll be posting more videos as they become available.
Blogging conventions are springing up all over the place. Lots of us netroots like to think of Daily Kos as the font of all that is good in organizing online, but the BlogHer women’s blogger conference came first in 2005, followed by the first Yearly Kos conference in 2006, and now Blogging While Brown, which will have its inaugural conference in 2008.
