Day One Thoughts

This is going to be random and disconnected and based on what I remember, which given my state of 4 hours of sleep might not be much.

• Debbie Cook is making a lot of believers, and it's well-deserved. My initial thoughts on her fundraising were that she was doing OK, but her beating Dana Rohrabacher was more of a function of him being incredibly lazy. What I'm being told by Cook's people is, no, he's trying pretty hard and Republicans are stiffing him. He's certainly an abrasive personality and it could be that a lot of people want him to fail. Cook is on the energy panel this morning, which I may look in on for a bit. She and Charlie Brown are the most exciting races in California, and both of them are here and were at the California caucus, which went well.

• The Open Left caucus became a bull session about why we can't get an advantage on the energy issue, why "Drill Now!" is so effective even though everyone knows it's bullshit. I think Matt Stoller hit the nail on the head when he talked about how, in an era of high gas prices, people will gravitate to SOMETHING as long as it looks like leadership, and the Democratic message on energy is so ad hoc and muddled that the leadership isn't there. Even the things they do right, like this "Use It Or Lose It" thing, they don't promote effectively. Apparently there was a vote on that yesterday. Hey, can we get some advance warning, guys??? There is a Democratic message sometimes, but it's not always broadcast effectively.

• Wes Clark and Howard Dean gave solid enough speeches last night at the evening keynote, and it's good to see Clark out from the bunker after his non-gaffe about John McCain, but these are the same stalwarts. I found it very telling and revealing to learn that the Senate had scheduled a Martha's Vineyard retreat for a bunch of big-dollar muckety-mucks and leading candidates this weekend. I really don't think that was unintentional. There is not one sitting member of the US Senate here, and a lot of the candidates have to split their time between here and the big-dollar meeting. Scott Kleeb was here AS HIS BABY WAS BEING DELIVERED last year, and this year he opted to go up and kiss the ring. That's not a slam on Kleeb, it's the bottom line of politics. But there's no question that the calendar sent a message to me. Sometimes this does feel like a treadmill; I commiserated with a couple people over this last night. We know change is not going to be immediate, but I don't know if we're learning the right lessons yet. The movement has come a long way but there's a danger of dislillusionment if we don't crash the gates necessary to wield real political power.

• Austin is a great city. It must have the highest concentration of bars per capita in the United States, based on my stroll to some of the offsite parties last night. Looking forward to getting some barbecue at some point.

• I'll be liveblogging a couple panels today, in particular the media panel with Atrios, Digby, Paul Krugman and Rick Perlstein.

• This is hilarious:

It may be the blogosphere's equivalent of the scarlet letter, and the organizers of Netroots Nation, a gathering of liberal bloggers that is taking place this week, say they will be more than happy to pin it on Fox News.

Planners of the conference want to force representatives of the cable news network to wear credentials identifying them as opinion media rather than providing them with the regular press passes other news outlets will receive.

"Fox News calls itself fair and balanced, but it's not," Josh Orton, political director for Netroots said in an interview. He accused the network, which is popular among conservatives, of misrepresenting itself.

Fox lied and said they were never coming to the convention anyway, apparently they had called in for passes and then abruptly changed their tune.

• OK, gotta run.