Yearly Kos: Random Thoughts

Sorry I was unable to post for a good portion of yesterday; just too busy running around. Here's a bit of disconnected meanderings about what went on.

• The New York Times did get right that people were upset about Hillary Clinton not appearing at the "breakout session" after the Presidential forum tomorrow, leaving things to her surrogate Ann Lewis. It kind of dissipated a lot of the goodwill she gained by defending the convention on O'Reilly. UPDATE: Apparently it was more about a scheduling conflict, which I surmised, but the optics are not good for her.

• Apparently Chris Dodd LEAPED by her on that score by hammering Billo on the show the other night, but I haven't yet seen it. Media Matters is giving out a sticker here that says "Annoy Bill O'Reilly."

• After the Mike Stark/Lane Hudson/S.R. Sidarth early session, I attended the Living Liberally Caucus. It was pretty cool to hear about all the great events springing out of the Drinking Liberally franchise.

• Last year was all about looking perpetually down at people's badges to see what their screen names were. This year is about remembering the faces from last year. Which I'm doing with moderate success.

• In the afternoon, I caught a little of the local blogging and marketing session with Blue Mass Group and Squarestate, before the state and local blogging roundtable that Kid Oakland put together. Very productive, it's great to see what the various state blogs are doing, and to have them see what we're doing at Calitics.

• The California caucus was a rousing success. We had about 100 people there, and I got to co-moderate the session. The good news: I earned myself one a'them fancy nameplates. The bad news: they spelled my name wrong. The agony and the esctasy. We had 4 Congressional candidates at the caucus; Charlie Brown, Russ Warner, Steve Young and Ron Shepston. All of them made short speeches and really got the crowd going. It was great to get the netroots activists in California together and hopefully get the names and the faces together, and to stress the importance of returning to California and focusing on the state political scene.

• Howard Dean and Dick Durbin (via satellite; he couldn't get out of Washington) gave speeches at the welcoming event. And Dean was fired up. It was a speech that was more like a blog post, citing statistics and polls to make the point that Democrats must continue to reach young people, our greatest opportunity to win. The Laughing Liberally peeps were funny as well.

• The Pub Quiz is sure to be an annual tradition. Calitics fielded a team called "Home of the Original Dirty Fucking Hippies." We were in the lead after two rounds and then crashed and burned in Round 3. Overall we finished fourth. The winning team received fleece jackets from the DCCC. The punch line? They were made in China.

• I seem to have left my iPod on the plane, so no Random Ten today. Waaahhh. Will be calling the airline post-haste.