Morning Round Up from Austin

Day 2 dawns, bright and early here at Netroots Nation. With the proper fuel from Jo's coffee next door; here's what's what.

It was a long day yesterday, esp. when factoring in Tokyo jet lag.
Highlights of the day.

1. I have also volunteered to voluteer a few hours a day all week. So I put my time in from 10:30 am yesterday till 1pm working as a volunteer at the Progressive Book Club stall. I met and talked with some fun people there; Dave from Orcinius, the aforementioned Rick Perlstein, and lots of friendly bloggers. I will repeat this performance this morning! But today should be even more interesting as I think there are 3 or 4 author singings during my time at the booth, including Richard Clark I believe.

2. I told you about the Firedoglake Caucus, which was a nice chance to catch up with bloggers who have been very very supportive of the GNB.

3. The big speech! 2000 attendees! including many candidates running for local offices around the country. Darcy Burner was there. Yeah Darcy!

The MC was one of my favorite Laughing Liberally funny men, Baratunde Thurston. He is a comedian, editor of the Oninon, and damn funny fellow. He had the crowd pretty warmed up with Brandon Friedman from VOTEVETS.org came on. Brandon introduced Gen. Wesley Clark. Wes gave a very genuine supportive speech where he spent a lot of time talking about how what we do the the blogosphere was very relevant, and how he was so grateful for the support the bloggers have shown him when he was unfairly characterized by the news media over the last 4 years. He talked a lot about our responsibility to help steer our country and the discourse. He was a stand-up guy and got a standing ovation.

Next was the lead in to Howard, which I must say I missed! Why you ask? Cause Tokyo Terri one of our commenters and fellow travelers who won a Netroots Nation Scholarship here is doing a series of podcast interview (videocast) and we got a call 10 mins before Howard's speech, which told us that if we got our butts upstairs to Gov. Dean's green room we could have a 5 min. interview with the gov!!! LM, Terri and I hauled our asses up there as fast as we could. Missed our window to set up! But, the gov. who is a big Terri fan, promised that if we waited till after he spoke we could do the interview. So we did, and he came back and was fabulous as always. All this means that I will have to let Sara, Jesse, or HS tell you what he said downstairs. But it also means that when Terri starts posting her "Unofficial Netroots Nation" podcast you will be able to see me asking the gov. our 3 questions!



After all the excitement, the event finished up at about 10pm. At which time the fact that I skipped dinner became a real problem. A few of us went out to grab some grub. And then we hung out a bit, and talked to the lobby lounge waiter about movies. LM by the way can do a very very realistic impression of Christopher Walken... I have to admit I will never see him in just the same way again!

Crashed, under the blogger moon.
Now am trying to drag my tired gator bum into the new day.

More soon. Today is filled with very interesting panels and speaker events.