9:08 A.M. (that's 8 central!) Ey yi yi, it is really early, but we sure had a good time after the convention business wrapped up last night. We traveled to dinner and our other, um, engagements in fine style...



We made it back to the hotel in time to catch the rest of the welcome reception, which featured live salsa music!



So we're sitting in platform now, sort of idly waiting for stuff to maybe happen... of course we haven't met quorum ;-P

9:59 A.M. Democrat time strikes again - we've only been underway for 8 minutes of the hour of sleep I didn't get. No bitterness though ;-) Tim tells me that John Edwards is expected to address us tomorrow, and our favorite potted plant is going to talk to us on Saturday. Stuff to look forward to!

12:53 P.M. Yay! We're breaking for lunch, and I'm going to delegate the rest of this platform stuff to someone else, so hopefully I'll be able to blog some more exciting things this afternoon.

2:50 P.M. Well, I was wrong, I'm in platform for at least another hour and a half. We're back from lunch. Before lunch, we talked for a bit with some of the Edwards folks:



Zach remarked that they did look a little bit youthful, but I feel like that's intentional on Edwards' part - after all, we get quite all we need of the seasoned political operative crowd. Edwards gets very strong marks for putting youth on his agenda for real - compare to Obama, who snubbed this convention, presumably because he's too big time to care about us plebes anymore.

We stopped across the street for some lunch...






Clearly Dallas has some nice architectural spaces. Notice the indoor ice rink thing, although it looked like something that wasn't actually ice, I didn't really get it.

We just added more anti-predatory subprime lending language to the platform, incidentally.

4:01 P.M. Having finally managed to escape from Platform, I'm free to see what's going on here! Some of our craftiest backroom godfathers are working Charter and Rules...



Much less interesting than Platform, but also more important. Glad someone's doing it... There's a training aimed straight at a certain person going on right now about dealing with traditional media. Best piece of advice: "Off the record comments: NEVER DO IT!!!" (I wonder who recently made some "off the record" comments and paid for it? ;-)) Here's a sampling of what they're discussing here...



They're talking about the blogosphere, as well, which definitely isn't "traditional" media, but hey, you can never say "Watch out for Matt Sludge" too often.

(P.S. Let me know whether there's any sound on the video, I don't know whether it's my laptop being crappy or what, but I can't hear any, but I know it's there.)

4:44 P.M. Got to love the irony of blogging about "traditional" media, huh? Just getting underway with a(nother) training on "new media" - probably not going to hear too much that's radically new, since Tim Moenk probably knows everything this dude and his consulting company knows and then some...



Yup, here are the bullet points on the first slide: Web site, blogs, YouTube, Flikr, Social networking sites, and SMS. That would be a check, check, check, check, check, aaaand... check. We have this covered! What's interesting though is how many of the international liberal youth (who are here at the same time) are in this training. I count several laptops from them. Not sure I'm going to stay for the whole thing, but maybe these international folks will have some interesting perspectives.

5:02 P.M. The presenter just asked whether anyone spent lots of time blogging... I was actually surprised that I was the only one who raised my hand. I guess if they DID blog a lot, they wouldn't be in this meeting, huh? I talked a little about those famous Angry Benson posts that brought so much traffic to the site in those heady days when Sonny was just an aberration instead of a harbinger of doom. "The mainstream media and the blogosphere are still trying to find the boundaries" - boundaries? We don't need any f'ing boundaries!

6:17 P.M. We're all waiting for general session to start - we supposedly have some good speakers lined up. Jason has outfitted us with hip YDG gear...



It's actually quite convention-ish in here, you could almost believe that you were on the floor of the DNC convention!



We're all a bit bored at the moment, Spicy is reading over my shoulder as I type this ;-)

6:56 P.M. Man, this Jim Hightower - guess he was a state legislator around here or something - is a trip. "In sex, they say using a feather is erotic... but using the whole chicken, that's kinky!" Or "George Bush is a corporate wet dream." I'd pay to hear this guy :-) Maybe we need some cowboy hats in Georgia.

7:05 P.M. I'm in the process of uploading a short clip of Jim Hightower. Right now we're hearing from former Texas governer Mark White, who is our keynote speaker; he's endorsing Bill Richardson for president. Hey, maybe Bill should have come here himself instead of letting someone else do his campaignining for him, but what do I know?

7:14 P.M. *sigh* More routine business, yay credentials report or whatever we just approved! We're being introduced to Garret Coleman, former Texas state rep, as our next speaker. Will we get a "Vote Obama" speech? Apparently he has "motherfucking balls" (what they said, not me...) Heh, he just said they kicked Tom Delay's ass (in so many words). I like our non-keynote speakers a lot more than the keynote...

7:33 P.M. We're singing "All My Exes Live in Texas"... somehow it seems appropriate. Knew I should have brought my cowboy hat... (Ok, so I don't have one.) Oh, and here's the Jim Hightower video, hopefully the sound works...



7:52 P.M. YDA president Chris Gallaway does give a good speech, I have to say.



The speeches are getting a bit old - I'm going to be highly disappointed if one of the musical lead-ins to the speakers isn't a Rage Against the Machine song. "You gotta take the power back!"

7:59 P.M. Now we're hearing from Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. We're not hearing anything new but it's good that we're hearing from such a clearly important personage. It must suck to be him these days under this administration...



11:27 P.M. Last post of the night. Finished up session for the time being, ate some passable food at the hotel sports bar, and spend another two hours on the platform... oog. Nicolette is ready to smack down the platform geeks and their minor wording changes in the morning, so maybe tomorrow I really will be free...