7:30 am, the doors are open and registration has begun.

8:00 am and the floor is starting to fill up.
Delegates are on the floor and lower bleachers. Alternates are up top

9:00 am, the floor is packed, most of the bleachers are filled. Program is scheduled to start now.

9:15 and the crowd is getting pretty wired up. Both Hillary and Obama supporters chanting and gettin rowdy. Considering how out numbered they were, the "over the Hill" gang was pretty vocal.

Then the speeches. Mostly by those running for office. This is "turncoat" Brian Baird.
He didn't seem to appreciate the "Stop the War" chanting.

It's a sea of Democrats. I don't know the numbers, but it has to be in the thousands.

These are the people of MY Legislative District, the 18th.
Back in the stadium on the floor, that's the County Convention. Here we split out into our Legislative Caucus groups.

Here you can see the Obama camp, lower portion of the picture, and the Hillary camp. The small bunch at the top.

Each will select an equal number of men and women, a number based on the number of registered delegates in our district, to send on to the Congressional and the State conventions. At the state convention, these delegates will then elect and select who will go on to the national convention in Denver. Mostly it was about 7 hours of standing, or sitting around. In defense of the organizers, they don't know how to deal with crowds this large. Usually the county convention will attract a hundred to a hundred fifty delegates. This year there's ten times that many. So naturally items such as verifying every single delegates status takes much longer.

It was a fun day though. If you were watching CCTV of the event, the loud mouth was probly me. Like, right at the end of the national anthem, just before the crowd started to cheer, I let out an especially loud, "OBAMANATION" which of course, increased the cheers from the Obama crowd.

A letter I wrote to all the Clark County Obama Delegates on the mailing list......






I sure would like to hear what the numbers were for todays 2008 Clark County Convention. My guess is it's thousands!

I'd like to thank the organizers for all their hard work. Thank you for being politically active and for putting up with so many people.
I'd like to thank all of us who participated. We are who this is all about. This is OUR government.
WE ARE OUR GOVERNMENT!

I'd also like to thank President George Bush. Yes, good ol village idiot himself. Thank you George for messing up the system so badly that all of these wonderful and good people have become so disgusted, and so strongly feel the need for change that today we came together in part of a movement to create that change! Today, for the first time in many years, I was proud to be an American again. And George, you did that for us. So thank you for all that absolutely terrible corrupt, incompetant, cronyistic inspiriation. Now it's time for a Progressive movement the likes of which haven't been seen since Franklin Roosevelt.


That said, I'd like to leave you with something I came across today, the words of Deepak Chopra discussing Barack Obama and the idea of hope in these modern times. Dare once again to have hope! Dare to bring our country back!



http://www.oldamericancentury.org/bb/index...c=20071&hl=

Monday February 18, 2008
Category: Consciousness, Politics, Politics, Spirituality
The Audacity of Enlightenment
(by Deepak Chopra)


Although Barack Obama's slogan is "the audacity of hope," the words have deeper connotations at this moment. One of the most powerful, I think, is the audacity to wake up. In order for the right wing to succeed in its reactionary agenda, the American public had to agree with it. On the surface it wouldn't seem that people could agree to freeze their incomes, give tax breaks to the least deserving, amass a huge national debt, ignore the rising cost of health care, and various other aspects of the right-wing agenda. To offer their agreement, the public had to vote against its own interest, and doing that required them to be asleep.

What keeps people asleep? Some ingredients are cultural. The dumbing down of America is a real phenomenon. One person out of five believes that the sun revolves around the Earth, and their ignorance is directly related to a failure of education. Half of high school graduates cannot tell you how many Supreme Court justices there are. Overall, pop culture has trumped political culture, so a glib, attractive candidate who makes a nice image on TV reassures more people than a thoughtful intellectual discussing real-life issues. Having drummed "compassionate conservatism" into the mass media, President Bush went on to pass the least compassionate, most right-wing agenda in history without negative consequences to himself for at least six years. He counted on the public remaining asleep.

Now that we are being asked to wake up again, the result could be revolutionary. Looming problems like the national debt, universal health care, and a troubled Social Security system do have real, workable solutions that can be implemented if we don't postpone them much longer. But the alternative has been ingrained for so long that the political machine hopes to return to runaway spending, social irresponsibility, and pro-war policies controlled by a white male elite. This, despite the fact, as Frank Rich pointed out in his NY Times column, that 40% of Americans born after 1982 come from a family with at least one non-white parent.

Waking up means seeing clearly who we are and what needs to be done. It means not blindly voting against your own interest. That's audacious enough. But I was struck by the appraisal given by the British journal, The Economist, to my old teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi when he died on Feb. 5: "Crank? Crackpot? Charlatan? Maybe all three. Yet the maharishi was generally benign. He did not use his money for sinister ends." Behind the dismissive and personally offensive tone is a cynical attitude that is now widespread. This attitude holds that higher consciousness per se is a fraud, that anyone who encourages others to walk the path of enlightenment is by definition a fraud, hypocrite, and money grubber. (The complete Economist article can be found here)

Let's leave aside the abysmal ignorance being shown toward the Indian spiritual tradition, which is immense, not just from the Economist but from obituary articles that were more kindly disposed to Maharishi. What is being derided is the highest aspiration of civilized society, which is to go beyond human frailty toward the best in human potential. Those who ridicule such aspirations will find themselves mired in the opposite -- a downward spiral into greed, selfishness, corruption, and mindless mass consumerism. The rise of Maharishi stood for a belief in higher aspirations. One is allowed to have any kind of opinion about whether gurus and spiritual teachers have feet of clay. But to adopt the cliche of the guru-as-fraud is mean-spirited and ignorant. The audacity of enlightenment reaches much farther than the audacity of hope, and until we are willing to reassert our right to aspire, America will remain crippled spiritually, the very result the right-wing has sadly achieved.