Since yesterday's Live Blogging "Vote for Change at Netroots Nation!" YAY!!! went over so well...

...and since you guys (some sampling of you, more accurately) have been asking for more live-blogging of convention events...

...and since I am light a meaningful live-blogging event at the moment..

...I figured I would live-blog a meaningful place at Netroots Nation 2008.

The Hilton Hotel Lobby.

More below the break.

If you are in Austin for Netroots Nation, you are invited to stop by the coffee shop and hang out and participate in the fun and joy that is live blogging...

...and/or get properly sworn in as a deputized registrar as we help turn Texas blue(bluer/blue-ier) as thoroughly described in casperr's Vote for Change at Netroots Nation -- you know you want to! diary.

here are the event specs, compliments of my.barackobama.com...

We're at the Hilton Hotel Lobby Coffee Shop*,  (500 E. 4th Street) already (3PM CST) and getting geared up for deputization and training, and heading out to register new Texas Democrats!  The plan is to finish up at 6:00. If you want to join us later in the afternoon, drop a message here.

We're treating this as live news coverage! Offer support to the team! Or just give us some cheers and yays and woots woots! It's all good.

Besides, what beats live-blogging? :)

Yep, it's Tuesday this must be DIDS. :)

Tonight's adventure is simply declaring that I have just confirmed my flight is still in existence for tomorrow and just about lunchtime tomorrow local time I shall (barring some mortal or morbid event) be hanging out, being cool, with cool peeps at Netroots Nation!

Woot!

More below the break.

Quick Disclaimer - This story has a happy ending!

It'd be nice if we could sort all our associations into two groups, one with white hats and the other with black hats.

Gosh, then when I am pissed off at my friends I could remember very easily.

Oh, yeah. White hat. It's no big deal.

And likewise, when they are pissed off at me, they could go. Oh, yeah. White hat. Ain't nothin' but a thing.

The problem, of course is, as in recent political dust-ups, it ain't that easy, is it?

Regrettably, if there is one way the Obama netroots contingent could make more effort emulating the Democratic candidate, it would be in the area of conducting relations with people who disagree with them.

Quite frankly, it's not been a hearts-and-minds winner. In point of fact, it has encouraged obstinacy in people who, like me, would like to come back to the fold but are not inclined to concede away our right to speak and think freely as the price of doing so.

So, maybe, just maybe, if you leave me in charge of talking myself back into line, I might just go there and help you hook back the rest of the strays from the flock.

UPDATE 1: Someone finally voted NO. Yay! I have arrived. :)

Netroots Nation is a week away.

You've got your travel arrangements.

You got your registration.

You either have your bod in top-fit condition or your love-me-because-I-am-hot-as-I-am body language ready to go.

You have your wardrobe.

You have your schedule of events.

BUT

You have no idea where you are going to stay, where to meet the peeps you want to hang with, what you are going to do when the convention sessions are done for the day.

Eep!

I offer this diary as a public service for people who

1. need roomies to help defray expenses

2. need roomies to help defray the risk of sleep outside in the hot Austin night

3. want to know where the parties and dinners are gonna be that aren't on NN radar.

4. want to know where the cool watering-holes and hangouts are gonna be.

5. Opportunities for local activism

6. just want to wave hi to their convention-going peeps, even if they themselves are not going.

A bit more below the break.

I am fired up about the Constitution, and perhaps my reverence for it qualifies as a secular religion, and as such might cast haze over my eyes when it comes to more immediate, pressing considerations in the realpolitik of American politics in general and advancing the progressive agenda in detail.

I have, sometimes nicely, received this hint from quite a few persons the past few weeks.

The short form: CSK, you need to look at the big picture.

I answered, not always nicely, that what was bigger than the Constitution?

Let me be up front and apologize for that belligerence. Sorry, guys.

So I took the advice and revisited my thoughts on this election for the past several months...and here is what I came up with.

The Constitution is a framework for resolving domestic political contests in a peaceful, lawful and orderly fashion even among the most diametrically opposed of ideological factions.

In fact, the Constitution thrives in this circumstance.

The Constitution prevails when compromise is made strenuous and unjustifiable deviation from the wishes of one's constituents is made political perilous to the representative of the people who forgets his or her duty - to represent their will, not her or his own.

There is no intellectually, morally or political honest conflation of support for the Constitution and self-destructive ideological zeal.

In occurred to me over the weekend that the Framers of the Constitution would not have been surprised by the current FISA debate at all.

The basic doctrine of the constitution is that human nature is largely constant, and certain assumptions can be made of the behavior of ambitious persons.

In a nutshell, that it is not in the nature of politicians of any stripe to honor the law, where it does not honor their ambition.

Which is why constitutionalist appeals fall on deaf ears when those ears either hold great power or are in the midst of a contest for same.

Back in the day, back in the political wilderness, liberals and progressives were free to imagine the Democratic leadership to be different, better creatures.

Granted, they are sufficiently different and better in their choices and public policy proposals to merit preference over the alternatives.

However, they are not significantly different and better by their nature and their adherence to higher principle.

The same standard holds for all politicians: they will not honor the law, where it does not honor their ambition.

And right now, honoring the Constitution is just not good politics.

Every week it's time to do the DIDS...to crow about what perfectly ordinary little victory we or someone we care about or know about has wrested from the grubby fingers of mundance workaday existence.

Sure, we could blog about the 2008 election..or the latest race to build a better battery....but why?

We want to write about our achievements. They rock!

This is the week I get to guard the house while the family is off in Michigan.

One thing I know for sure -

I sure as heck ain't selling rights to it for $300 million, given it would solve a lot of the problems associated with hybrid cars.

So, I think we are talking, oh, something worth about $8,000 in energy savings per new super-hybrid vehicle less the cost of the battery packet. Hmm.. let's sell those at $6,000 per unit...yes, a bit more than the usual $5,000 per engine (manufacturers currently eat most of this cost).

More below

As of this moment, the top ranked diary calls the Constitution a piece of toilet paper, that the erosion of liberties and rule of law that privileged technocrats enjoy is something that persons of color have dealt with all their lives and long before. That, in so many words, it's a war, an ideological struggle, with the latest insult being hand-wringing over a bill that amends a piece of toilet paper.

I will set aside the transparent retort that such bills ended slavery and gave women the vote, among other valuable public goods, because the same author demanded but one thing in answer - are you with the Blue Prince, or do you stand against him? For she is with him, and she will not have her time wasted with the likes of fools and villains who do not raise their guns and cry loudly their oaths of fealty to the new champion.

She says it's war.

So be it.

War it is.

And so it has come to this: The bipartisan consensus that the Constitution is negotiable.

We now make pragmatic decisions on when it should and should not apply to those who hold power in the name of the people...or act on the behalf of the powerful as a few corporations have done in the past several years.

And we now applaud it when our leaders qualify when the laws apply to some and not to others, starting with themselves.

You dared promise good leadership in the name of the American people. You have failed us, have moved us onto a fast track to more certain and unambiguous failure.

So be it. See what you have sown, and what you shall reap.

In honor of the Democratic Congressional leadership's ratification of the Enabling Act of 2008, I have decided to illustrate how much of an impact on simple phrase --

...except when the President writes a memo saying otherwise...

is about to have on all of your lives.

I'd call this snark...but it's just not so.

Following the break is the Constitutution of the United States of America...which just one little phrase added to each major point of basic law.

....except when the President writes a memo saying otherwise...

The FISA capitulation isn't a little thing. It changes everything.

Early last year, I posted a comment about the two neighborhood girls who became for all intents and purpose my sisters.

Well... my mom just called.

One of them died of pneumonia, complications from a pair of broken ribs (cause unspecified but not likely for any reason worse than a fall) and not going to a hospital for it. Per my mother's account, she went into a coma, and all her organs started shutting down one after the other. She did go to the hospital at last, on Sunday. Ironically, my mom was there getting her leg tended too at the same time, had no idea this was going on.

More below the break...

Every so often (almost always on a Tuesday) we get a DIDS going. What's that? An excuse to chitter chatter about the little victories that make the waking world a little better and ourselves a little prouder. Not all of us can win the mightiest Democratic primary in, like, forever. Some of us have to take our victory laps after, well, running a few laps. Or packing away some pictures. But there are heroic moments, and sad, noble struggles. Life is not always joy and sound bites. Sometimes, life can well and truly suck.

But on enough occasions it is bright, and it is hopeful and when you have friends to share the little victories with, it is a life full of love.

And that, I suppose is, what the DIDS is all about.

So let's get on with it. :)

A year ago, I was admonishing any and all who would listen that the then-extant plan to wait out the clock on the Bush Administration is an utterly dangerous thing to do, not because Bush is dangerous, but because a future President with at least twice his current approval ratings.

And all of Bush's acquired powers and asserted (without effective contest) precedents.

And were that soon-to-be president tempted to do anything of a similar sort, they would do it to the sound of madly cheering crowds.

I said that it would never be easier to remedy the Praetorian Presidency than while it was in the hands of a 28% approval rating president.

No one seemed to mind very much. After all, the presidency was going to be "theirs", that is, in the possession of some faction that won it. And once they had it, they would have all of Bush's powers and a fresh set of ambitions to exercise with them.

And that is why the primary season has proceeded as it has.

The prize of the Oval Office is not so rich that anyone can risk anything to achieve it, but for a very few, with significant organization and backing, fighting to the very end is very much worth their while.

Most of my ancestors are Scots-Irish, some are English but that is heavily diluted over the several centuries since the Kendricks arrived in the middle colonies in the late 1600s and my branch migrated slowly down through the Piedmont and into the Carolinas. On the other side, it's all about the hillbillies, folks who came down from the mountains after multigenerational sojourn to meet other folks and then decide to produce a branch of the family tree that includes the likes of me.

Point is, the sudden and uncomfortable prominence of Appalachia in politics hits close to home for me. These are my mountains, too. I grew up in sight of them, spent considerable time visiting there, and for me it really does feel like home. But it also feels out of time, in both senses; a part of the country the rest of us (and that is the proper term; I'm an outsider for sure) never waited for as we rushed westward and future-ward.

And now the hills have cleared their throat and been given a chance to pay back the rest of the country for progressing without its permission by having a unprecedented influence in the Democratic presidential primary race, after long being largely ignored in politics and if the mine safety issue is any indication, being ignored by the protections of the law as well.