DENVER -- There are many images I will never forget following this week at the DNC. But I haven't been inside the real halls of power most of the week. An activist's view probably isn't what a delegate or certainly not what a VeryImportantPerson might expect. But I think perhaps my view was just fine.
The police presence has been incredible. It takes an awful lot of riot sticks, tear gas guns, rope and body shields to make sure the Dem's perimiter's are secure. I used to live in Denver, and this is one of the images that just doesn't mesh with my view of the city. And I'm not at all sure it was all entirely necessary.
It makes me think Denver has either become a very unsafe city or that we have so many pissed off people in the country that even the Democrats have to brace for the attack of the non-ruling class. And since I keep hearing everyone say "It's necessary," with regard to the intense security, I suspect that it's what the city's leaders felt necessary from a wide variety of perspectives.
The protest rally I attended was filled with good music, powerful messages and people trying to have their voices heard and acknowledged during the Dem's convention week.
It's been an exciting week for me. Last October, I moved back to Denver from the San Francisco Bay Area. I did so to give my two small boys a better chance at a quality education and to provide a safer environment for my two mixed race sons to grow up in. Please understand, as you parents out there surely do, they are my reason for being.
Tonight, Senator Joe Biden gave a strong speech that called for America to GET BACK UP! He also smartly attacked John McCain - calling McCain "More of the Same" and hitting McCain - for voting like Bush on 95% of the issues. He also attack McCain for giving too many tax breaks to Big Oil companies. Biden's message really hit home, especially on everyday issues - like the struggles of family. We even saw Biden's family - his son Beau gave an impressive opening - leaving us to ask - what were the strongest & most impressive messages from Biden?
Fellow Kossacks, tonight I feel something that I know many of you share. Pride. Tonight, I did not attend the convention, no media pundits asked my opinion, and I shook no famous hands. I sat, like you, and watched C-SPAN, and commented excitedly on liveblogs and speech discussions (I am, without a doubt, the most politically inclined of my friends). But I felt an electricity in the air nonetheless, a certain strength, the swelling sense of pride. Tonight, I was proud to be a Democrat.
Not really worthy of a diary, however, permit me to say "it's time to dig deep people." We are one! We are a family. The issues have been laid bare. We know the difference... we know the choice. There is only one candidate who believes what you believe. There is only one candidate who will do what you would do.
Do you have $10? How about $20? Now is the time to donate! WE HAVE THE TEAM TO WIN - LET'S GET THEM THERE! (BTW, for $15 you get a magnet!)
As day three of the convention winds down, the crowd was treated to an unexpected visitor and we all got a preview of tomorrow night.
In other news, rumor has it that John McCain will name his running mate tomorrow ahead of Barack Obama's speech. It's hard to decide whether to laugh at the thought of a green screen running mate, or roll our collective eyes at what kind of a petty, petty person would do that. And if it turns out to be only a rumor, I'll apologize for calling him petty. I will, however, still call him an asshole.
Biden's speech began with lovely tributes to his family, including his mother, of whom he said:
My mother's creed is the American creed: no one is better than you. You are everyone's equal, and everyone is equal to you.
Biden ends by using his authority on foreign policy to detail how Obama's foreign policy judgment has time and again been correct while McCain has been wrong. Biden's foreign policy judgment will not be substituted for Obama's; instead, his credibility will be used to affirm Obama's judgment.
John McCain was wrong, and Barack Obama was right -- again, and again, and again, on the most important national security issues of our time, John McCain was wrong and Barack Obama has been proven right.
And here comes Obama, introduced by Biden's wife Jill.
Who is she? Who is the carefully groomed and scripted Debra Bartoshevich in McCain's new ad "Debra"?
Is she a lifelong Democrat, a Hillary backer who switched to McCain because Obama lacks "experience"? That is what she and her PUMA admirers claim. But the YouTube video at the top of this post, an unscripted interview with a local reporter, tells a far different story. What lifelong Democrat says, as she does repeatedly, "Democrat party"? And why was the McCain team already so poised to recruit her that she got a phone call from them "approximately three minutes" after Hillary Clinton's June 5 concession speech?
Her strange journey to center stage of McCain's Democrat-switcher campaign began long before that campaign gleefully leaked to reporters their coup in persuading one of Wisconsin's Hillary Clinton delegates to pledge publicly she would vote for John McCain. Read on below the fold!
Joe Biden has been nominated and Nancy Pelosi informs us he's accepted.
The video and son Beau's introduction have really focused on Biden's remarkable story of commitment as a father; earlier, Quincy Lucas, an advocate on domestic violence issues, delivered a nominating speech focusing on Biden's longstanding work on the Violence Against Women Act.
Finishing, Beau Biden alludes to the fact that he will be deployed to Iraq this fall, asking the crowd to "be there for my father; be there for Barack Obama."
Now that I have your attention, I just want to say that the Big Tent experience is primo and I want to personally thank DailyKos, Google and Digg and the City of Denver and the DNC (even if the latter didn't have much to do with it.)
I want to thank whoever made it so we got Cajun food tonight and all the Fat Tire we can drink. & I want to thank whoever gave us this wonderful proximity to the awesome Tattered Cover Bookstore and to the MSNBC sound stage where I just saw Rachel Maddow and Pat Buchanan going at it (no, I don't mean that way!) I want to thank Arianna Huffington for having a cool spa next door and for showing up and blogging there! I want to thank her for the free book. & the free Dean Ornish book.
I want to thank Markos for the free book and for signing it, and for holding down the fort in a crazy zoo so far! I want to thank the Volunteers and Security who work out in the front and keep all of corporate (aka mainstream or traditional) media from bursting in here at once to see what we're doing.
I got an email from my father today. He asked me to share it because he doesn't know "how to blog." So here goes a deeply personal post. His email is at the end and it's better than my writing, so if you need to, just skip to the last part.
I had the pleasure to meet many of you at Netroots Nation in Austin. My name is Amir Samandi, a.k.a. "Texican." I would like to share a personal story that explains my personal connection to this campaign. Why I understand the urgency of now.
