Blue Mass Group

Let’s hear it, folks. Your blogging team has got the whole stadium covered, from the floor to the galleries to the blogging pool room in the skyboxes. Here is the view from Bob’s seat with the Massachusetts delegation: Here is the view from Charley’s seat in the gallery with some friends of his: And here’s a very brief snippet of the speech, just so you can see what the view is like from inside the blogger room in the press box where David is:

August 28 is an extraordinary day in American history.  Fifty-three years ago today, Emmett Till was murdered.  His murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury; they later admitted having done it.  That murder, and the acquittal, in part motivated the civil rights movement that changed this country like nothing since the Civil War.  I didn’t know that today was the anniversary of that dreadful day — the guy sitting next to me told me.  He’s got a post up.  WARNING: it contains graphic imagery. And forty-five years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the greatest speech of his too-short life, and one of the greatest in American history.   And today, Barack Obama will accept the Democratic party’s nomination for president — the first African-American nominee of a major party in this country’s history.   Savor this day.  And remember what came before.

We’ve got the whole scene covered here, folks.  Bob is down on the floor sitting with the Mass. delegation, only a few yards from the podium.  Charley is up in the nosebleed seats with the folks who have “community credentials” (i.e., the tickets that about 55,000 non-connected folks got).  And I am back in the press box with the other credentialed bloggers.  There are more bloggers here than the room can accommodate, but fortunately I won a spot in the lottery, so I’ll be here through Obama’s speech.  I never win lotteries.  Good time to change my luck.  Now THAT’s change I can believe in!  ;-D I’m the only one of the three of us with an internet connection, so you’ll have to rely on my impressions until the other guys get a chance to post later on.  For now, I can tell you this: the atmosphere in this place is electric.  The stadium is packed to the freaking gills — and when you think about the horrific lines that people had to stand in to make it in here, that’s quite a testament to how badly people wanted to be here.  Charley (on the Twitter feed) is right: this [...]

I am completely loving that these ordinary people are getting up and speaking with great urgency and passion to a packed football stadium about their hopes and fears.  CNN of course can’t be bothered to show them… it’s all talking heads instead.

If you’re on your cell, take a second to text “DNC – Deval Patrick” to 62262, and we might get it up on the big screen at Invesco.  :-)

This morning’s breakfast with the MA delegation — the first one we actually heard all of (they start at a brutal 7 a.m.) — was quite a show.  The breakfasts run about two hours, and are jam-packed with Democratic dignitaries both within and outside MA.  Today, MA Dems chair John Walsh was the emcee (as he always is); Congressman Ed Markey did a bunch of the introductions as well as giving his own very fine speech; and we heard from such characters as Secretary of State Bill Galvin (who spoke well on election procedures), Center for American Progress guru John Podesta, and Lt. Gov. Murray. Of particular interest, of course, was the special guest, former Senator George McGovern, who amusingly started off his speech by praising “the smartest voters in the country.”  (For those of you too young to remember, George McGovern won only one state — MA — in his 1972 race against Richard Nixon.)  It was fascinating to hear him talk about the 1968 convention.  He recalled that, when looking out over the convention hall, it was an almost uniform sea of white middle-aged males.  He led the way in gently encouraging states to reform their caucus systems [...]

The latest in our series of video profiles of interesting people we run into here at the convention.  Melissa Diaz is a student at Columbia University, a former student of BMG’s own Bob, and a passionate Obama supporter who has far better access to the convention than any of us.  She has lots to say to young voters, Hispanic voters, and about her own future.  Here she is.

After walking through a very, very long line (which actually moved pretty well) I’ve made my way into Invesco field.  At the moment I am blogging from a blogger area which is in the glassed-in press box way above the field.  I have an excellent view of the “Greek columns” that seem to have created such a hubbub, with Team McCain deriding the structure as “the Temple of Obama” and “the Barackopolis” (the latter is actually quite funny).  Here they are. I mean, for God’s sake.  What is the big deal?  It looks vaguely like the White House, vaguely like the Capitol, vaguely like the Supreme Court.  That, obviously, is the point.  This “Barackopolis” nonsense, while witty, isn’t anything more than the media mindlessly parroting McCain talking points.  There’s been a lot of that lately.  It needs to stop. UPDATE: Here is another view, taken by Bob who is down on the floor with the Mass. delegation.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization waqs founded in 2001 as a sort of post-cold war successor to the Warsaw Pact as a security “club” of non-NATO nations.  It hasn’t really ever done anything, but there exists the implicit threat that it might if NATO ever gets too big for its britches. Russia recently petitioned the SCO to provide political cover for its military incursion into South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  Indeed, the Russians (probably correctly) view the Georgian government as a receieving assistance and direction from the United States. One might have expected China, being a rising power and rival of the United States, to allow the SCO to grant that cover, if only as an eff-you to Washington.  This would have been a bad development because it would have re-congealed the Cold War alliance that was so skillfully split by one of those Republican presidents who shall not be named.  I think it is fair to say that this kind of anti-American military alliance would have been a bad development for American national security. Well, lucky for us, the Chinese just told the Russians to get bent.  Seems the Russians and the Chinese have often had a hard time getting along, [...]

This morning at the Massachusetts delegation breakfast. “Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts.”