they call it a convention

I am at the Florida Democratic Party Convention at Disney this weekend. It's a lot of rah-rah speeches mostly and then some parties. Truthfully most of it would totally bore the socks off of you but I'll give you some of the better highlights.

Probably the best thing that has happened so far is that I volunteered to help out briefly holding a "Stop Alito!" sign for those who were attending the luncheon to see, including Sen. Bill Nelson who will probably vote "yes." First a woman who I recognized as being important comes up and says "thank you for doing this! it's very important!" Of course I have no clue who she is. So I introduce myself and she says "I'm Pat Schroeder." I found out later that she is the longest-serving woman in the House of Representatives, from 1973-97.

Then someone comes by and says to me and a student I was talking to, "Hey do you need tickets for the luncheon?" and I say "uh sure" as they were $100 and I was not going to pay it. So I got in for free then there were no seats at all in the regular area and somehow the AFL-CIO table at the front has seats in its reserved table and they let us sit there, I was in the second row of tables from the front. John Edwards, former VP nominee and Senator from North Carolina, gave a great speech about poverty (he is now the director of a center about poverty at UNC).

Here is a link to a pretty good Florida politics website that has been doing blogging about the entire conference. Truthfully I have no better stories than that, it's been pretty standard fare other than having fireworks out my window every evening because it's Disney.