FYI: I'm still with LoadedOrygun--until August 14th. :)

Hey, that was great reading. Thanks so much - please post more if you can! Wish I could have gone!!!

It's like blogger rapture and all of youse is in in YearlyKos heaven. The rest of us are left-behinders. Oy.

Does that mean we get their cars? I call Kari's.

I don't mean to be nitpicky, but is this really policy wonk stuff? Sessions on communications, media training, blogging, and messaging sound more like political operative training than actual policy. Taking a quick look at the YearlyKos agenda confirms that at least 90% is politics, with a smattering of policy thrown in.

I bring this up not to discount the importance of communications and messaging -- it's essential to the success of any party or ideology -- but to highlight the lack of policy work being done by progressives. For me, the key lesson of the right-wing ascendancy isn't that they figured out how to "communicate", it's that they spent 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars building a network of think tanks and institutes that developed and honed conservative policies, policies that they then successfully communicated to the masses.

Progressives are beginning to have success in specific areas. . .energy and environmental policy come to mind. But in areas like education and health care, we've been recycling the same ideas for too long. Our foreign policy infrastructure if practically non-existent (does progressive foreign policy even exist besides just being "anti-neocon"?). Our economic policies are all over the map and have little intellectual consistency.

Maybe the reason the DNC message is so weak is because the substance behind that message is so weak. Perhaps you could pose these questions at some of the sessions: "What is the grassroots/netroots doing to build the kind of intellectual foundation that conservatives have benefitted from? How can we do more?"

Miles: I hear ya. And the long-term strategic building and use of think tanks is something the Rs have done much longer and better than we have. Forgive my communications bent - there are other sessions going on and hopefully Kari will report on some of the ones he's hitting about using new tools to reach people etc.

But just to prove the power of blogging, I'm following your advice and going to two sessions this afternoon about using think tanks and (maybe) building them. Thanks for the shift in focus. I'm a little burned out on talking about talking anyway.

The one thing I will say about the value of effective communications is that doing it right will help us build the support and potentially someday the financial base required to have our own think tanks. Right now, blogs are kind of the germinating seed for that sort of thing, IMHO.

Thanks, Mary. I saw one of those think-tank sessions on the afternoon agenda, and it's what got me thinking about the whole policy/politics issue. I'm glad you're going.

The one thing I will say about the value of effective communications is that doing it right will help us build the support and potentially someday the financial base required to have our own think tanks.

It's a little bit chicken and egg, though. Do you get financial support to dig deeper into an issue because you've effectively communicated your vision to the funders? Or do you get financial support to communicate to a larger group because the funders are impressed with how deeply you've already dug? In truth, it's a little of both. I just worry that progressives spend too much time on "messaging" without spending enough time defining the message.

Have fun.

Click for the Virtual Yearly Kos Convention

See beyond the windshield, fergoodnesssakes. Khaos is Anarchy. While I may like the concept of Rational Anarchy... most of us Working Progressives can't afford to just up and fly off to a foreign country to hob-nob with the media elite.

Mary posts: "They showed an embarassingly good 2 min video the Bush camp produced in 2004 that went to middle-class Hispanic families in AZ, NM, TX and FL. It was beautiful and moving. It made you forget Bush actually wants them all ejected."

Incredible. Bush was joined at the hip with Ted Kennedy to grant virtual amnesty to illegal aliens - and liberals can't see that?

Bush's sister-in-law is Hispanic. Alberto Gonzales believes he may be the product of illegal alien grandparents. Both put politics and personal bias ahead of national interest to support virtual amnesty for illegals. The hypocrisy of liberalism is laid bare when Bush and Gonzales detractors are so blinded by hate that they don't even recognize when the subjects of their hatred have taken their own liberal camp's position. The hypocrisy of liberalism is further laid bare when the hypocrisy of the other party must be overlooked because it touches too close to home.

lestatdelc - yes, I was serious. For example, take a look at at DailyKos today and you'll see one poster proudly dispalying the following quote by E.J. Dione of the Washington Post: "The key litmus tests for Kos and his many allies in the blogosphere involve not long lists of issues developed by the American Civil Liberties Union or the AFL-CIO, but loyalty in standing up against Bush and doing what's necessary to build a Democratic majority."

Get it? Liberal sales pitch = "Bush is the enemy." Now, how is it that your enemy could possibly have a bleeding heart for those poor illegal aliens, just like you do? He's evil after all, isn't he? Not my question, of course, but Mary's.

Plunging headlong into the Internet era, Democratic presidential candidates on Saturday fought for the support of powerful and polarizing liberal bloggers by promising universal health care, aggressive government spending and dramatic change from the Bush era.

<h2>No, this tidbit isn't from Faux News, is the start of an AP "story" over at CNN.</h2>