Good day and welcome to DKos Asheville. This is the weekly DKos Asheville open thread for Saturday, February 7th. We try to get together every weekend to share with everyone what we're all up to in Western North Carolina and beyond. We hope this group serves to invigorate us locally and regionally here on Daily Kos, building on the sense of community that's grown through our online engagement. DKos Asheville can give us all a better sense of connection, a better understanding of who we stand with, work with, and share with. We hope this community can help leverage our orange passion for progressive politics to elect more and better Democrats.
Please join us below.
We are coming off a well received seventh meet up on January 17th that featured DKos Asheville co-hosting a bloggers conference. For our next meet up on April 27-28 25-26 we will be doing something completely different, going back to the theme of our first meet up on 4/20/2013: Meeting, spending time focusing on community and networking and less time with an agenda driven schedule. And this time we will be taking the meet up on the road to Roanoke Virginia in April! Please sign up by dropping me a kosmail. For more information, please drop over to last week's DKos Asheville diary.
I've been reflecting on our recent bloggers conference and wanted to share some of what I drew from one presentation.
Near the end of the day, we were treated to the knowledge, insight and intelligence of the two politicians that had been invited to speak. Gordon Smith, Asheville City Council and Terry Van Duyn, North Carolina State Senator from Buncombe County. This is the county where Asheville lies on the map.
At the beginning of their discussion, they both said that their presentations would be short and to the point. The interest of the audience however made that idea a moot one as they answered questions and discussed issues for forty five minutes.
This was the end of a long, guest packed conference that included many subjects, many ideas and much interaction between guests and speakers. The confluence of old and new media was a big hit as was much of the information on the mechanics of blogging, how to get started, how to find an audience and how to improve your writing and outreach.
So after four heavy hours with just a few short breaks, I was wondering how engaged everyone would be with Gordon and Terry. My worries were soon put to rest as the two discussed a wide range of issues both from the local perspective and the wider view from the state. The audience just wouldn't let them go, it was fantastic.
And the gold nugget at the end of the day was the mind boggling description of the "Sausage Making" process of getting a bill through the North Carolina General Assembly. Senator Van Duyn went through several detailed examples of what she has to go through with each of these bills. She described situations where she is handed a bill out of Committee that has over two hundred pages late in the afternoon and is expected to make an educated vote the next morning.
And guess who she depends on to help her with the fine print? She doesn't have a large staff that works 24/7. She certainly doesn't have the time to look into fine detail the nuances and probable outcomes of each bill. She has other Senators who can help guide decisions with their particular knowledge on the background and impact of bills, but they have their own job to do.
At the end of the day, Senator Terry Van Duyn depends on BLOGGERS. That's right, our network of progressive activists in the county and state are her real investigative staff. She finished with a great story about a bill she was about to vote yes on, when a local blogger, Barry Summers, found one little paragraph in the bill that was abhorant and had obviously been snuck into the larger bill which was somewhat innocuous.
Then she thanked us. "There is no way I could do this job without you, I depend on you."
Have a great day everyone.