Last week I attended Netroots Nation, an annual conference of progressive bloggers and organizations. Conventional wisdom says bloggers are crazy, evil doers and sit in the basement with their pajamas on never leaving the house and never talking to real people.

I didn’t meet one blogger with horns, not one that hates America or hates conservatives for that matter and they were all fully dressed (thank gawd).  All of the bloggers at the convention were a bunch of regular people who found their voice and activism online instead of offline like in the 60s. 

Now, that is not to say a bunch of bloggers don’t also do activism offline.  In fact, the bloggers had a whole event creating care packages for soldiers.  I asked a young candidate Jon Powers, who is also an Iraq Vet, what he thought about the care packages and about young voters:

I had the opportunity to sit on a few panels to talk about the role of the youth vote in this year’s elections.  One of the panels was sponsored by Future Majority which is a blog all about young voters.  The other panel was sponsored by Qvisory which is all about making sure young people don’t go further into debt and that they can buy health insurance for cheap so just in case the invincible persona wears off, they have a place to go get the broken leg fixed. 

The last panel I was on was all about creative ways to get people involved in elections.  Some of the groups from that panel included Living Liberally, MOMocrats and the Harry Potter Alliance, which admittedly is dorky but awesome.

The rest of my time was spent talking to candidates who were just milling around talking to folks and learning about things like the mortgage crisis and transparency in our government. 

All of the candidates think the youth vote is critical to their ability to win this year, so I asked a few of them some questions about young voters on camera.

Meet Dan Seals, he is a young candidate running in Illinois, who knows he won’t win unless young people come out to vote in November.

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I then bumped into Joe Garcia, who is from the state I was born in, Florida and who knows all about the power of the youth vote:

Al Gore and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi showed up as well.  Both Gore and Pelosi did an amazing job answering questions from the audience.  The focus of many questions was of course about energy and global warming.  One person asked about the connection of meat and global warming, so for next’s week story I decided I am going to travel up into the Sandhills of Nebraska and ask a local meat producer his thoughts on this dilemma.

Lastly, a conference wouldn’t be a conference without a little bit of fun, especially with bloggers.  So to close, I leave you with some pictures of a Celebrity Bartender event sponsored by Young Voter PAC, Future Majority and Living Liberally, at a great bar called Cedar Door. 

Bloggers (Markos, McJoan, Stoller) and candidates (Darcy Burner and Mark Strama) got behind the bar to serve a few rounds and close out a great conference.