krug_atrios_echidne1.thumbnail.jpgPicture by Spork; Krugman, Atrios, Echidne.

Greetings from EschaCon! Wish you here, unless of course you are, in which case, of course, come up & say hi.

Heres just some notes on what we talked about and so on, from my own personal, eccentric jaundiced perspective, of course. The first panel began amid the usual commotion of getting set up & so forth and started somewhat late, but you know, the spirit behind EschaCon was always "hey kids, let's put on a convention!" We just did it, my-coblogger Molly I doing the coordination, helped out by RIL from Rising Hegemon, and Atriots Vicki & qlNY. So a bit of chaos is OK, and indeed part of the fun (at least after the fact...). Besides, expecting bloggers to get going at 8:45AM is a bit above & beyond the call anyhow.

Jane moderated the first panel, with Atrios, Digby, and NTodd fom Dohiyi Mir. Jane spoke about what a chore it is getting the idiot media off its collective McCain-loving ass and actually covering stuff like his glaring hypocrisy on campaign financing, and how we need to get the guns blazing generally on McCain, which is a bit of a challenge now until we have a candidate. Of course, McCain is a dangerous lunatic, so the bright side is that there is plenty of ammo to fire at St. John's halo. Atrios told everyone to get ahold of this book; you may have heard of it. NTodd spoke about how we need to revitalize the peace movement, because, you know, people are dying in a really, really stupid war.

The second panel was moderated by me, and, uh, it seemed to go OK. Ted Rall brought the house down -- one of his newest cartoons is going to cause a bit of a ruckus, of the censorship type. You might be hearing more about that pretty soon. Watertiger took the piss out of McCain for his "Baghdad is safer than Philadelphia!" garbage. The Rude Pundit was, uh, actually pretty polite, though we all did say some bad words (hope that doesn't shock you). TRex talked about the pure joy of receiving emails from Melanie Morgan. Me, I talked about how much I hate people who say "fuck" on blogs, those assholes. Atrios asked about how we can use humor as a weapon against the right wing crazy hate machine; my feeling is that the media are more susceptible to a good snarking than wingnuttia. Funny as wingnuts are, they're incapable of, say, shame; someone like Joe Klein, though, is wonderfully thin skinned, and may be a better target for a good puncturing.

I had to unwind a bit after the panel, and our kids are here -- we have a teenager to watch them -- so I had lunch and played with the little ones, so I missed the panel on Creating Constitutional Accountability, which was about, essentially, why on earth Bush hasn't been impeached, already. Impeachment should be understood as a means of redressing an imbalance between the different branches of government, and, you know, maybe we need something like that. Maybe! There was also a good deal of a talk about why inherent contempt might be a good idea. The chief of staff for Rep. Bob Wexler was there, as were Kagro X, Scott Horton, and Bob Fertik.

Next up was our media panel, moderated by Susie Madrak, who is still cheesed about this as well she should be. Will Bunch talked about his experiences as one of the first journalists to jump into the blogworld, and mentioned that his (excellent) site seems to get more conservative than liberal commenters. I asked him about it later and he said newspaper blogs just attract a different audience than "traditional" blogs, with a lot of people with very firm ideas about Teh Media thinking "wow, here's a good chance to unload!" He sure does have some fine specimens over there; I enjoyed this one, attached to Will's first conference rundown post: "I bet there won't be a heterosexual in the place." Well, I started the day out straight, but I suppose I can ask TRex for some lessons later on... Will's right though that it might be a good idea to get involved in comments at any local newspaper blog, to spread a different POV.

Eric Boehlert made the point that it's an extremely bad idea to buy into any slimy media/wingnut crap flung at any Democrat, even if it's one you yourself dislike. The primaries have made some people lose their minds in this regard. If it comes from Drudge, it's shit: remember that, kids. The brilliant and lovely Athenae talked about the structural problems with journalism that caused her to leave the profession, and about what ought to be done about these issues. Doug Smith discussed the economics of the news business, explaining that dead tree papers still bring in 90% of advertising revenue, as opposed to 10% for the online stuff. Susie also brought up what she sees as a kind of class bias in the media, where there are too many j-school elites, and not enough just smart young working class kids doing what anyone can do if they're smart, persistent, and paid for it. But the star of this panel was Spocko, who wore a disguise -- a tie -- and swore us all to secrecy about the fact that he is, in reality, a Vulcan. He got a hell of an ovation after telling his story of facing up to the wingnut talk radio cretins. And good on him! He also thanked my buddies El Gato Negro & Interrobang, both of whom got plenty of applause for their role in supporting Spocko during the lawsuit-threat phase.

Finally, we had out economics group. Atrios took us on a spelunking tour of the Big Shitpile collapse, Paul Krugman gave a pretty damn funny account of the same territory -- basically wondering how there could be so much idiocy surrounding a commodity, housing, which "we've basically had for five thousand years." And then we had the divine Echidne of the Snakes, arguing that we need to apply strong "moral pressure" in order to win ourselves a decent health care system, one in line with the ones they have in, you know, the rest of the industrialized world. Echidne wants single payer, and you know what? She's right. She als explained the gory details of the "everybody die" McCain health care plan, which, oddly enough, is also his foreign policy...

And during this panel, Jane came by to say hi to Will, and tripped over my laptop cord, on which I'm writing this very post. She's OK, but man, that would have been an ironic way of hurting yourself.

I'll be rocking out to the fun tonight, and won't be in the threads: below is a bit of what we'll be hearing. It is a bit rude. Really do wish you were here!