Signs of Spring





Awww. Spring.


On Saturday I got up early and went and did my Duty. My notes say we started at 10:09am, well, the guy tried to get the attention of the crowd starting at 10:00 but it was a good ten minutes until the crowd stopped chatting outside the auditorium and wondered when this thing was going to start.

The invocation. (We are Christian’s DAMN IT.) My notes on the invocation seem to indicate it went on forever. My notes also indicate I may have fallen asleep. We then said the Pledge (We love this country DAMN IT) . The last county convention I went to was held at the Raleigh Convention center in a room that was not equipped with a flag, we ended up saying the pledge while aimed at a guy in a flag tie. This years was held in a high school auditorium that came pre-flagged.

Moving on. We had 85% of the precincts represented and achieved quorum.

The key note speakers gave their stump speeches and hurried off to other counties conventions. A good speech is a short speech. If you are represented by David Price, Bob Ethridge or Brad Miller you can be proud of them and their CVs.

After the speechifying we had our first motion. It was concerning the reading of the minutes from the last years county convention. A gentleman was still pissed and wanted it read into this years minutes that he was pissed about last years minutes. The next motion, by that same man was concerning the resolutions that were not made part of the official resolutions to the party platform.

There was an extended argument about the resolutions that didn’t make the cut. At one point the mic was cut off. Many people lined up to argue for and against turning off the mic. Between arguing about the mic, the speakers testified at length about the wonder and the power and the glory of the folks who did go to the resolution committee meeting and spent 8 hours arguing about the resolutions!! Lather, rinse, repeat.

The resolutions that were collected from the precinct meetings held earlier in the year. These were then taken to the Resolution Committee and some were taken up and some were not. Every single democrat in Wake county was repeatedly informed of and invited to this meeting. 20 people showed up and found they were now part of The Committee. They met for 8 hours to argue over the resolutions that covered everything from officially saying that George Bush and the Republicans are big fat meanies and we hate them to formally complaining about a sewage system in some housing development. The resolution calling GWB and the GOP a bunch of meanies failed while the resolution condemning the sewage to the housing development passed. Guess who bothered to show up for the meeting?

Roberts Rules of Order were trotted out and explained. And Explained. And Explained. I learned that "Call The Question" is RRoO for " Stop running your mouth and sit down!". Almost everything everyone said was out of order because they wouldn't look at the agenda. One man complained that the whole convention was out of order because the agenda had a fixed time of adjournment and since The Chair was insisting on a near fanatical devotion to the agenda that this year the assembly would be robbed of the opportunity be held captive by special interest groups and what a great loss to Democracy and the Party and the Republic and Mom and apple pie if the crowd was not held there indefinitely. Ended as scheduled : 1:00pm.

Mom, apple pie, The Party and The Republic managed to stay on their feet.