I’m back from Yearly Kos. I have to find a way to fall asleep fast because I have to get up early and get on a train for Washington DC. I’ll be at the Take America Back 2006 conference Monday-Wednesday.

Before I go to sleep though, I thought I’d just jot down some impressions and anecdotes of the conference in Vegas.

The first thing I have to mention is that I won about $700 in craps over the length of the conference (some of it with Joe Trippi at the table). Just before I left for the airport I won $497 on one turn of rolling. I couldn’t roll a seven if my life depended on it. It was awesome. So that put a nice capper on a pretty good weekend.

There was a lot of fun times. Maryb2004, Boran2, CabinGirl, Kid Oakland, Brementown Musician, and I got to spend a lot of time together. BarbinMD and I kept running across each other every five minutes. We joked that we were stalking each other. We had the joint MLW/BT/ET party, and that was a lot of fun and I met a lot of members and lurkers. It’s always fun to hang out with MSOC and her husband Adam.

Warner had his now infamous party. It was pretty cool as far as I was concerned, but it did cause a lot of controversy. My main problem was that I was so tired that I had a hard time socializing.

The panels were very strong. It seemed like Chris Bowers was on almost all of them. He’s pretty burnt out. We just flew back together, and he was happy but spent. The funniest thing that happened at the conference was in the Blog Theory panel that Chris moderated. Some people saw CabinGirl and me on C-SPAN2 and sent me a note about it. Then I said we were trying to figure out a good way to heckle the panel. Omir the Storyteller suggested that I open Word, and type ‘Smile, if you are not wearing underpants’ in a huge font and turn around my laptop so the panel could read it. Since Tim Tagaris was so nervous that he was shaking the whole table, I decided it might lighten his mood. So, I followed Omir’s advice. The only problem was the Tim wouldn’t look at me. Then I noticed Rep. Brad Miller squinting to read my monitor, then a look of shock overtook his face. Pretty funny.

We had a lot of laughs like this.

I was very pleased to meet a lot of my favorite bloggers, including Jerome a Paris, Larry Johnson, mcjoan, emptywheel, Christy Hardin Smith, Bob Geiger, Mike Stark, SusanG, and many others.

I was concerned about the way the convention became a kind of near endorsement of Mark Warner, and I will probably have more to say on that later. But, by way of a quick clarification, I don’t think Warner did anything wrong. I think Jerome Armstrong deserves a doubling in salary for the job he did for Warner. And I don’t think Markos did anything wrong, either. I’ll get into the details of what concerns me another time. Suffice to say, getting called ‘low class’ by Markos was something that will have to be revisited. But not now.

The biggest kudos have to go to the people that organized the event. They did a spectacular job.

I’m glad I went. I had a very good time as, it seems, nearly everybody did. It’s a truly empowering feeling to get to take our blogworld into real life. There is a tremendous feeling of comraderie at these types of meet-ups, and as a conference it was a big success. The biggest coup of all was getting Bill Richardson to endorse Jerome’s energy plan. Jerome is understandably elated. He deserves to feel that way. He’s really making a difference.