It was the sixth Farmers Market Obama table for this year and was a blustery spring day with lots of people from all over the globe walking along and choosing from all kinds of locally grown, baked, crafted and political flavors. The Obama table is one feature to many at what the New York Times mentioned "The Dane County Farmers' Market in Wisconsin is now recognized as the largest in the nation, and is still growing."
(Note: I was out of town last weekend, but had someone cover for me)
The night before the tabling, I made sure the weekly war scorecard was updated and visible.
Here's this week's ever growing sad news:
Weekly War ScorecardCost of Iraq Occupation:(running total):
$524,621,185,052
- $4,681 per household.
- $1,721 per person.
- $341.4 million per day
American Deaths:4,086
American Wounded:30,143
Iraqi Body Count:1,365,622
As of May 31, 2008 at 12:00AM
Sources:
www.iraqbodycount.net
www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths....
www.defenselink.mil
www.antiwar.com/casualties
www.costofwar.com
With the Democratic Rules & Bylaws Committee meeting on Saturday, there was much conversation about what might happen. For the most part, people seemed pretty savvy that both Michigan and Florida would get half votes as a solution to move on. Many people stopping by were disgusted by how long the race has gone on and the very creative way that popular votes were counted as bragging rights. Here's the official statement, which happened well after the tabling event:
http://democrats.org/a/2008/06/rbc_reaches_agr.phpThere were at least a dozen families that posed with Obama. This was the second week we had the very successful and popular Obama life-size cut-out where many people stopped by to get their pictures taken.
It was a lot of fun watching people run up and get photos taken. I was asked several times to talk people's photos with the cutout. The backdrop of the Capitol building makes for a great background. I'm sure photos will start showing up on the web.
Between myself and someone else tabling, we register a dozen people to vote. The campaign staff, which now has an office in Madison, has gotten a lot of people registered to vote. These efforts are truly a lot of fun and it's great seeing people want to participate.
Fortunately there is a fresh shipment of buttons and bumperstickers coming since we ran out of those things again... it's evident with a LOT of Obama bumperstickers showing up on cars where people go to the Farmers market. People are getting very excited that Barack Obama will be the official nominee this week. It's going to be fun just having to deal with McCain at this point.
If you want a check out a one-minute video of the Obama table, check it out. It's generally this busy from 8am to 1 pm when we finally call it a day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffk987EmRxwGobama!
NOTE: I've been so busy recently since this event and finally had the time to make a post.