The Rising star Tom Ritter, The always energized Howard Dean

It's been a couple of days. Unforunately, 4-5 hours of sleep a night caught up to me a little bit. Whatever.

The last couple of days have been really interesting. Thursday was highlited by a presentation by the head of Secret Service in Denver, Special Agent David O'Connor, who gave his presentation in a magnifecent Boston accent that made me feel right at home. As the week wore on the three and ahalf hours straight of morning presentations were getting harder and harder to make it through but O'Connor's presentation, which included references to my hometown and how much the Yankees suck, did a great job keeping me awake. His lecture was about his own career in the secret service, and a history of the secret service.

How the secret service was started is amazingly ironic. It was started by Lincoln not to protect the president, but to fight the abundance of counterfeit money being passed in American right after the civil war. After signing the papers bringing the secret service into being he hastened to the theatre without protection and was promptly shot and killed.

After that the growth of the secret service has understandably coincided with American tragedies. It remained an agency to fight counterfeit currency until the assasination of McKinley, after which it began to protect the president, but only the president. After Kennedy's assasination, the secret service expanded again, and after the assisanation of Robert Kennedy, it expanded to protect all major candidates running for president and vice president.

Friday gave us our biggest name speakers of the week by far. In the morning Bill Ritter, the governor of Colorado, gave a brief presentation and answered questions. Bill Ritter. Remember that name for the Democratic Party's future, seriously. Bill Ritter. He was a great public speaker, full of energy, did an amazing job staying on point his entire talk, and did not dodge any of the questions asked of him by the students. He discussed how organizing the convention in Denver was like a second full time job for him, but it was worth it for the short term and long term economic expansion of Denver. He also went into some detail about the emergin democrats of the west as an important story for the rest of the country. The mountain west is emerging as the crossroads of the energy and climate debate in America, and all along the west moderate democrats have been beating conservative republicans in general elections. He thinks Obama can win if he can get the independents in the mountain west to shift from the republican party to the democratic party, and can do it by appealing to their values by talking about education, infrastructure, and energy.

Ritter also emphasized the job he has been doing in Colorado to make it a green and energy-efficient state. The results of his efforts are everywhere. Ther are recycling bins EVERYWHERE in downtown Denver, the air is clean, and all public transportation puses and monorails are hybrid. Ritter has also been able to bring the Global Research Center for alternative fuels to Colorado. During this portion of his speech you could feel his passion, and he did an excellent job not only talking about the progress he was making in producing alternative energy in Colorado, but how doing these things was helping the people of Colorado socially and economically. Keep an eye out for Tom Ritter in the next eight or ten years to come.

We also spoke to a medai panel about covering the convention. The panel was great, and brought up the first negative response to Obama's decision to move his final speech to invesco. Apparently, doing this sort of screwed the media over, not something you really want to do as a politician.

Friday afternoon we received a breif but energizing talk by Howard Dean at the Colorado Convention Center. It was a short piece about the importance of youth in politics that wasn't very substantive. However, it was great that he made the time to speak with us, and to put a sufficient amount of energy into the presentation. He got pretty riled up talking about how we did not want to inherit a country so screwed up by republicans, and that we must vote for Obama to change this, that I was half-convinced that he way going to throw in a signature yell of enthusiasm at the end, but he didn't. I was dissapointed I couldn't get a picture with him, but I know how busy he is, and it was great to see him close up talking about the importance of the youth vote, and how we could change things.

Off to Coors Field for a Rockies game!