Late, but for a reason.

I'm in the middle of some four story projects, but the three that I worked on this week are some of the most frustrating of my short journalistic career.

The Earth Day video still isn't up because I spent the entire day troubleshooting. It's done, but something weird happened with the format. So that is on my list of things to do today.

The trash story has a lot of conflict, but I don't know how to make it more than a "he said, she said" type of thing. They're all really angry.

Saturday I went to the Republican 9th District Convention and it was the biggest shit show I have ever seen. Going in, I knew that there would be conflict - I had been speaking to Ron Paul supporters and they had informed me that they were going to turn out in large numbers to try and elect Ron Paul supporters to the state convention, and eventually change party policy so that Missouri would be a proportional state instead of a winner-take-all state in terms of delegates. This would mean that Ron Paul would get 30 or so delegates from Missouri. The movement is nationwide, apparently.

Anyway, the Ron Paul people showed up and were voted down in everything fair and square, but they basically weren't allowed to talk. The guy in charge used parliamentary procedure as an excuse to rule them "out of order" any time they tried to speak. But it wasn't just then. Delegates were ruled out of order when they asked for 15 minutes to read the rules that they were about to approve by voting.

A woman expressed concern that she was about to vote on amendments from the 25 represented counties to go to the state convention, when she hadn't seen or read them. This came right after the group had voted down having a group read-through of the amendments. She was ruled out of order. God forbid anyone see what is actually in those amendments.

I was shocked and disgusted, and sooo frustrated. I got back and vented to Bowers, who was an amazing neutralizing force (read: he let me vent for like, ten minutes), and who helped me figure out how to write the lede.

When the story was published, some of it had to be cut and I still didn't feel like I had demonstrated exactly how outrageous the situation was. But I guess that's why we have blogs.