Preliminary Report on Sarah Palin Visit to Asheville

Here is a preliminary post on the Sarah Palin visit to Asheville, NC.

I hope that the local and state GOP operatives realize that hey should be processing their video, audio, photos and writing up the speech in a timely fashion...because in 24 hours, this will be old news. The National News Cycle runs fast, unlike the slower regional news cycle.

Max Cooper has some excellent photos on his blog. At this point, I believe he was the only conservative blogger there, although he doesn't do commentary...just photos.

This first video is by Richard Bernier, who seems to enjoy poking fun in this video at the group of Bloggers I consider to be my arch-rivals, the Scrutiny Hooligans. Richard Bernier and Randy Thomas have a show called "Sound Off Buncombe" that airs on the public access station in Asheville. His show is on Thursday nights and they are now live-streaming.

Speaking of the Hooligans, the crowd there had good coverage from the outside of the event, with an open thread of the Zombie Walk, and they found themselves subject to the lack of Tech Support inside the Civic Center (as I was) and we were all in the dark when the Internet feeds went down. I was keeping watch over 9 separate video feeds, and they all went down...with the WLOSers going first, and a couple of guerrilla feeds from inside the crowd lasting the longest, working on wireless connections. I don't think the event planners took demand into account. The most important part of a National Event like this is getting the word out (preferably live) and in this regard, it was an EPIC FAIL. Wasn't there a more modern facility they could have chosen?

The DUmmies at Democratic Underground had threads up concerning the protests mounted by Obama Supporters, and here is a photo I swiped from this thread:

Of course, another lefty, AshVegas had coverage (I consider his coverage the best I have found so far) an includes a video of the Zombie Walk, his MountainX operation, and his early photo of a Palin Suporter.

I will have more as the stragglers beg to post video, photos, and their observations of the events.

**7.54am** I forgot to link to Tim Peck's photos. They have some good wide-angle shots.