“NH Politics with John Burt” NH-US Senatorial Debate- Part 1

Yesterday was the first televised US Senatorial Debate here in NH. It was produced by John Burt of "NH Politics with John Burt" who was kind enough to invite GraniteGrok to cover the event. All four prospects (i.e., Kelly Ayotte, Jim Bender, Bill Binnie, and Ovide Lamontagne) on the Republican side participated. Debate was civil and showed that they all are similar on the major topics of the day.

I apologize for the "distance" that you may see here (and in Part 2 and the Summary).  St. A’s had set up the room and kinda forgot about bloggers needing a bit of space.  Also, I was a bit late in setting up the camera(s) – I spent way too long trying to get my FTP program to connect and schlep a simple pic up to the ‘Net for posting – and THEN found out I had plum run out of time.

One of the nice things that happened yesterday was that I had the chance to meet Neil Levesque, the Executive Director of the NH Institute of Politics at St. Anselm’s.  I had left the GraniteGrok banner in the car and went to fetch it; in doing so, I spotted Jim Bender sitting in "his" room before the debate.  I walk in and was having a quick chat with him when Niel walked in and got an introduction.  He gave me a quick tour of the parts I had not seen and talked about the on-going projects he and the Institute were involved in (just ripe for political junkies!).  

I made a suggestion: well, why not do a project on the political bloggers, especially those here in NH?  I could see the wheels turning for a bit, so who knows?   

Full Disclosure:  The NH IOP only provided the environment for the debate; John Burt, producer and host, was solely responsible for the putting on the event!

Also, I apologize for the shakiness of the camera at the beginning. I had first put up the live stream from the Public access station, but then *I* had problems getting the necessary FireFox plugin to work correctly on my machine – with a bit of panice, I used good old duct tape to put the “Eye of Sauron” on top of my regular tripod and then used the Gorillapod to sideways mount the Flip cam – apologies! However, it may well be a setup that I’ll use in the future – but I’ll need to do something better than duct tape long term….