It’s not getting much attention, but the Netroots Nation conference (formerly known as YearlyKos, a spinoff from the left-wing website DailyKos) is going on in Pittsburgh this weekend.  Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg has conducted a straw poll of the participants and found that a majority of those surveyed, 53 percent, say they “cannot support a health care reform bill that does not include a public option.”  Other results include word that most of the attendees are willing to compromise a bit on environmental legislation, even though it gives a lot of benefits to big corporations, and the finding that, amazingly enough, attendees voice near-unanimous approval, 95 percent, of the job Barack Obama is doing as president.

What’s truly striking in Greenberg’s poll is the degree to which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have fallen off the progressive radar.  I attended the first YearlyKos convention, in 2006, and have kept up with later ones, and it’s safe to say that while people who attended those gatherings couldn’t stand George W. Bush in general, their feelings were particularly intense when it came to opposing the war in Iraq.  It animated their activism; they hated the war, and they hated Bush for starting it.  They weren’t that fond of the fighting in Afghanistan, either.