tomd | Shell script for upgrading textile posts to markdown

I'm trying to take input from an interactive prompt via python's cmd library and pass the input to an autobahn websocket client to send up to a websocket server. The cmd loop and the autobahn websocket client loop are running in the same interpreter. I'm trying to use crochet to make that work. The websocket client connects to the server successfully but when I enter something at the cmd prompt to invoke sendMessage, I get the exception shown at the bottom of this post. Any guidance on where I may have messed up would be much appreciated. If there's a better approach to accomplish what I'm trying to do, I'm all ears.

These are the relevant imports and setup: