Deval Patrick, Castro, and Michelle Obama.

All three were better than any RNC speech I saw.

There's just no competition in the head-to-head matchups -- Castro vs. Christie and Michelle Obama vs. Ann Romney. 

I was pissed because it was on 4 of the 11 channels I get with my antenna.  I don't care for conventions.

Was all the defense of the health care bill, which Democrats have typically shied away from.

Also, a lot of uncompromising pro-choice support.

The parties could've looked blandly the same since Rs also spent a lot of time pretending to worry about unemployment, entitlements, poverty, etc., and Democrats might've re-iterated that and then just attacked their opponents. 

Instead they appear to have distinguished themselves. 

Abortion-palooza (59% want it either illegal or legal under only a few circumstances).

Taking God out of the party platform (92% believe in God).

Gay marriage (only half support it).

First, what she said.

"We know, and I’ve heard no less than Ambassador Michael Oren say this, that what the Republicans are doing is dangerous for Israel.”

Oren categorically denies saying this. And then, on FoxNews, DWS lied, accusing Philip Klein of a "deliberately misquote".

"I didn't say he said that."

Part of me wants to say, "keep her on, let her make a fool of herself and her party". Another part wants her out. Her schtick is bad for her party and bad for America. As Mark Twain said: Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. DWS is spinning so hard she can't find a clue let alone a fact. Can somebody please fire her?

Proving, maybe, that the weather does not play political favorites when it comes to disrupting mere mortals' plans: the DNC has canceled their stadium rally for Thursday night and is moving it (not-moving-it?) back into the TWC Arena.

Except for his tax rates.

Fix-a-Flat.

Re the vote on the two amendments.

Warren is kind of a boring primary school teacher.

The good news is that maybe it's not her populist economic message that's the problem, maybe she's just not a very talented/charismatic politician. 

.

Nobody like him. He made the case -- the Medicaid stuff is, as Frum tweeted, the H bomb in it -- and he both highlighted and eviscerated every Republican lie from last week. So two nights in.  Anybody wanna bet that the Obama bounce won't be bigger than Romney's?

I hardly watched any speeches at Tampa, and the only speech I saw at the DNC was Clinton's (mostly). What can I say, Clinton gave a helluva speech. He is still the best politician the Dems have.

even on a vegan diet, Bill Clinton is still kicking the GOP up and down the street.

Another DWS lie (link). Please. Can somebody fire her?

On Republicans in Tampa...

They did it well. It looked good, it sounded good. They convinced me they all loved their children, their families… They convinced me they were honorable people who believed what they said and they’re going to keep every commitment they’ve made. We just got to make sure the American people know what those commitments are — (cheers, applause) — because in order to look like an acceptable, reasonable, moderate alternative to President Obama, they just didn’t say very much about the ideas they’ve offered over the last two years.

On Mediscare...

Now, when Congressman Ryan looked into that TV camera and attacked President Obama’s Medicare savings as, quote, the biggest, coldest power play, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry — (laughter) — because that $716 billion is exactly, to the dollar, the same amount of Medicare savings that he has in his own budget. (Cheers, applause.) You got to get one thing — it takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did.

On Obamacare repeal...

So if he’s elected, and if he does what he promised to do, Medicare will now go broke in 2016. (Boos.) Think about that. That means, after all, we won’t have to wait until their voucher program kicks in 2023 — (laughter) — to see the end of Medicare as we know it. (Applause.) They’re going to do it to us sooner than we thought.

On Romney's proposal for Medicaid block grants...

Lot of folks don’t know it, but nearly two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for Medicare seniors — (applause) — who are eligible for Medicaid.

On Workfare...

This is personal to me. We moved millions of people off welfare. It was one of the reasons that in the eight years I was president, we had a hundred times as many people move out of poverty into the middle class than happened under the previous 12 years, a hundred times as many. (Cheers, applause.) It’s a big deal.

 

But I am telling you the claim that President Obama weakened welfare reform’s work requirement is just not true. (Applause.) But they keep on running the ads claiming it. You want to know why? Their campaign pollster said, we are not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers. (Jeers, applause.) Now, finally I can say, that is true. (Laughter, cheers, applause.) I — (chuckles) — I couldn’t have said it better myself. (Laughter.)

On Romney's debt-reduction plan...

Now, I think this plan is way better than Governor Romney’s plan. First, the Romney plan failed the first test of fiscal responsibility. The numbers just don’t add up. (Laughter, applause.)

 

I mean, consider this. What would you do if you had this problem? Somebody says, oh, we’ve got a big debt problem. We’ve got to reduce the debt. So what’s the first thing you say we’re going to do? Well, to reduce the debt, we’re going to have another $5 trillion in tax cuts heavily weighted to upper-income people. So we’ll make the debt hole bigger before we start to get out of it.

 

Now, when you say, what are you going to do about this $5 trillion you just added on? They say, oh, we’ll make it up by eliminating loopholes in the tax code.

 

So then you ask, well, which loopholes, and how much?

 

You know what they say? See me about that after the election. (Laughter.) I’m not making it up. That’s their position. See me about that after the election.

 

Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: Arithmetic. (Sustained cheers, applause.)

the very next morning after all this press on how Clinton's speech the previous evening was a knockout punch to the GOP?

It seems to kind of feed into the narrative that the D convention is nailing their hides to the barn door.

MI is Romney's home state.

Maybe they could've waited until the weekend?

I think we can all be grateful that Twitter didn't exist when Walter O'Malley died--the sheer number of invocations of a flaming afterlife sent into the ether from Brooklyn would have certainly summoned the apocalypse.

Someone suggested dropping thousands of copies of pages of Obama's tax returns from the convention ceiling.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

No bounce for Romney. But we already knew that.

There was, however, a Dent.

In terms of electoral votes, he figures they lost a bit, then gained a bit, and ended up about 10 EV worse than they started:

See the chart.

We were told that Romney was keeping a low profile this week to warm up for the upcoming debates. Maybe instead it's a duck and cover strategy to prop up his poll numbers.

Bill Clinton took a stiletto to Romney and Ryan last night: Big John seems to have decided that a nail-studded baseball bat was a subtler weapon to wield...

"Ask Osama if he's better off..."

"Rocky IV"

"blooper reel"

"had every position on Afghanistan"

"omission of 'the troops' from his acceptance"

Rough stuff, but it's nice to see Dems standing up - and proudly - for their foreign policy endeavors.

he was going for the undecideds, and I think he did a good job highlighting the differences between the Dem and GOP approaches, hitting really hard on the tax cuts for the rich angle.

Pretty lousy, actually. It paled before Clinton's.

#1. Hustle on a ball hit to the left center power alley and turn what would be a double for 95% of hitters into a triple:

http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?content_id=24547811&topic_id=&c_id=mlb...

#2. Exercise perfect timing on a ball hit back to the box and dash home with the tying run, scoring easily:

Naturally, this tends to annoy the other team, and tends to make them act like punks:

It was a mostly dull performance, certainly not as good as Michelle's, Clinton's, Biden's, even John Kerry's (who still sounds insincere with every word he utters, IMO, even when he isn't being insincere). In fact, in terms of substance and delivery, Obama's workaday talk was pretty much upstaged by all the other keynote, prime time speakers.

If the aim was to lay out a clear vision and inspire campaign organizers & voters to get to the polls, I don't think it did a very good job. It sounded like a fairly low-key recital of accomplishments.

As far as the DNC itself, there are two notes nobody really touched on, and that in my opinion were critically important:

1) The economic recovery plan - what exactly are Dems going to do about unemployment and the ongoing mortgage crisis? This morning's jobs report shows just how critical this issue still is, and I wanted to hear more than just "stay the course" from Democrats. I wanted to hear exactly why the President thinks recovery is taking so long, exactly what the problems are, and exactly what he thinks we should do to overcome those problems and bring about real recovery. Which leads me to...

2) Congress & downballot votes - Most everyone who isn't part of the right wing propaganda system understands that Republicans in Congress, under pressure from the Tea Party faction in the House, have been deliberately sabotaging recovery efforts using obstructionist tactics that are unprecedented in US history. Truman's "Do Nothing Congress," just by way of example, passed five times the number of public laws as the 112th Congress. Republican bums in the Senate have blown away previous records for filibusters, procedural holds, and so forth, while the Republican House spends its time banging the Repeal! button over and over again like a mental patient in a football helmet, when it isn't holding the Treasury hostage and earning the US an unprecedented credit downgrade.

Congressional Republicans in this term are the most destructive, obstructionist, irresponsible crowd of nitwits ever to hold the minority. All they care about is cutting taxes for rich people and beating Democrats...gone is any pretense of duty. They are preventing Congress from carrying out its constitutional function of producing legislation for the general welfare, and doing their best to prevent the executive from carrying out its functions as well. They're a disgrace, and they've got to go.

I thought we'd be seeing a lot more "vote downballot! straight ticket D!" or the like. There were some fingers waved at Congressional R's, but it was a distinctly minor theme, and there was nothing, nothing about getting out and campaigning for Congress, for statehouses, etc. The whole "unity" theme could have been used to build up to a mighty denunciation of Republican tactics in Congress and the need to elect people who are willing to help the government actually perform its basic functions. But no.

Overall grade: A-. Epic performances by Michelle Obama & Bill Clinton will make this a convention to remember & study in the future. Really needed the President to step in and close the deal though, and I feel like Obama was a bit of a disappointment on that score. For all of the passion & clarity of vision expressed by the other speakers, they aren't the ones who have to go back to work at 1600 Pennsylvania. We needed even more passion & even more clarity from the guy himself, and instead we got a fairly uninspired recital of accomplishments. Great stuff he was talking about, but he just didn't explain it all in a way your average low-information voter could understand and "feel." 

....do you people watch these things?  Enquiring minds want to know.

According to a Jon Alterman tweet, economists figure a 100k margin of error when it comes to job reports.  

So.  Maybe it's 96k.  Maybe it's closer to 200.  Or maybe we lost jobs.   

Is it really worth all the attention? 

From none other than Chris Matthews.

Bras aren't a mystery to this guy. He knows a clasp from a hook. He's touched base. He's tagged up. He knows his way around a hooter.

 

And that's how Obama wins Ohio.

Lean Forward!

after 50 years of not giving a darn about football, I am now a Vikings fan.

if government employment under Obama had kept pace with government employment under Bush II:

UCLA stuns #16 Nebraska 36-30; Oregon State slips past #13 Wisconsin 10-7.

that MaPol posted the other day?

I hope they weren't deleted as spam or something ...

This is literally an awesome picture!