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LET CAMPAIGN 2008 BEGIN NOW...FOR THOSE WHO WISH TO READ WHAT HAS HAPPENED SO FAR (IN OUR OPINION) CLICK HERE.  
T U E S D A Y ,   N O V E M B E R    4 ,    2 0 0 8    -   E L E C T I O N    D A Y   U . S . A . !
Democrat Obama; 
Republican McCain; 
Libertarian Bob Barr
Green Party candidate, too. 
CONGRESS 4TH DISTRICT
There may be more stuff, too!
                    

Joe Biden for the Democrats, Senator from Delaware

Barack Obama would consider charging Bush administration over Guantanamo:  Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s vice-presidential running mate, has indicated that a new Democratic administration could pursue criminal charges against the Bush administration over the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo bay.
By Toby Harnden in St Paul
Last Updated: 7:01PM BST 04 Sep 2008

Mr Biden said at an event in Deerfield Beach, Florida: “If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued, not out of vengeance, not out of retribution, out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no attorney general, no president - no one is above the law."

His statement is the strongest indication yet that an Obama administartion might seek legal redress against the President George W. Bush. It could undermine Mr Obama’s message of bipartisanship and moving beyond the battles over Iraq.

In April, Mr Obama struck a similar note when he promised that he would ask his attorney general to review the Bush administration’s decisions to differentiate between "genuine crimes" and "really bad policies".

"If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated," he told the Philadelphia Daily News. "You're also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we've got too many problems we've got to solve..." 


From Wikipedia (quote):

On July 1, 1991 President George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall who had recently announced his retirement.[13] Marshall had been the only African American justice on the court. The selection of Thomas preserved the existing racial composition of the court, but it was seen as likely to move the ideological balance to the right.

American Bar Association's (ABA) rating for Judge Thomas was split between "qualified" and "not qualified."

Organizations including the NAACP, the Urban League and the National Organization for Women opposed the appointment based on Thomas's criticism of affirmative action and suspicions that Thomas might not be a supporter of the Supreme Court judgment in Roe v. Wade. Under questioning during confirmation hearings, Thomas repeatedly asserted that he had not formulated a position on the Roe decision.[14]

Some of the public statements of Thomas's opponents foreshadowed the confirmation fight that would occur. One such statement came from activist Florence Kennedy at a July 1991 conference of the National Organization for Women in New York City. Making reference to the failure of Robert Bork's nomination, she said of Thomas, "We're going to 'bork' him."[15]

[edit] Allegations of sexual harassment

Toward the end of the confirmation hearings, information was leaked to the press from an FBI interview with Anita Hill, an attorney who had worked for Thomas at the Department of Education and the EEOC. On October 11, 1991, Hill was called to testify during the Senate confirmation hearing.

Hill said: "He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes....On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess....Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office, he got up from the table at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, 'Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?'"[16] Hill also indicated that Thomas made reference to the pornographic actor Long Dong Silver.

Angela Wright, who worked with Thomas at the EEOC, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Thomas had repeatedly made comments to her, much like those he allegedly made to Hill, including pressuring her for dates and commenting on her body. Rose Jourdain testified that Wright had discussed Thomas' behavior with her at the time it occurred, and that she had considered it sexual harassment. In light of the fact that Thomas had testified that he had fired Wright for calling another employee a "faggot," [17] Sen. Joseph Biden, chair of the Judiciary Committee, decided against publicly hearing Wright's testimony.

Another former Thomas assistant, Sukari Hardnett, made further damaging charges against him. Although Hardnett made it clear she was not accusing Thomas of sexual harassment, she provided the Judiciary Committee with sworn testimony that "if you were young, black, female, reasonably attractive and worked directly for Clarence Thomas, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female." Additionally, Ellen Wells, John W. Carr, Judge Susan Hoerchner, and Joel Paul testified that Hill had discussed Thomas's actions at the time she worked for Thomas and that she had characterized them as sexual harassment.[18]

Thomas denied all allegations of sexual harassment and sexual impropriety by Hill and the others. Of the committee's investigation of the accusations, Thomas said: "This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."[19]

After extensive debate, the committee sent the nomination to the full Senate without a recommendation either way. Thomas was confirmed by the Senate with a 52-48 vote on October 15, 1991, the narrowest margin for approval in more than a century.[20] The final floor vote was not along strictly party lines: 41 Republicans and 11 Democrats voted to confirm while 46 Democrats and two Republicans (Jim Jeffords (R-VT) and Bob Packwood[21] (R-OR)) voted to reject the nomination.

On October 23, 1991, Thomas took his seat as the 106th Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.



WHAT NYTIMES COLUMNISTS AND THE DAY ARE SAYING ABOUT...Sarah Palin, Republican Governor of Alaska

Palin speech must have Democrats nervous 
DAY Editorial
Published on 9/4/2008 
 
Democratic party leaders who were happy to see Sen. John McCain select little-known Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidental running mate were probably not smiling after listening to her acceptance speech at the GOP convention Wednesday night.

Palin energized the convention hall by perfectly delivering a speech that was a mixture of conservative populism and biting criticism of Demcoratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama. Palin deftly presented the Republicans as the party of working America, not corporate America.

As the surprise VP pick walked to the microphone the stakes could not have been higher. She had been buffeted by days of news reporting into her background as a former small-town mayor and first-term governor. While the social conservative wing of the Republican Party was ecstatic over Palin's selection, some moderate Republicans were quietly questioning McCain's judgment in placing such an untested and arguably poorly vetted candidate on the ticket.

But Palin showed no hint of stress. She looked remarkably at ease, delivering her message in a conversational and  genuine style that perhaps no current nationally known candidate can match. From a middle-class perspective, it would be hard to get more real than five children, a pregnant teen daughter, a special-needs baby and a smalltown-girl-made-good story.

She attacked the Washington political elite pundits and the news media, always popular targets. Invoking the memory of Democrat Harry Truman, Palin said sometimes it takes someone from middle America, or perhaps Alaska, to bring wisdom to Washington.

Palin ripped Obama's lack of executive-level inexperience, one of several speakers to make light of his community organizing work on Chicago's south side. And she made a decent case for the lessons learned by running a small town and directing a state. She repeated the convention theme that, unlike Obama, McCain has been tested under fire.

Palin sought to drive a wedge between Obama and working-class voters in such critical industrial states as Ohio and Pennsylvania by reminding her audience of Obama's comments about such folks at a San Francisco fundraiser: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." While not using the word, she clearly suggested he was a hypocrite for saying one thing to a San Francisco crowd, something else to Pennsylvania audiences.

How she will stand up to the scrutiny and questioning in the weeks to come remains to be seen. There will be ample opportunities for her to implode. But for one very important night Sarah Palin was very impressive and that could be making some Democrats very nervous.
Life of Her Party
NYTIMES
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 2, 2008

ST. PAUL

For many years, reality was out of vogue with Republicans. They ignored the reality of Iraq and Katrina, of Pakistan and Osama bin Laden.

When confronted with their colossal carelessness around the globe and here at home, their mantra was, as Rummy put it, “Stuff happens.”

Now reality, in all its messy, crazy, funky glory, has flooded the party, in the comely, crackling form of Sarah Palin.

Unable to stop the onslaught of wild soap opera storylines erupting from the Palin family and the Alaska wilderness, McCain campaign adviser Steve Schmidt offered caterwauling reporters a new mantra: “Life happens.”

Indeed, it does. Only four days into her reign as John McCain’s “soul mate,” or “Trophy Vice,” as some bloggers are calling her, on the ticket known as “Maverick Squared,” Palin, the governor of Alaska, has already accrued two gates (Troopergate and Broken-watergate), a lawyer (for Troopergate), a future son-in-law named Levi (a high school ice hockey player, described by New York magazine as “sex on skates”), and a National Enquirer headline about the “Teen Prego Crisis” with 17-year-old daughter Bristol.

It seems like a long time since Vice President Dan Quayle denounced Murphy Brown for having a baby out of wedlock, bemoaning a “poverty of values.” It also seems like a long time — and another McCain ago — that Republicans supporting W. smeared the old John McCain by spreading rumors that he had fathered an illegitimate black child.

This week, the anti-abortion forces celebrated the news of Bristol’s pregnancy, using it as further proof that their beloved Governor Palin — who will no more support sex education than polar bears — was committed to the cause.

Since John McCain played craps first and sent the vetters to Alaska afterward, Republicans have been defending Governor Palin by saying that, while she has no foreign policy experience — except, as Cindy McCain pointed out, that “Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia” — she has a lot of domestic policy experience as a supercharged P.T.A. and hockey mom.

As more and more titillating details spill out about the Palins, Republicans riposte by simply arguing that things like Todd’s old D.U.I. arrest or Sarah’s messy family vengeance story will just let them relate better to average Americans — unlike the lofty Obamas.

“If this doesn’t resonate with every woman in America, I’ll eat my hat,” Bill Noll, an Alaska delegate whose daughter got pregnant at a young age and kept the baby, told The Times’s Ashley Parker.

Even as they push Sarah Barracuda as the glamorous but tough hunting and fishing mom who can juggle it all — she’s the only nominee, as Fred Thompson bragged in his convention speech, “who knows how to properly field dress a moose” — they rant at reporters who wonder how she will juggle it all and question some of her judgments.

At a Washington, Pa., rally on Saturday, as her two other daughters stood with her, Ms. Palin left Bristol baby-sitting Trig, who has Down syndrome. “Then we have our daughter Bristol,” the new conservative Republican star said. “She’s on the bus with the newborn. ... It’s his naptime, so he is with his big sister on the bus. But we thank them for being here.”

And this while Bristol was still absorbing the shocking news that she was about to turn into tabloid roadkill — and oh, yeah, she’s getting married sooner rather than later.

When you make a gimmicky pick of an unknown, without proper vetting, there’s bound to be a sticky press conference sooner or later. I watched it happen with Ferraro and Quayle, and I watched Mondale and Poppy Bush curdle with embarrassment but plow through.

The political unknowns, of course, want that tantalizing brass ring, so they’re not always completely forthcoming about their skeletons, if they’re lucky enough to be ineptly vetted. This is ironic, since the nominee who gets blindsided with these crises — Did McCain really know that this Palin reality show was about to pop and swallow his convention — is presenting them to voters as the most trustworthy people to inherit the nuclear codes.

Because Ferraro grabbed at the chance, without revealing to Mondale’s incompetent vetting team how damaging some of her husband’s financial imbroglios could be, she went from being a female icon to part of the reason it’s taken a quarter-century for another party to take a chance on a woman.

When McCain gets in trouble, he pulls out the P.O.W. card. Now Republicans are pulling out the sexist card.

Hillary cried sexism to cover up her incompetent management of her campaign, and now Republicans have picked up that trick. But when you use sexism as an across-the-board shield for any legitimate question, you only hurt women. And that’s just another splash of reality.

----------------

And Then There Was One
NYTIMES
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 2, 2008

As we emerge from Labor Day, college students are gathering back on campuses not only to start the fall semester, but also, in some cases, to vote for the first time in a presidential election. There is no bigger issue on campuses these days than environment/energy. Going into this election, I thought that — for the first time — we would have a choice between two “green” candidates. That view is no longer operative — and college students (and everyone else) need to understand that.

With his choice of Sarah Palin — the Alaska governor who has advocated drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and does not believe mankind is playing any role in climate change — for vice president, John McCain has completed his makeover from the greenest Republican to run for president to just another representative of big oil.

Given the fact that Senator McCain deliberately avoided voting on all eight attempts to pass a bill extending the vital tax credits and production subsidies to expand our wind and solar industries, and given his support for lowering the gasoline tax in a reckless giveaway that would only promote more gasoline consumption and intensify our addiction to oil, and given his desire to make more oil-drilling, not innovation around renewable energy, the centerpiece of his energy policy — in an effort to mislead voters that support for drilling today would translate into lower prices at the pump today — McCain has forfeited any claim to be a green candidate.

So please, students, when McCain comes to your campus and flashes a few posters of wind turbines and solar panels, ask him why he has been AWOL when it came to Congress supporting these new technologies.

“Back in June, the Republican Party had a round-up,” said Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club. “One of the unbranded cattle — a wizened old maverick name John McCain — finally got roped. Then they branded him with a big ‘Lazy O’ — George Bush’s brand, where the O stands for oil. No more maverick.

“One of McCain’s last independent policies putting him at odds with Bush was his opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” added Pope, “yet he has now picked a running mate who has opposed holding big oil accountable and been dismissive of alternative energy while focusing her work on more oil drilling in a wildlife refuge and off of our coasts. While the northern edge of her state literally falls into the rising Arctic Ocean, Sarah Palin says, ‘The jury is still out on global warming.’ She’s the one hanging the jury — and John McCain is going to let her.”

Indeed, Palin’s much ballyhooed confrontations with the oil industry have all been about who should get more of the windfall profits, not how to end our addiction.

Barack Obama should be doing more to promote his green agenda, but at least he had the courage, in the heat of a Democratic primary, not to pander to voters by calling for a lifting of the gasoline tax. And while he has come out for a limited expansion of offshore drilling, he has refrained from misleading voters that this is in any way a solution to our energy problems.

I am not against a limited expansion of off-shore drilling now. But it is a complete sideshow. By constantly pounding into voters that his energy focus is to “drill, drill, drill,” McCain is diverting attention from what should be one of the central issues in this election: who has the better plan to promote massive innovation around clean power technologies and energy efficiency.

Why? Because renewable energy technologies — what I call “E.T.” — are going to constitute the next great global industry. They will rival and probably surpass “I.T.” — information technology. The country that spawns the most E.T. companies will enjoy more economic power, strategic advantage and rising standards of living. We need to make sure that is America. Big oil and OPEC want to make sure it is not.

Palin’s nomination for vice president and her desire to allow drilling in the Alaskan wilderness “reminded me of a lunch I had three and half years ago with one of the Russian trade attachés,” global trade consultant Edward Goldberg said to me. “After much wine, this gentleman told me that his country was very pleased that the Bush administration wanted to drill in the Alaskan wilderness. In his opinion, the amount of product one could actually derive from there was negligible in terms of needs. However, it signified that the Bush administration was not planning to do anything to create alternative energy, which of course would threaten the economic growth of Russia.”

So, college students, don’t let anyone tell you that on the issue of green, this election is not important. It is vitally important, and the alternatives could not be more black and white.

I-BBC video link here
Sarah Heath Palin, an Outsider Who Charms
NYTIMES
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: August 29, 2008

Her father shot the grizzly bear whose hide is now draped over the sofa in her office. She, too, hunts and fishes. She runs marathons. She delivered her fifth child during her first term as governor. They call her husband, the reigning champion in the annual Iron Dog snowmachine race, First Dude.

Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s surprising selection to be his vice-presidential running mate, took Alaska by surprise, too, not long ago. Though indisputably Alaskan, she rose to prominence by bucking the state’s rigid Republican hierarchy, impressing voters more with gumption, warmth and charm than an established record in government.

It was a combination that dumbfounded her rivals.

“She wouldn’t have articulated one coherent policy and people would just be fawning all over her,” said Andrew Halcro, a Republican turned independent, who along with Tony Knowles, a Democrat, ran against Ms. Palin for governor in 2006. “Tony and I looked at each other and it was, like, this isn’t about policy or Alaska issues, this is about people’s most basic instincts: ‘I like you, and you make me feel good.’ ”

“You know,” said Mr. Halcro, invoking the Democratic presidential nominee, “that’s kind of like Obama.”

Before Ms. Palin, 44, became Alaska’s first female governor, in 2006, the top line on her political résumé was her tenure as mayor of Wasilla, a growing suburb of Anchorage with fewer than 7,000 residents. But even before a wide-ranging federal investigation began rattling through the Republican-controlled State Legislature over lawmakers’ links to an oil services company, Ms. Palin jumped into the governor’s race as an outsider calling for reform.

She already had challenged the state Republican Party’s chairman, accusing him of abusing his role on a state oil and gas commission to do political work. And by the summer of 2006, Ms. Palin was taking on the governor, Frank H. Murkowski, a Republican lion of Alaska politics whose bluster and closed-door dealing had finally worn thin in the state.

Ms. Palin (pronounced PAY-lin), youthful and sympathetic with voters but bluntly critical of her party’s leadership, said state government was broken, that it needed to be transparent and responsive. Stunningly, she won in a landslide, trouncing Mr. Murkowski by more than 30 points in the Republican primary that summer and rolling through the general election.

Defying Expectations

Now, after barely 20 months in office in a state that has rarely played much of a role in national politics, Ms. Palin is again challenging expectations, including those of her own party.

“Did I wake up in a parallel universe?” said Mr. Halcro, who writes a blog that is frequently critical of the governor. “I am absolutely shocked.”

Whatever similarities Ms. Palin and Senator Barack Obama may have in personal appeal, they seem to have little else in common. She is a conservative Protestant and has also been a member since 2006 of Feminists for Life, an anti-abortion group. She has supported the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, alongside evolution.

She is a member of the National Rifle Association, and has said Alaska’s economic future depends on aggressively extracting its vast natural resources, from oil to natural gas and minerals.

Ms. Palin said she supported Alaska’s decision to amend its Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. But she used her first veto as governor to block a bill that would have prohibited the state from granting health benefits to same-sex partners of public employees. Ms. Palin said she vetoed the bill because it was unconstitutional, but raised the possibility of amending the state Constitution so the ban could pass muster.

“I don’t think a Hillary person would ever move to her, based on the issues,” said Jean Craciun, a strategic research and planning consultant in Alaska who has done political polling for Democrats and Republicans. “I don’t think before today I would have ever heard someone call her a feminist.”

This month, Ms. Palin issued a last-minute statement of opposition to a ballot measure that would have provided added protections for salmon from potential contamination from mining, an action seen as crucial to its defeat. Her intense pursuit of a pipeline to deliver natural gas from the North Slope of Alaska to market in the Lower 48 led to what her administration has claimed as a major triumph: the Legislature this summer approved her plan to give a $500 million subsidy to TransCanada, a Canadian company, to help build the project.

The State Senate president, Lyda Green, a Republican who is also from Wasilla, has repeatedly sparred with Ms. Palin in the 20 months since she became governor. Like Mr. Halcro, Ms. Green called the governor’s economic policies “liberal,” and said, “I’d have concerns that she’d have the same negative impact on the nation that she has on Alaska.”

Ms. Green disagreed with the governor’s decision to award a license and $500 million in subsidies to the Canadian company, saying there was no guarantee that even with the subsidies a gas pipeline would be built.

Ms. Green said the governor was difficult for her to deal with, a state of affairs she traces to Ms. Green’s decision to remain neutral in Ms. Palin’s race against former Governor Murkowski.

“There was some resentment there that some of us didn’t come out and support her during the primary, and it never really got any better,” Ms. Green said. “I found that if you disagreed with her or tried to amend or change something, that was sort of off-limits. She did not like being told no or to change it.”

Commitment to Pipeline

Rebuffing criticism of the pipeline subsidy, Ms. Palin has cast the pipeline as a way for Alaska to “end our dependence on foreign oil.” She has said she hopes the pipeline effort will show that Alaska can contribute to a new energy economy, rather than be known as the state that receives more per capita federal spending than any other.

Critics in the state complained that Ms. Palin had undercut her clean-government image by appointing as her chief adviser on the pipeline a former lobbyist for TransCanada. The adviser, Marty Rutherford, her deputy commissioner of natural resources, earned about $40,000 lobbying the state government for a TransCanada subsidiary in 2003.

Asked recently whether Mr. Rutherford’s past work for TransCanada presented a conflict of interest, Ms. Palin told The Anchorage Daily News, “Going on five years later, no.”

One of her most significant accomplishments as governor was passing a major tax increase on state oil production, angering oil companies but raising billions of dollars in new revenue. She said the oil companies had previously bribed legislators to keep the taxes low. She subsequently championed legislation that would give some of that money back to Alaskans: Soon, every Alaskan will receive a $1,200 check.

Appointed in 2003 to the state board that settles drilling disputes, the Alaskan Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, she became an outspoken critic of one of her fellow commissioners, Randy Ruedrich, for soliciting political contributions from the oil industry in his capacity as chairman of the state’s Republican Party.

Ms. Palin’s introduction to a national audience comes as little good news has come out of Republican politics in Alaska. The same corruption investigation that was brewing when she ran for office in 2006 has led to the convictions of three Republican state lawmakers, charges against still more and, most recently, the indictment of the most established and revered Alaska politician of all, Senator Ted Stevens.

The continuing trouble has made Ms. Palin’s calls for reform appear all the more prescient, yet she now is facing an investigation herself. The Republican-controlled Legislature has hired an independent investigator to determine whether Ms. Palin improperly pressured the former state public safety commissioner to resign this year.

The former commissioner, Walt Monegan, has said he felt pressure from Ms. Palin’s administration, and her husband, Todd, to fire a state trooper, Mike Wooten, who was going through a bitter divorce with the governor’s sister. The trooper was not fired.

Mr. Monegan told The Anchorage Daily News that Mr. Palin had showed him some of the findings of a private investigator the family had hired and accused the trooper of a variety of misdeeds, including drunken driving and child abuse.

Mr. Palin told the newspaper he feared for his wife’s safety and said Trooper Wooten had made threats against her and her family. The governor has acknowledged inquiries by her staff to the Public Safety Department but said she played no role in them. To demonstrate she welcomed the inquiry, Mrs. Palin asked the state attorney general to look into the accusations as well.

Born on Feb. 11, 1964, in Sandpoint, Idaho, Sarah Heath Palin was still an infant when her parents moved the family to Skagway, in southeast Alaska, after accepting teaching positions there. The family moved to Wasilla, a small, conservative and growing suburb of Anchorage where, as Mr. McCain noted, Ms. Palin was a “standout high school point guard.”

The governor met her husband in high school, and she was later voted “Miss Wasilla” in a local beauty contest. In 1987, she received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Idaho. A year later, she and Mr. Palin eloped.

The governor said Friday that she “never really set out to be involved in public affairs, much less to run for this office,” referring to the vice presidency, but she rose quickly once she entered political life. “A P.T.A. mom who got involved,” is how the current mayor of Wasilla, Dianne M. Keller, described Ms. Palin.

She was elected to the Wasilla City Council in 1992, then ran for mayor in 1996, she has said, because she was concerned that revenue from a new sales tax would not be spent wisely. She served two terms, through 2002.

As mayor, she oversaw the Police Department, which has 25 officers, and the city’s public works projects. Garbage collection is done by private companies, and a borough government oversees firefighting and public schools.

“This is really rural America,” said the deputy city clerk, Jamie Newman, who added that town residents were still reeling from the news that the woman who just six years ago served as their mayor could now be vice president of the United States. “Frankly, everyone is in shock.”

Ms. Keller said that Ms. Palin had three major achievements as mayor: She cut property taxes, increased the city sales tax by half a percent to support construction of an indoor ice rink and sports complex, and put more money into public safety, winning a grant to build a police dispatch center in town.

Although she would later criticize Congressional earmarks like Alaska’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” proposed for the town of Ketchikan at a cost of about $400 million, as mayor she began the practice of making annual trips to Washington to press for them on behalf of their town.

A Fresh Family Tableau

Ms. Palin’s family presents Mr. McCain, who turned 72 on Friday, with fresh and wholesome campaign imagery. It also presents some potentially delicate issues. Mr. Palin, in addition to being a champion snowmobile racer, is an oil production operator on the North Slope, working for BP, a company that has had to make major repairs since a spill on the slope temporarily shut down production there in 2006.

In addition to Ms. Palin’s $125,000 state salary, Mr. Palin earned $93,000 last year running his own commercial fishing business and working part-time at BP’s oil production facility, according to her public financial disclosure reports.

Although Ms. Palin once said that her husband would quit his job at BP if she were elected governor, she later backed away from that. He took a leave from the company after she won, but went back to work there last year, saying his family needed the money. And the governor now says that because Mr. Palin is not in management, it poses no conflict with her own dealings with the petroleum industry, a major force in Alaska’s politics and economy.

Mr. Palin, who is part Yu’pik Eskimo, also received a few hundred dollars in dividends as a shareholder in two benefit corporations representing Alaskan Natives and $10,500 from the Iron Dog snowmobile race, which he has won several times. The Palins reported no debts other than the mortgage on their home.

The couple have five children — Track, 19; Bristol, 17; Willow, 14; Piper, 7; and Trig, 4 months. Track joined the Army last year, a fact Ms. Palin mentioned in her introduction to the Republican ticket on Friday. Trig, who was born in April, has Down syndrome, which Ms. Palin seemed to allude to only obliquely on Friday, after she described him as a “beautiful baby boy” then shifted from there to her selection as Mr. McCain’s running mate.

“Some of life’s greatest opportunities,” the governor said, “come unexpectedly.”

Ms. Palin and her husband knew during her pregnancy that there were complications, though the boy’s condition was not revealed publicly until after he was born. Anti-abortion groups have praised Ms. Palin and her family.

“It speaks volumes about her personally and about how she walked her talk,” said Serrin M. Foster, president of Feminists for Life, an anti-abortion group.

Three days after giving birth, Ms. Palin was back at work.

Background:
I-BBC on Republican contenders:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7493849.stm
NYTIMES' ideas for Vice-Presidential running-mates...
another idea, from the CT POST...


T H E    W H I T E    H O U S E  :   Mixed use property, downtown Washington, D.C. - available in January 2009.  Front and rear entrances - historic 19th century structure (no visible fire damage);  Lincoln Bedroom (lower left @1960's), helicopter landing pad (not shown are tennis court, swimming pool and bowling alley)...nice views.



C A N D I D A T E S

OLYMPICS:  The candidates had a clear two-step process:  first an Obama ad immediately followed by the hammer coming down with McCain black and white ad.

Give Us More Debate
Hartford Courant editorial
August 12, 2008

So far, Sen. Barack Obama's performance in debates with Sen. John McCain has been a gross disappointment. Largely because there haven't been any.

Back in May, an adviser to Mr. McCain's campaign invited Mr. Obama to a series of town-meeting-style appearances during the summer to debate the issues. Mr. Obama, then in a pitched battle with Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, seemed enthusiastic. "I think that's a great idea," he said.

After clinching the nomination in June, however, the Democrats' presumptive presidential nominee has neglected to take Mr. McCain up on his invitation.

Early this month, Mr. Obama appeared to show his hand: In a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates, his campaign committed to the standard three-debate format with Mr. McCain this fall. A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama's campaign declined to shut the door on more debates, but his advisers admit that, with Mr. Obama emerging as the front-runner, he's reluctant to give his opponent more of a nationwide forum.

Mr. Obama's vault to prominence on the national stage has been remarkable. His intellect and eloquence combined with his repeated portrayals of himself last spring as a candidate of change generated considerable excitement.

Lately, however, his commitment to reform has started to look a little thin. Last month, Mr. Obama, who has proved to be a prodigious fundraiser, went back on a promise to accept public financing for his general election campaign.

We urge Mr. Obama to engage Mr. McCain in more debates. Sure, there's a political risk. But when candidates for nationwide office engage in robust debate, Americans are the winners.



D E M O C R A T I C   T I C K E T   2 0 0 8


DEMOCRATS fly to Athens for their closing ceremony - is was it "faux" Parthanon?  At Mile High Stadium, Vice Presidential candidate Senator Joe Biden (l.) reads his teleprompter without distance glasses, as Presidential candidate, Senator Barak Obama is amused by this difficulty.  Question:  where is Senator Biden's water bottle?

A Speech to the Delegates
NYTIMES
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: August 29, 2008

DENVER

My fellow Americans, it is an honor to address the Democratic National Convention at this defining moment in history. We stand at a crossroads at a pivot point, near a fork in the road on the edge of a precipice in the midst of the most consequential election since last year’s “American Idol.”

One path before us leads to the past, and the extinction of the human race. The other path leads to the future, when we will all be dead. We must choose wisely.

We must close the book on the bleeding wounds of the old politics of division and sail our ship up a mountain of hope and plant our flag on the sunrise of a thousand tomorrows with an American promise that will never die! For this election isn’t about the past or the present, or even the pluperfect conditional. It’s about the future, and Barack Obama loves the future because that’s where all his accomplishments are.

We meet today to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans, a generation that came of age amidst iced chais and mocha strawberry Frappuccinos®, a generation with a historical memory that doesn’t extend back past Coke Zero.

We meet today to heal the divisions that have torn this country. For we are all one country and one American family, whether we are caring and thoughtful Democrats or hate-filled and war-crazed Republicans. We must bring together left and right, marinara and carbonara, John and Elizabeth Edwards. On United we stand, on US Airways, there’s a 25-minute delay.

Ladies and gentleman, I never expected to be speaking before you today. Like so many of our speakers at this convention, I come from a hard-working, middle-class family. I was leading a miserable little life, but, nevertheless, overcame great odds to live the American Dream. My great-grandfather fought in Patton’s Army, along with Barack Obama’s great-grand uncles’ fourth cousin once removed.

As a child, I was abandoned by my parents and lived with a colony of ants. We didn’t have much in the way of material possession, but we did have each other and the ability to carry far more than our own body weights. When I was young, I was temporarily paralyzed in a horrible anteater accident, but I never gave up my dream: the dream of speaking at a national political convention so my speech could be talked over by Wolf Blitzer and a gang of pundits.

And today we Democrats meet in Denver, a suburb of Boulder, a city whose motto is, “A Taxi? You Must be Dreaming.”

And in Denver, we Democrats showed America that we have cute daughters who will someday provide us with prestigious car-window stickers. We heard Hillary Clinton’s ringing endorsement of “the weak-looking thin guy who’s bound to lose.”

We heard from Joe Biden, whose 643 years in the Senate make him uniquely qualified to talk to the middle class, whose family has been riding the Acela and before that the Metroliner for generations, who has been given a lifetime ban from the quiet car and who is himself a verbal train wreck waiting to happen.

We got to know Barack and Michelle Obama, two tall, thin, rich, beautiful people who don’t perspire, but who nonetheless feel compassion for their squatter and smellier fellow citizens. We know that Barack could have gone to a prestigious law firm, like his big donors in the luxury boxes, but he chose to put his ego aside to become a professional politician, president of the United States and redeemer of the human race. We heard about his time as a community organizer, the three most fulfilling months of his life.

We were thrilled by his speech in front of the Greek columns, which were conscientiously recycled from the concert, “Yanni, Live at the Acropolis.” We were honored by his pledge, that if elected president, he will serve at least four months before running for higher office. We were moved by his campaign slogan, “Vote Obama: He’s better than you’ll ever be.” We were inspired by dozens of Democratic senators who declared their lifelong love of John McCain before denouncing him as a reactionary opportunist who would destroy the country.

No, this country cannot afford to elect John Bushmccain. Under Republican rule, locusts have stripped the land, adults wear crocs in public and M&M’s have lost their flavor. We must instead ride to the uplands of hope!

For as Barack Obama suggested Thursday night, wherever there is a president who needs to tap our natural-gas reserves, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a need for a capital-gains readjustment for targeted small businesses, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a president committed to direct diplomacy with nuclear proliferators, I’ll be there, too! God bless the Democrats, and God Bless America!
Mr. Obama’s Party
NYTIMES editorial
Published: August 29, 2008
 
One test of a presidential candidate’s strength, and often his best shot at winning, is how much he can mold his party in his image and rally it around a powerful argument for his election. Barack Obama left Denver having made significant progress on both fronts.

The Democratic Party today is different from the one that lost the last two presidential elections. It is bigger, younger and less visibly linked to traditional Democratic interest groups.

Mr. Obama long ago proved his skills as an orator. He went further on Thursday night, using his acceptance speech to add detail to his promises of hope and showcase a new theme that could find resonance with Democrats, new and old, and a broader range of Americans.

Government, Mr. Obama argued, cannot solve all of the country’s problems. But he said it has basic responsibilities to do what individual Americans cannot do themselves — “protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.”

He said that government had failed in those duties under President Bush.

He tied his opponent, John McCain, tightly to Mr. Bush and to an “old, discredited Republican philosophy — give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.” He said what “that really means is you’re on your own.”

Mr. Obama promised to rewrite Mr. Bush’s tax code to restore fairness to working people and take away economy-busting breaks for the wealthiest Americans. He promised universal health insurance. He offered a grand, perhaps grandiose, vision of ending America’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil in a decade.

And he challenged Mr. McCain’s absurd charge that because Mr. Obama opposed the war in Iraq, he will leave America defenseless. “We are the party of Roosevelt,” he said. “We are the party of Kennedy. So don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country.”

The party rallying around Mr. Obama in Denver looked noticeably different. Part of that is real: his campaign’s unprecedented registration drives have brought many new voters into the party and, we hope, permanently into the democratic process as a whole.

Part, we suspect, was stage management. There was little display in the convention hall, and even less in prime-time broadcasts, of the placards of the teachers’ and service workers’ unions, of the National Abortion Rights Action League and the Sierra Club.

That reflected the Obama campaign’s sound analysis that American voters mistrust interest groups — except their own — and its brash conviction that Mr. Obama’s drawing power is so strong that they can win without giving these groups prominence.

Whether this is all visuals — or the start of a new brand of politics — is hard to tell. We have noted too much tactical triangulation in Mr. Obama’s campaign. He has dropped some of the vital themes of his early candidacy, including his withering criticism of Mr. Bush’s abuses of power, and he wavered on illegal wiretapping.

Mr. Obama’s strategists believe their route to victory lies in the careful selection of battleground states, and in the vast expansion of their base of voters. That won the primaries, but he has to repeat that performance on a far larger stage. The bulk of the voters his team is registering are younger, first-time voters and minority voters whose turnout is always dubious.

We are skeptical of slogans, but there is a refreshing audacity — another of Mr. Obama’s favorite words — in the strategy that he and his team have chosen.

27 August 2008

By Matt Frei
BBC News, Denver

Washington diary: Anxious Democrats
If you had any doubts that American party conventions were about ritual, you should talk to my friend who found herself in the Ladies as the gavel went down on the Denver proceedings.

Members of the American GI Forum present the colours during day two of the Democratic Convention, 26 Aug 2008
US party conventions are the scene of patriotism and ritual

As she and her colleagues obeyed the calls of nature, the Star Spangled Banner piped out of the loudspeakers. Despite being inconvenienced in the convenience, the Americans immediately obeyed that other call, the one to honour the flag.

The Ladies on the second floor of the Pepsi Center hummed to the sound of ladies singing along to the National Anthem and holding their hand over their heart. My friend does not know whether this show of patriotism extended into the privacy of the cubicles but she did point out that what she witnessed would never have happened in the UK.

I wonder if the Republicans, who have set up their own war room here in the Mile High City, were taking note.

They have, after all, questioned not just the patriotism of Barack Obama, but his American identity.

The first day of the convention was carefully choreographed to allay voters' fears that despite his exotic name and complicated upbringing, Mr Obama was as American as the next citizen in this country of immigrants.

If the symbolism can't be hammered home during convention week, when can it?

His wife, Michelle Obama, was almost in tears when she pleaded with the cameras that she loved America.

Her family story, delivered with an inevitable hint of treacle, was the iconic journey from wholesome poverty to wholesome public service. The gorgeous daughters were on stage to prove the point.

And just before you thought you had witnessed a rerun of the Cosby Show, the candidate himself popped up on a video link from Kansas City, Missouri, surrounded by a regular family of American voters, all white.

It looked a little ham-fisted but then this is a campaign and if the symbolism can't be hammered home during convention week, when can it?

Democratic royalty

While Michelle Obama reintroduced her family as regular American folks, the gravelly baritone of a terminally-ill Ted Kennedy was there to illustrate how extraordinary the ordinary Obamas are.

The Kennedy clan is Democratic royalty. Like Germany's Hohenzollerns, Austria's Habsburgs or Britain's Windsors, they even display the predominant gene of royalty. In the Kennedys' case these are square jaws, Lego-sized teeth and a broad forehead. And, like all royalty, they guard their legacy jealously.

Senator Edward Kennedy addresses the convention, 25 Aug 2008
The Kennedy clan sprinkled political stardust on the Obama family

On Monday night, the last surviving member of the ill-fated quad of Kennedy brothers passed the family torch to the Obamas.

He did so right over the heads of the people who had originally expected to inherit the torch, the Clintons.

What added insult to injury was that Caroline Kennedy, the former president's daughter, was in charge of the committee to find a suitable vice-president and Hillary was, it seems, not even on her short list.

Sprinkled with Kennedy stardust, buoyed by Michelle Obama's slick performance and reassured by the rhetorical gift of the candidate himself, the Democrats should be in a Mile High Club of euphoria.

After all, the winds of change should be blowing against the Republicans and their president. But, everywhere you look in Denver, you find nail-biting delegates, nervous surrogates, defensive campaign staffers.

The rest of the world thinks that Mr Obama will be America's 44th president but, at home, the Democrats are the worried party.

To some extent, this is their traditional role. Like Woody Allen in one of his earlier movies, the Democrats excel at fretting, agonising, navel gazing and over-analysing.

The opinion polls, which have Mr Obama and his Republican rival John McCain neck-and-neck, prove that they have reason to worry.

The senator from Illinois has had an arid summer. He needs to have a bountiful harvest season.

The ghost of Clinton

But the other reason for anxiety is the Lady who broods in the wings. Of late, Hillary and Bill Clinton have not uttered a single public word of apostasy. They are toeing the line, gritting their teeth and swallowing their pride.

A supporter marches for Hillary Clinton in Denver, 26 Aug
Many Democrats are finding it hard to let go of their hopes for Mrs Clinton

They are also economical with their enthusiasm. I am told that senior Clinton people aren't even sticking around for Obama's big stadium speech on Thursday. This is damning with faint praise.

Moreover, such was the Clintons' hold over the party that the faithful almost expect them to lash out and derail the meticulous choreography. Like the children of over-bearing parents, they expect wrath, even if there's no evidence of it.

Hillary Clinton has become Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited, a living reminder of the perils of abandoning orthodoxy - the orthodoxy of a Clinton candidacy - and a permanent finger on the delicate bruise of guilt and self-doubt, that this may turn out to be a mistake.

The Republicans are doing their best to press on the wound.

As the Wall Street Journal asked: How could the Democrats choose a running mate - Joe Biden - who garnered no more than 9,000 votes and ignore one who harvested 18 million during the primary season?

The ghost of Clinton needs to be exorcised from the convention and that is something that only Hillary and Bill can do. The ritual of convention alone is not enough.


The 21st-Century Man
NYTIMES
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: August 25, 2008
 
DENVER

I flew into the airport here on Sunday and the pilot could barely land because of the fog of bad advice. Democrats are nervous because Barack Obama’s polling lead has evaporated. And when Democrats are nervous, all the Santa Monica Machiavellis emerge from their fund-raisers offering words of wisdom. And the subtext of the advice being offered this year is that Barack Obama should really be someone else.

Some sages are saying that Obama needs to get specific. He needs to lay out concrete plans and legislative agendas. Apparently, having nominated Obama, they really want a replay of the Dukakis campaign.

Others say he needs to describe his experience in government better, to make Americans comfortable with him as chief executive. Apparently, having nominated Obama, they want him to run as Chris Dodd.

Still others say he needs to be a scrappy class warrior defending the middle class against the depredations of the rich overlords with their multiple homes. Apparently, for these people it wasn’t enough that they got to live through Al Gore’s “people versus the powerful” campaign just once. They want to relive the joy again and again.

And yet there are still others who say Obama needs to get bare-knuckled. He needs to hammer McCain above the belt and below. Apparently, these people have decided that having nominated Obama, the party needs to be led by Michael Moore.

The words fly, the quotes are given, campaign aides are pulled aside. It’s like a Greatest Misses compilation of every Democratic campaign idea ever conceived.

Obama is already an elusive Rorschach test candidate, and now he’s being pulled by his party in a thousand directions. The Democrats are in danger of doing to Obama what they did to their last two nominees: burying authentic individuals under a layer of prefab themes.

Obama’s chief problem in this campaign is that large numbers of voters still don’t know who he is. They are having trouble putting him into one of the categories they use to grasp those they have not met.

And now he has to define himself amid the phantasmagorical vapors of his own party: the ghosts of the Kerry campaign, the overshadowing magic of the Kennedys and the ego-opera that perpetually surrounds the Clintons.

Of course, the Obama campaign has been here before. Just about a year ago, Obama was stagnant in the polls. His supporters were nervous and full of advice. And in the crowning moment of his whole race, Obama shut them out. He turned his back on the universe of geniuses and stayed true to his core identity.

At the core, Obama’s best message has always been this: He is unconnected with the tired old fights that constrict our politics. He is in tune with a new era. He has very little experience but a lot of potential. He does not have big achievements, but he is authentically the sort of person who emerges in a multicultural, globalized age. He is therefore naturally in step with the problems that will confront us in the years to come.

So as I’m trying to measure the effectiveness of this convention, I’ll be jotting down a little minus mark every time I hear a theme that muddies that image. I’ll jot down a minus every time I hear the old class conflict, and the old culture war themes. I’ll jot down a minus when I see the old Bush obsession rearing its head, which is not part of his natural persona. I’ll write a demerit every time I hear the rich played off against the poor, undercutting Obama’s One America dream.

I’ll put a plus down every time a speaker says that McCain is a good man who happens to be out of step with the times. I’ll put a plus down every time a speaker says that a multipolar world demands a softer international touch. I’ll put a plus down when a speaker says the old free market policies worked fine in the 20th century, but no longer seem to be working today. These are arguments that reinforce Obama’s identity as a 21st-century man.

And I have to say, during the first night of the convention, the pluses far outweighed the minuses. In spirit, the night extended Obama’s 2004 convention speech. The overarching theme was intrinsic to the man, unity instead of division, something new instead of conflicts that are old. His sister hit this theme forcefully. Jesse Jackson Jr. made the generational-change argument explicitly, paying tribute to the fights of the past while describing the more subtle challenges of the present. Michelle Obama was short on biographical details, but long on the idealism, which is at the heart of Obama’s appeal.

Obama may yet recover his core focus. Now he has to preserve it against his most terrifying foes: the “experts” in his own party.
Democrats Link Past, Present As Convention Opens In Denver; Kennedy, Michelle Obama call for unity as nominee-in-waiting prepares for election 
DAY
By David Espo    
Published on 8/26/2008 

Denver - Ailing and aging, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy issued a ringing summons to fellow Democrats to rally behind Barack Obama's pioneering quest for the White House Monday night in a poignant opening to a party convention in search of unity for the fall campaign.

”Barack will finally bring the change we need,” seconded Obama's wife, Michelle, casting her husband - bidding to become the first black president - as a leader with classic American values.

She pledged he would end the war in Iraq, revise a sputtering economy and extend health care to all.  Democrats opened their four-day convention in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains as polls underscored the closeness of the race with Republican John McCain. And there was no underestimating the challenges confronting Obama.  He faces lingering divisions from a fierce battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton for the nomination, tough ads by McCain and his Republican allies, and a reminder that racism, too, could play a role.

”There are people who are not going to vote for him because he's black,” said James Hoffa, president of the Teamsters union. “And we've got to hope that we can educate people to put aside their racism and to put their own interests No. 1.” He spoke in an Associated Press interview.

Kennedy and Obama's wife were the bookends of an evening that left the delegates cheering, one representing the party's past, the other its present.

”The work begins anew, the hope rises again and the dream lives on,” Kennedy said in a strong voice, reprising the final line of a memorable 1980 speech that brought a different convention to its feet. The senator has been undergoing treatment for a malignant brain tumor.

Obama's wife said it was time to “stop doubting and start dreaming.”

Moments later, Obama appeared via satellite from Missouri, drawing cheers from delegates.  Convention planners hoped the prime time address by Obama's wife would begin the work of casting the Illinois senator as a leader with classic American values.

Among them, she said: “that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them.”

The convention's opening gavel fell with Obama and Clinton still struggling to work out the choreography for the formal roll call of the states that will make him the party nominee.  Michelle Obama included a tribute to her husband's former rival, crediting her with having placed “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” that constrains women's ambitions.  (NOTE:  Isn't that the number of votes Hillary received during the primaries?)

”There is no doubt in anyone's mind that this is Barack Obama's convention,” the former first lady told reporters early in the day. And yet, she said, some of her delegates “feel an obligation to the people who sent them here” and would vote for her.

Kennedy's speech was an implicit appeal to Clinton's delegates - and the 18 million voters who supported her in the primaries - to swing behind Obama.

He said the country can meet its challenges with Obama. “Yes we can, yes we will,” he said, echoing the presidential candidate's own signature refrain.

In one of their first orders of business, delegates ratified a party platform tailored to Obama's specifications. It backs “complete redeployment within 16 months from Iraq,” as well as health care for all, a new economic stimulus package and higher taxes on families earning over $250,000 a year.

”The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right,” it said.

As the delegates took their seats in the Pepsi Center, Obama campaigned in Iowa, the first in a string of swing states he is visiting en route to Colorado.  Obama delivers his acceptance speech on Thursday at a football stadium, before a crowd likely to total 75,000 or more. Then he and Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, his vice presidential running mate, depart for the fall campaign.

While the White House is the biggest prize of the election year, prominent Democrats expressed optimism in Associated Press interviews about major gains in the fall in races for the House and Senate.  Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said 70 or more House seats are competitive, the majority of them currently in Republican hands.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said fashioning a 60-seat, filibuster-proof Senate majority was a stretch. But he added that Democrats lead for five seats currently in Republican hands, and several others are competitive.  Howard Dean, the party chairman, rapped the opening gavel precisely on schedule at 3 p.m. Mountain Time - before only a smattering of delegates.

”We are ready to compete in all 50 states in November,” he said, even though Obama has already written off large portions of the South and Mountain West.  Schumer and Van Hollen said only a small fraction of Clinton's delegates remained unreconciled to Obama's triumph in the bruising primaries of the winter and spring.

Perhaps so, but they were vocal about it, and officials said one of the issues under discussion was whether to permit a noisy floor demonstration by Clinton's supporters when the former first lady's name is placed in nomination on Wednesday night.  Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the eldest child of the late Robert F. Kennedy and a former lieutenant governor of Maryland, said the animosity that some Clinton delegates feel toward Obama is worsening. “There's a moment that you want to enjoy your bitterness,” she said, although she emphasized that she is supporting Obama.

Obama told reporters that his former rival and her husband, former President Clinton, “couldn't have been more clear” in their support for his candidacy.  But the sniping was impossible to miss.

”I'm getting a lot of calls and e-mails, especially from women, who are quite upset that she was not vetted (for vice president) even though senator Obama said she was on the short list,” said Lanny Davis, a longtime Clinton loyalist.

All the talk about disunity was grating on some.

”To stay wallowing in all of this is not productive,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.

”So we can talk about this forever, or we can talk about how we're going to take our message to the American people, to women all across America, to see the distinctions” between Obama and McCain. 

-------

*
NOTE: these items make you wonder...not the message we would want to send.
Kennedy to appear, may speak at convention 
DAY
By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Writer 
Posted on Aug 25, 11:42 AM EDT

DENVER (AP) -- A cancer-fighting Sen. Edward M. Kennedy prepared to attend, and possibly speak, at the opening day of the Democratic National Convention on Monday as presidential nominee-to-be Barack Obama unleashed a hard-hitting television commercial linking GOP rival John McCain to President Bush.

The ad signaled that the Democrats' gathering would be just as much about skewering McCain as about unifying the fractured party after a protracted primary season that split supporters between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Kennedy, who is being treated for a malignant brain tumor, is a beloved figure within the party, and the Massachusetts senator's last-minute appearance at the Pepsi Center is a way toward unification as the four-day convention opens amid signs of acrimony between Obama and Clinton delegates.

Kennedy arrived in Denver Sunday night and got a checkup at a local hospital. He plans to attend to watch a video tribute to him and may address the convention if he feels up to it, said a senior Democratic official who talked on the condition of anonymity.

"He's truly humbled by the outpouring of support and wouldn't miss it for anything in the world," said Stephanie Cutter, a Kennedy spokeswoman.

As Democrats put the final touches on opening night, Obama's campaign released an ad featuring images of McCain hugging Bush and the two smiling in spite of tidings of economic woe. It features a parody of the Sam Cooke classic "Wonderful World," which starts off with the line "Don't know much about history." For the ad it's "I'm not up on the economy," playing on McCain's earlier admission that economics wasn't his best subject.

Ending with a photo of Bush patting McCain's back, the spot asks, "Do we really want four more years of the same old tune?"

McCain's campaign also released an ad to play on what it sees as a weakness for Obama: his lack of support among some Clinton backers. That ad features a Clinton supporter who now backs McCain assuring like-minded voters: "A lot of Democrats will vote McCain. It's OK, really!"

Opening night at the Pepsi Center, the main venue for the four-day convention, aimed to tell the Illinois senator's personal story to the millions of voters nationwide who will begin tuning in to the presidential campaign. Obama's wife, Michelle, was the evening's keynote speaker.

Obama's campaign dismissed concerns about the impact of die-hard Clinton supporters on the choreographed show of unity. Behind the scenes, however, polls showed significant Clinton support still being denied to Obama, and pro-Clinton demonstrations at offsite venues were creating a different kind of anticipation. Clinton has backed Obama and was scheduled to speak Tuesday night.

"There are a lot of delegates here who had passionate choices in an extended primary season," Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs told "Today" on NBC. "We feel confident that if we can demonstrate a record of change, a record of vision ... a team of Barack Obama and Joe Biden can convince Democrats, Republicans and independents to support a ticket of change in November."

Most Democratic delegates were putting the rough-and-tumble primary contest behind them and focusing on electing the first black presidential nominee of a major political party. The night was turned over to Michelle Obama, the candidate's wife of nearly 16 years, to allow the potential first lady a prime-time speech meant to serve a dual purpose: humanize Obama and show up her own critics before her largest audience yet.

"Our stories are the quintessential American stories," she said in an interview CNN aired Monday. "I am here because of the opportunities that my father had, that my mother had. You know, we are who Americans were supposed to be."

With Democrats and convention delegates streaming to the Mile High City, party officials worked to assure a harmonious week.

Biden headed by plane to Denver on Monday after making an unannounced visit to the Amtrak train station in Wilmington, Del, that he has used for years to commute to Washington and his day job in the Senate.

"These guys have been my family," said Biden as he greeted vendors and travelers. Biden has taken Amtrak during his 35 years in the Senate. He visited the station with his wife, Jill, and his security detail.

Biden said his Wednesday night convention speech "is all ready."

At some point during the week, Clinton was expected to release the delegates she won in primaries and caucuses and encourage them to support her former rival.

On Sunday, by unanimous vote, the party's credentials committee restored full voting rights to delegates from Florida and Michigan. The party had stripped both states of their convention voting rights for holding primaries before the rules said they could. The new committee vote was taken at Obama's behest, and Democrats hope the goodwill gesture will help improve their standing in two important states.

Obama, slowly making his way to Denver via a tour of battleground states, said Sunday that one of his goals is for voters to come away from the convention thinking he is one of them. His uncommon name and family background still concern some voters.

"I think what you'll conclude is, 'He's sort of like us,'" Obama said in Eau Claire, Wis. "'He comes from a middle-class background. He went to school on scholarships. He had to pay off student loans. He and his wife had to worry about child care. They had to figure out how to start a college fund for their kids.'"

Obama closes the convention Thursday night when the action shifts to Invesco Field at Mile High stadium, where the 47-year-old, first-term senator will give his speech accepting the nomination from the 50-yard line. He said Sunday he was "still tooling around with my speech a little bit."

He is scheduled to campaign Monday in Iowa.

McCain, meanwhile, wasn't disappearing from the campaign trail entirely. He was using an appearance Monday on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and newspaper interviews to stay in touch with voters. And, there's continued interest in his choice of a running mate.

Besides Michelle Obama, other speakers Monday night include Barack Obama's sister, Maya Soetero-Ng, and Craig Robinson, his brother-in-law. The schedule also includes former Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, a Republican moderate who broke ranks with his party this month and endorsed Obama.
Blitzer: Democrats kick off major marketing in Denver
By Wolf Blitzer , CNN Anchor (Sunday, August 24, 2008)
    
DENVER, Colorado (CNN) -- And now the selling begins.  CNN's Wolf Blitzer says Democrats need to sell Barack Obama to voters.

The Democrats need to do some major marketing at their party convention in Denver, Colorado.  First and foremost, they need to sell Sen. Barack Obama. They need to convince American voters that he's the right man to lead the country.  That sales campaign kicks off Monday night with the focus on Obama's personal story. It is an amazing success story that will be told on the big screen inside the Pepsi Center.

The video, we are told, will be dramatic and highly produced, including some powerful music. And it will be amplified by his wife, Michelle, who speaks Monday night.  Barack Obama's sister Maya Soetero-Ng, and Michelle's brother, Craig Robinson, will also speak.

It also will be an emotional night as the Democrats pay tribute to Sen. Ted Kennedy, who has brain cancer.

Beyond the personal and the emotional, the sales campaign moves to more substance Tuesday night with the focus on issue No. 1: the economy. The Democrats are calling their theme that night "Renewing America's Promise."

Sen. Hillary Clinton will be the headline prime-time speaker. This will be a critically important speech because so many of her supporters remain unconvinced about Obama. The tone she sets and the words she utters will send out a powerful message.

Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner will deliver the keynote address that night. He is running for the U.S. Senate to succeed John Warner (no relation).  There's a history to these speeches. Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democrats' last convention, and we know where he wound up.

The focus shifts to national security and foreign policy Wednesday night in what the Democrats are calling "Securing America's Future."

Sen. Joe Biden, the vice presidential nominee, will deliver the big speech. He will speak and make the case for Obama and, perhaps even more important, make the case against McCain.  Knowing Biden as I do, this will be a feisty moment.

Former President Clinton will weigh in that night with a major speech of his own. That also should be a moment.

Finally, the festivities move to INVESCO Field at Mile High Stadium for the biggest night of the week: when Obama accepts his party's nomination.  About 80,000 people will fill the stadium. Tens of millions will be watching at home. No surprise on his theme for the night: "Change You Can Believe In."

That message brought him to the big dance, and he and his team believe that it can get him to the finish line.



R E P U B L I C A N   T I C K E T   2 0 0 8


A Glimpse of the New  
NYTIMES
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 4, 2008

ST. PAUL

Political parties usually reform in the wilderness. They suffer some crushing defeat, the old guard is discredited and the pain compels turnover and change. John McCain is trying to reform the Republican Party before a presidential defeat, with the old guard still around, and with a party base that still hasn’t accepted the need to transform. The central drama of this week’s convention was the struggle by reform Republicans to break through the gravitational pull of old habits and create something new.

Before the convention, some McCain aides wanted to sunder the links to the past in one bold stroke: Name Joe Lieberman as the vice presidential nominee, promise to serve only one term, vow to take a hiatus from partisanship and work by compromise to get things done. That proved to be a leap too far.

So McCain was pulled back. But he refused to stay there and pressed ahead by picking Sarah Palin. At first, this seemed like the fresh break he needed. Her career in Alaska has been nibbled on the edges, but the key fact is this: When the testing time came, she quit her government job, put her career on the line and took on the corrupt establishment of her own party.

But again, the forces of the past pulled McCain back. Parts of the press pack elevated Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. A controversy over human reproduction brought back the old culture wars and the mommy wars. Battle lines formed, as in the days of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, and everyone took their pre-assigned roles.

Millions declared themselves qualified to judge her a bad mother, while others held her up as the model of evangelical virtue. And, of course, the whole thing became enmeshed in the clichés of red-blue: the supposed conflict between the condescending media elites and the gun-owning trailer trash, between abortion-rights urban women with one kid and anti-abortion rural women with five.

For 36 hours, the gravitational pull of past resentments dominated the media-culture war complex. And from the convention podium the past and the future fought to a draw. On the one hand, Joe Lieberman went up there and praised Bill Clinton, giving a glimpse of what a less partisan political future might look like. On the other, there was Mitt Romney, who delivered a cynical, extreme caricature of old-line Republicanism.

The convention thus sat on a knife-edge. And then Palin walked onstage. She gave a tough vice presidential speech, with maybe a few more jabs than necessary. Still it was stupendous to see a young woman emerge from nowhere to give a smart and assertive speech.

And what was most impressive was her speech’s freshness. Her words flowed directly from her life experience, her poise and mannerisms from her town and its conversations. She left behind most of the standard tropes of Republican rhetoric (compare her text to the others) and skated over abortion and the social issues. There wasn’t even any tired, old Reagan nostalgia.

Instead, her language resonated more of supermarket aisle than the megachurch pulpit. More than the men on the tickets, she embodies the spirit of the moment: impatient, fed up, tough-minded, but ironical. Even in attack, she projected the cheerfulness of someone confident about the future.

In those 40 minutes, the forces of reform Republicanism took control, at least for a time. Republicans started talking about Palin, Bobby Jindal and a brighter future for their party.

In his own speech on Thursday, McCain showed that he is not naturally the smoothest of speakers. He did not have an over-arching story to describe how the world has changed in the 21st century and how government must adapt.

He did not lay out a new doctrine to give shape to his administration. Bill Clinton had a new Democratic agenda to describe how his party would evolve, and in 2000, George W. Bush had compassionate conservatism. McCain had nothing like that. He did not offer as transformational a domestic policy agenda as one would have liked.

But he described traditional conservatism-plus: low taxes and free markets with some activism built on top; compensating workers for lost wages when plants close; a grand national project for energy independence. Through it all, he communicated his burning indignation at the way Washington has operated over the last 12 years. He communicated his intense passion to lift government to a plane the country deserves. He did note that he has fought to change the Republican Party during its period of decay. And he diagnosed that decay Thursday night (to the tepid applause of the faithful).

And this passion for change, combined with his proven and evident integrity, led to the crescendo of raw energy that marked this convention’s conclusion.

His policies are still not quite there yet, but McCain has the heart of an insurgent.
Lieberman leads GOP cheers in St. Paul
New Haven REGISTER
Wednesday, September 3, 2008 5:30 AM EDT
By the Associated Press

ST. PAUL, Minn. — President Bush led a convention chorus of praise for John McCain Tuesday night, hailing him as a "ready to lead this nation" and a courageous candidate who risked his White House ambitions to support an unpopular Iraq war. Republicans rallied forcefully behind vice presidential running mate Sarah Palin in the face of fresh controversy.

Barack Obama drew criticism from the convention podium when Sen. Joseph Lieberman said the Democratic presidential candidate voted to cut off funding "for our troops on the ground" in Iraq last year. By contrast, Lieberman, who was the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in 2000, said McCain had the courage "to stand against the tide of public opinion."

McCain was in Pennsylvania and Ohio during the day, campaigning his way into the convention city where the 72-year-old Arizona senator will deliver his formal acceptance speech on Thursday night.

Hundreds of miles to the west, in St. Paul, about two dozen men who were Vietnam prisoners with him a generation ago sparked chants of "USA, USA" when they were introduced to the delegates.

Bush reprised the national security themes that propelled him to a second term as he spoke — briefly — from the White House. "We need a president who understands the lessons of Sept. 11, 2001," he said in prepared remarks. "That to protect America, we must stay on offense, stop attacks before they happen and not wait to be hit again. The man we need is John McCain."

Inside the convention hall, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson delivered a strong defense of Palin. He said the Alaska governor, was "from a small town, with small town values, but that’s not good enough for those folks who are attacking her and her family."

He said McCain’s decision to place her on the ticket "has the other side and their friends in the media in a state of panic."

Other Republicans — delegates and luminaries alike — defended Palin, who disclosed on Monday that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is pregnant. In addition, a lawyer has been hired to represent the governor in an ethics-related controversy back home in Alaska.

Conservatives, slow to warm to McCain even after he clinched the nomination last spring, were particularly supportive.

"I haven’t seen anything that comes out about her that in any way troubles me or shakes my confidence in her," said former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who ran unsuccessfully for the party’s presidential nomination this year.

"All it has done for me is say she is a human person with a real family."

And Ron Nehring, chairman of the California state party, said video footage of Palin on a firing range was helping her cause.

"The reports I’m getting back is that every time they show that footage we get 1,000 precinct walkers from the NRA," he told members of his state’s delegation, to laughter. "She cuts taxes and shoots moose. That’s Gov. Palin," Nehring said.

Thompson jabbed at Obama on abortion, as well.

"We need a president who doesn’t think that the protection of the unborn or a newly born baby is above his pay grade," he said in prepared remarks, referring to a recent episode in which McCain’s White House rival said it was "above my pay grade" to decide the point at which an unborn child is entitled to rights.

There were indications that Republicans thought they could turn Palin-related controversy to McCain’s gain. Officials said Levi Johnston, the 18-year-old father of the baby Bristol Palin is expecting, was en route to the convention from his home in Wasilla, Alaska.

McCain’s wife, Cindy, took in the evening program from a VIP box. So, too, former President George H.W. Bush, accompanied by his wife Barbara.

Bush, with his approval ratings in the 30-percent range, was relegated to a relatively minor role at the convention of a party that has twice nominated him to the White House. The president scrapped a planned Monday night speech because of the threat Hurricane Gustav posed to New Orleans. With polls making it clear the nation is ready for a change, the McCain campaign indicated there was no reason for him to make the trip to St. Paul.

The president referred to the years of torture McCain endured as a prisoner of war. Then Bush added, "If the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain’s resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry left never will."

"As president he will stand up to the high tax crowd in Congress ... and lift the ban for drilling on America’s offshore oil," Bush added.

Republicans handed Lieberman the prime spot in the evening lineup, and he blended praise for McCain with criticism of Obama.

"When others wanted to retreat in defeat from the field of battle, when Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for our troops on the ground, John McCain had the courage to stand against the tide of public opinion," the Connecticut Democratic-turned-independent senator said in excerpts released in advance of his speech.

The decision to place Lieberman out front on the convention’s second night capped an unprecedented political migration. Only eight years ago, he stood before a cheering throng at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles and accepted the nomination as Al Gore’s running mate.

In the years since, he lost badly in 2004 when he sought the Democratic presidential nomination, lost a Democratic nomination for a new term at home in Connecticut in 2006, then recovered quickly to win re-election as an independent.

Back in the Senate, his vote allows the Democrats to command a narrow majority, yet he has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the war in Iraq. He has traveled widely with McCain in recent months, and occasionally has angered Democrats with remarks critical of Obama.

One day after a frightening Gulf Coast hurricane prompted a subdued opening to the McCain convention, political combat enjoyed a resurgence.

McCain’s aides disputed a claim that vice presidential running mate Sarah Palin had once been a member of a third party — and accused Democratic rival Obama’s camp of spreading false information.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said that as far as he’d seen, "the only person talking about her being in the Alaska Independence Party is the head of the Alaska Independence Party."

"Their gripe is with those folks," he said of the McCain campaign.

Protesters outside the hall vowed to resume demonstrations that turned violent on Monday and resulted in 286 arrests.
8 Years Later, Lieberman Extols McCain
NYTIMES
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: September 2, 2008

ST. PAUL — Senator Joseph I. Lieberman’s speech to Republicans here on Tuesday night represented the culmination of an improbable path for a politician who just eight years ago was accepting the Democratic nomination for vice president and hailing his party’s nominee, Al Gore, as “a man of courage and conviction.”

During that time, Mr. Lieberman came to champion, with Mr. McCain, the American invasion of Iraq, and in doing so was frozen out by liberals in his party and denied renomination as a Democrat to the Senate. He won re-election as an independent, in 2006, and spoke to Republicans on Tuesday portraying himself as a man who transcends party lines.

“Dear friends, I’m here because John McCain’s whole life testifies to a great truth: being a Democrat or a Republican is important, but it is nowhere near as important as being an American,” Mr. Lieberman said to cheers, as electronic screens around the convention hall here flashed “Country First,” one of Mr. McCain’s campaign themes.

Mr. Lieberman and Mr. McCain have been close friends for more than a dozen years, working together on peace in the Balkans, regulations of gun shows after the Columbine High School shootings and promoting measures to curb carbon emissions. But it was the Iraq war that marked the turning point in Mr. Lieberman’s journey to the McCain camp.

His invitation to speak here was largely because of their political kinship as Washington leaders who have often felt uncomfortable in the boundaries of their parties.

Only last month, friends say, Mr. McCain wanted to reach beyond his base and ask Mr. Lieberman to be his running mate; in that instance, though, party influence proved too strong, with many Republican officials and delegates insisting they would reject Mr. Lieberman because of his support for abortion rights and some gay rights laws.

Mr. Lieberman’s address received some of the biggest applause of the night in the convention hall, topped perhaps only by a filmed tribute to President Ronald Reagan.

“It really represents one of the main reasons I love McCain,” said Nathaniel Dublin, a delegate from Newton, Mass. “He’s not caught up in this partisanship.” Mr. Dublin said he thought the speech worked in “changing the attitudes of all the Democrats and even changing the attitudes of all the Republicans.”

Several Republicans said they were counting on Mr. Lieberman’s speech to help dominate news coverage of the convention this week — and perhaps, some hope, to eclipse President Bush’s briefer remarks on Tuesday about Mr. McCain and Iraq.

If viewers came away from Mr. Bush’s speech on Tuesday assuming that he and Mr. McCain were inseparable on Iraq — a point Democrats are pushing — it is Mr. Lieberman who stands as a reminder that he and Mr. McCain wanted a larger American military presence in Iraq in the first, bloodiest years after the invasion, when Mr. Bush opposed sending more troops.

If Mr. Lieberman has long found himself on the outs with many Democrats, he also won his old party an ovation in St. Paul on Tuesday night when he compared Senator Barack Obama, unflatteringly, with none other than President Bill Clinton, whom Mr. Lieberman criticized sharply in 1998 for his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Mr. Lieberman, to applause, said Mr. Obama did not measure up to Mr. McCain or even to Mr. Clinton, who “worked with Republicans to get important things done,” like welfare reform and free trade agreements.

Of course, Mr. Clinton has had some nice things to say about Mr. McCain this year, though the former president has endorsed Mr. Obama — and certainly has not moved as far as Mr. Lieberman to receive an invitation to the Republican hall.

State delegation worried about security
CTPOST
PETER URBAN
Article Last Updated: 09/03/2008 12:40:46 AM EDT

WASHINGTON — A day after their run-in with protesters, the Connecticut delegation hired a security detail to accompany them into the Republican National Convention Tuesday evening.
GOP State Party Chairman Chris Healy said Tuesday afternoon that the delegation "retained a couple of off-duty policemen" to accompany them as they make their way into the Xcel Center in St. Paul, Minn.

On Monday, anti-war protesters attacked the delegation as they attempted to walk from their chartered bus to the convention. No one was seriously hurt, but several members had water laced with bleach splashed on them and at least one member had his credentials stolen.

Delegate Fred Biebel, 83, a former Stratford town councilman and a former deputy national chairman of the Republican National Committee, had his credentials snagged by a protester and was examined by paramedics afterward because he had trouble breathing. And former Rep. Rob Simmons, R-2, of Stonington, was hit in the face with bleach-tainted water.

"I was in the middle of that scrum yesterday, and I can tell you it got a little scary. Some of the knuckleheads had that look in their eye," Healy said during a telephone conference call with Connecticut-based reporters.

Healy said that the delegation had chartered a bus to take them to the convention center rather than rely on shuttle buses provided by the convention. The shuttles, which have been pre-screened, take delegates directly into the secured convention site.  The charter bus, which was not pre-screened, dropped them about three blocks from the Xcel Center at the corner of Kellogg Boulevard and Wabasha Street, outside the secured area.

Delegate Michael Garrett, of Bridgeport, said Tuesday in a telephone interview that the delegation disembarked outside the Xcel Center perimeter and walked several blocks before being confronted by the protesters.

"They were adamant that they weren't going to let us through. They started pushing and shoving and grabbing for our credentials," Garrett said.

Simmons said Tuesday in a telephone interview that the protesters took advantage of a security breach to attack them.  The delegation, he said, was told after leaving from the bus to cross the street and head to the secured area. Mounted police escorted them about halfway to the fenced area but departed after being called off to another area where demonstrators had gathered.

"The mob swarmed across the street and took us totally by surprise. The police shouldn't have allowed it to happen," Simmons said.

Simmons stepped between the protesters, who were grabbing for credentials, and some of the older delegates.

"They sprayed me in the face and on my clothes," Simmons said. "It was an ugly, inexcusable incident."

The delegation eventually forced its way through the protesters and made it into the enclosed area. Biebel, whose credentials were snatched from his neck, was having trouble breathing. He was eventually seated in a wheelchair and a paramedic examined him to make sure he was OK. Simmons and about a dozen others who were sprayed with the bleach water were washed down.

Garrett said that he believed the FBI recovered Biebel's credentials. "We saw the peace demonstrators earlier who were peaceable. These protesters were spoiling for a fight. And they had cameras to take pictures of anyone retaliating," Garrett said. "I saw them surging and going after especially the women. I was fending them off to blaze a path through. The sidewalk was totally obstructed; we had to walk through them as they bumped and shoved."

Garrett said that the protesters, whom he believed were anarchists, were trying to intimidate them but it didn't work.

"It only firmed our resolve. We weren't going to stop," he said.

Simmons said that Connecticut Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele had contacted local police officials seeking a report on the incident to find out more about who the protesters were.

"This was organized. They didn't just walk off some campus and use these tactics," Simmons said. "I'd like to know who is behind it."