Governor Gidget appeared on screen melting my heart and conquering my soul. That was after The Mayor of America softened me up.

Once I was blind. But now I can see.

I agree with every one of their points.

Black is white.

Up is Down.

Slavery is Freedom.

Arbeit Macht Frei.

We are winning in Iraq.

The WMD did exist.

Saddam was the leader of Al Qaeda.

Torture is legal.

Mitt Romney is a populist renegade.

Running Wasilla is more or less like running New York City.

Black men who become president of the Harvard Law Review are effete snobs.

Community organizers are sinister.

The media is run by Socialists.

Ivy League universities should be shuttered and replaced by trade schools.

Writing two best-selling memoirs is, um, a black mark.

Having a baby out of wedlock or aborting the fetus is strictly a personal, private issue even when the state wants to criminalize the latter.

America's perceived economic crisis is a mental aberration curable by sexual abstention.

Reading someone their legal rights is an act of wussiness.

Sarah has had more executive experience than Joe Biden and Barack Obama combined.

Hockey moms are more intelligent than hockey pucks.

Running the PTA is very much like the CIA.

Piloting a snowboard is the same as flying an F-16.

Garnering about 655 votes to win a Mayor's seat is major executive experience.

Palin would be the perfect President to stare down Vladimir Putin.

Mike Huckabee should be named head of National Institute for Science Education.

No Alaska Governor is a member of the Permanent Political Establishment.

Sarah is more or less like Harry -- Truman.

Traveling outside the country once by age 43 makes you fit to run the most powerful military in the history of the world.

Capacity to read a pre-canned generic speech written by spinmeisters is a major qualification for national office.

The Republicans are a shoo-in to win in November.

The sun sets in the east (except in Alaska which dwells in darkness much of the year).

P.S. I will leave it to others to offer a "serious" analysis of Sarah Palin's remarks, I refuse to participate in that sort of farce.

Bill Bradley, however, holds his nose and does a formidable job -- even before she spoke.

I was sitting next to Norman Mailer at the infamous 1992 Republican Convention when Pat Buchanan launched his notorious culture war speech. Mailer was wearing blue. Pat's brigades were in gray.

When the indoor fireworks went off upon Buchanan's conclusion, for a moment we weren't sure if these were pyrotechnics or rifle shots from the bleachers above us.

In the end, Buchanan's bombast helped sink the Republican ticket that year.

I agree with John Marshall that Mayor Rudy just did the same thing.

I have to admit that I had a ball watching the RNC tonight. I turned the audio way down and enjoyed the constant HD close-ups of the GOP party faithful. I don't want to engage in too many cliches, but what I saw definitely didn't look like America. It looked, instead, like a predominantly elderly, white and prosperous slice of America -- with a disproportionate number of goofballs mixed in. Sorry, but true.

I turned the volume up, I admit, for the speeches by Fred Thompson and Joe Lieberman. Two greater cynics would be hard to find! Thompson's usual cornpone act went on seemingly forever. Nothing like a Gucci-heeled corporate lobbyist railing against the Washington Establishment and soiling the persona of Obama.

Special shame, of course, for Joe Lieberman who directly attacked his Democratic colleague Barack Obama. Then again, some of us have the luxury of saying we were never taken in by Holy Joe and refused to vote for him in 2000. Give me another opportunity and I would make the same decision.

OK, enough of that. Here's the real news on RNC Day Two: Obama has now opened a 6-9% lead in all major tracking polls and in some surveys has now crossed the 50% mark:

Rasmussen's tracking poll, which had the race for the White House essentially tied on August 28th now shows Obama up by 6 points, joining Gallup's daily tracking poll, in which Obama's expanded his lead over McCain to 8 points. Hotline's latest shows a 9-point spread, and CBS shows Obama up by 8. Real Clear Politics rolling average of recent polls shows Obama up by 6.4 points.

In the Gallup Poll, Obama now has the support of 50 percent of registered voters (to McCain's 42 percent), the first time he's hit that mark and his highest level of support to date.

In CNN's polling, we get an indication of how the selection of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin played into the bounce. In its last pre-convention poll, which didn't mention vice presidential candidates, McCain led Obama by 2 points (42-40). In the latest, which did mention the candidates' running mates, Obama/Biden are up by 3 percent over McCain/ Palin (48-45), a 5-point swing. According to CBS, 71 percent of Americans said they watched the Dems' convention, including 63 percent of Republicans. CNN notes, "the convention made people who watched more likely to vote for the Democratic ticket." By a 51-32 spread, registered voters said the convention made them more likely to vote Dem come November.

Say it ain't so, Joe.

Who told you, baby?

Exactly three days ago I predicted that Governor What's Her Name would spell doom for McCain.  I wrote:

So, Sarah, enjoy the media honeymoon – which I predict will crash about the same time Hurricane Gustav makes landfall.

Looks like I was within the half-hour margin of error. Greg Sargent has the most nitid round-up of Day One of Hurricane Sarah:

It's worth pondering the totality of what happened today, in a mere half day...

* The news that Palin once backed the Bridge to Nowhere went national.

* It emerged that Palin has links to the bizarro Alaska Independence Party, which harbors the goal of seceding from the union that McCain and Palin seek to lead.

* The news broke that as governor, Palin relied on an earmark system she now opposes. Taken along with the Bridge to Nowhere stuff, this threatens to undercut her reformist image, something that was key to her selection as McCain's Veep candidate.

* The news broke that Palin's 17-year-old daughter became pregnant out of wedlock at a time when the conservative base had finally started rallying behind McCain's candidacy.

* Barely moments after McCain advisers put out word that McCain had known of Bristol Palin's pregnancy, the Anchorage Daily News revealed that Palin's own spokesperson hadn't known about it only two days ago.

* A senior McCain adviser at the Republican convention was forced into the rather embarrassing position of arguing that McCain had known about the pregnancy "last week" -- without saying what day last week he knew about it.

* It came out that Republican lawyers are up in Alaska vetting Palin -- now, more than 72 hours after it was announced that she'd been picked.

* Palin lawyered up in relation to the trooper-gate probe in Alaska -- a move that ensures far more serious attention to the story from the major news orgs.

What else will come out today? After all, there are still six hours left until September 2nd...

Can't wait until tomorrow!

When the post-mortems are written on the now diseased McCain campaign and -- more generally-- on the demise of the Reagan Era, the three top contributing factors of death will be listed as Katrina, Sarah, and Gustav.

As I wrote at the time, the ebbing flood waters of New Orleans exactly three years ago where a grim, but rather lyrical symbol of the evaporation of the Reagan Era. All the national mythologies of the previous twenty years were breached and flushed when the 17th Street levee cracked and FEMA fumbled.

Since then, it's been only deepening waters for the conservative movement, and with rather perfect timing, comes the rise of one Barack Obama.

A principle-free John McCain did his best these past months to dredge up all the psycho-political hobgoblins of the past 40 years -- alternately suggesting that Obama was something akin to an uppity, elite, remote and ultimately dangerous, feckless tyro. McCain swaggered onto the stage, redolent of jock straps, locker rooms and jet fuel exhaust, reassuring us that in such troubled times only his dead-serious maturity and stability could see us sternly through the storm.

Just when he was on the brink of successfully selling that story, he was unfortunately overcome by his inner frivolity and he chose a laughable and affable nobody zealot from a three stop-light town to be his running mate. I think it was all pretty much over last Friday.

But now, to finish things off , come the vengeful ghosts of Katrina -- in the form of Hurricane Gustav-- madly howling right onto center stage at the St.Paul RNC. If the political campaigns refused to come to New Orleans -- as many had insisted -- than it seemed somewhat cosmically inevitable that New Orleans would come to the campaigns. Here she is.

Always the opportunist, McCain and what's-her-name from Alaska immediately flew to Mississippi for the usual sort of photo-op. As if McCain's presence on the Gulf is going to save even one life. But there's simply no way to positively spin this for the woeful Republicans -- except that some strategists' quiet prayers have been answered by diverting Bush and Cheney away from the convention stage.

That ain't enough, though. Whatever happens in New Orleans in the next 48 hours -- and let's hope it's as little as possible-- the cable news split screen coverage will be a 'round the clock reminder of the total and unmitigated failure of the entire Republican approach to non-government. Alas, this election should be about the Big Things, not what kind of Moose Pie or what kind of shotgun Miss Congeniality prefers.

This is about our future. About everything from the use of American military power to providing health care to rebuilding our national infrastructure. Ultimately, it's about the quality of the leadership we generate and choose.

Gustav has blown what was left of the Republican Revolution right off the Monday night tube and, most likely, right into the deep, dark sea.

There’s one big difference between Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin. The latter is a hockey mom. The former was a hockey puck. Not that Quayle’s inert condition ever really got in the way of his political fortunes.

I remember very clearly the night Quayle was named Veep. Via a crackling Grundig short-wave radio I heard the news while sitting on a Mexican vacation beach on a breezy, balmy night. I immediately turned to my wife and sagely remarked: “Poor, George Bush. He just lost the election.” Rim shot!

In the intervening two decades I hope to have sharpened my analytical skills. So with some greater degree of acquired confidence I will now say: “Poor John McCain. He just lost the election.”

There’s going to be a very brief bubble during which many will strain to take this stunt seriously but soon enough this is going to burst as loudly as one of those Colt M4’s that Palin posed with while visiting the troops in Kuwait. Palin’s going to get the snot beat out of her by Joe Biden, the press is literally going to feast on her podunk record as former mayor of a town of 9,000, her image as a “reformer” is going to be quickly supplanted by the reality of her shilling for oil and gas interests, and after a solid year of Bill and Hillary Clinton and now John McCain making “experience” a central campaign issue, both Palin and McCain are going to become laughing stocks.

So, Sarah, enjoy the media honeymoon – which I predict will crash about the same time Hurricane Gustav makes landfall.

Following Palin’s surprise selection, on the heels of her staged debut appearance Friday morning on national TV, flustered cable anchors scrambled for something positive and “balanced” to say about someone who was –rather obviously—an aberrant and absurd choice. MSNBC’S resident airhead, Mika Brezinski gushed how as a fellow Working Mom she was so, so impressed about how Palin went back to work just a few days after delivering her fifth child. That bottomless font of conventional wisdom, Andrea Mitchell babbled on about McCain’s choice being a possible game-changer, and how Palin could easily cut into that segment of disaffected female Hillary supporters who are looking for reasons to vote McCain.

I see it slightly differently. Game changer for sure. How about Game Over? Giving the nod to Palin is an absolute guarantee that Hillary’s die-hards will now turn away from -- not toward—McCain. These are Democratic women who feel victimized for their feminist positions and while they might have been tempted to close their eyes to McCain’s right-wing record and convince themselves that the Arizona Senator was in fact a moderate, non-threatening maverick., they are not about to support a younger version of Phyllis Schlafly. Palin is a fierce, strident anti-choice activist who plays directly to the bible-thumper wing of the GOP. When she’s not out defending the rights of zygotes, she's out stumping for Big Oil and for the NRA. This is gonna work with Hillary supporters?

When she appeared before the cameras Friday morn, I confess I had hardly recall who the hell she was. I sat and listened --sort of amazed-- to her painfully amateurish maiden performance and said to myself that she sorta sounded like a finalist in a beauty contest. Which is exactly what she turns out to be! Fantastic.

Barack Obama’s address before a crowd of 85,000 the night before Palin’s selection was so stunning that even Pat Buchanan – after declaring it the best campaign speech in modern history-- insisted on reading aloud his favorite passages to a national TV audience. Obama eloquently elevated the stakes of the race, boldly challenging John McCain on every front the Senator has opened up in the last few weeks: on experience, on judgment, on policy, on temperament, on fitness to be commander-in-chief, on the future course of America. The Democratic nominee threw down the gauntlet, making it crystal clear that from now till November 4^th, every opportunistic low-blow, every distortion, every nefarious attempt to open cultural and racial wedges would be met with full resistance. Anybody expected Obama to blithely windsurf through the shit storm coming his way better tune into a different channel.

Most importantly, Obama declared that given the sobering array of crises and challenges we now face, this is hardly the time to “make a big election about small things.” McCain has now gone out of his way to make the smallest of choices for his running mate. It’s a cute trick – one worth a day or two of media drooling. But the price he will pay will be enormous.

That’s good for the rest of us.

Easy to sum up:

The most impressive campaign speech from an American presidential candidate I can recall in my lifetime.

The money quote:"Enough...Eight years is enough."

The message to McCain: Bring it on, mofo.

What a mistake for the Democrats to have allowed Barack Obama to close out the DNC by addressing 85,000 people in the Invesco outdoor stadium.

Do the Dems have any idea whatsoever just how many people this has offended on so many different levels?

What an insult to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. who clearly would have preferred the other candidate -- the guy who voted  in the Senate against turning his birthday into a national holiday.

What an insult Obama's speech is to a rival candidate who couldn't draw that many people to a rally if he literally bussed them in, paid them and fed them (Reports say that McCain's team is scouring several states to piece together a crowd of 10,000 for his big Veep roll-out event Friday in Ohio).

What an insult to those who demand much greater experience in their presidential candidates. Like having been in drunk tank rehab, having skipped out on his National Guard hitch, having owned a failed baseball team, having  signed a couple of hundred death warrants, and having served as commander-in-chief of the glorious Texas Rangers (not the baseball team).

What an insult to those Americans who are offended by thoughtful even complex oratory and who are repulsed by the very notion of a black man becoming head of the Hah-vahd law review, let alone of the United States.

What an insult to those Americans who are disgusted by a presidential candidate who uses Big Words in his speech and who -- lamentably-- has demonstrated "nuance" in  his public musings.

What an insult to those who are nauseated by the sight of tens of thousands of Americans who are genuinely excited and inspired by their candidate.

In short, what a horrible, offensive, insulting spectacle.

John McCain -- and the six people around him-- must be feeling very confident tonight.

The only news worth reporting out of Day Three of the Democratic National Convention is that at 4:48 p.m. for the first time in American history, a black man was officially nominated to be President of the United States.

I think that's enough said and we need not belittle the moment by wasting any words on what Mr. or Mrs. Clinton said or did not say today.

On this same day that Barack Obama was nominated, my daughter visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp just out of Berlin. Between 1936 and 1945 some 100,000 people died in that camp merely because of their nationality or religion.

We've come a long way since then.

Update: Several bloggers have noted what an on-fire speech none other than John Kerry delivered before Bill Clinton spoke tonight. They're right. It is arguably the best speech ever delivered by Kerry and maybe the best given at this convention. But the networks were too busy talking to themselves to cut away to the speech. I offer it to you below. Listen to it.

Also, has anyone noticed what an unbelievably vacuous gasbag Tom Brokaw has become? My God, man. Do us a favor and please retire. I thought you did already. But guess I'm wrong. Hook!

Oh those poor, poor deluded PUMAS and other assorted and crazed Hillaryoids. Senator Clinton spends months and millions (which she still owes) during the primaries to artificially inflate their expectations about her winning the nomination -- which was already lost. Then she stokes them some more by attempting to lamely game the party over the Michigan and Florida non-elections. Then she sort of concedes, but also wryly winks at her furious and martyred legions as they trudge toward Denver and threaten to pull apart the whole show.

All this so that on Day Two of the DNC she can appear on the podium in prime times with a gigantic sledgehammer and mercilessly crush all of her loyal troops as if they were so many bugs!

She did it by "doing what she had to do" as they say in pundit speak. Hillary, I must admit, gave a rip-roaring barn-burner of a speech -- unequivocally, fervently, and repeatedly demanding that her supporters get obediently into line behind Barack Obama. Her loving husband, captured in a gallery of camera close-ups, seemed so overcome by her generosity of spirit that his middle name might as well been Hussein!
Hillary made a powerful argument aimed at any still-reluctant followers, scolding them that a presidenial election was about a lot more than just supporting her --or any other single individual-- but was instead about determining the future of a nation.
This was wonderful, unbridled Clinton cynicism, given that it was she who had made the campaign all about herself. She also omitted one other little niggling detail: the reason she had to cajole her supporters back into the Obama camp is because she so determinedly led them astray during five crucial months of this campaign season -- basically since early March when she had effectively lost the nomination.
In any case, Hillary had no other viable choice tonight. She and everyone around her knows that if she didn't go all out in her support, if she didn't personally suffocate even the rumor of discontent at the Convention, and if Obama were to lose in November, she would be regarded as an uber-spoiler. So much more the timely for her to choose the path of righteousness.

God Bless America. And, God Bless Hillary Clinton. Our Savior.

P.S. After I wrote this post I saw this fine piece by Dickerson. He makes an excellent point.

I admittedly had put in a long day Monday before settling down to watch the DNC '08 show but the sucker did cause me to nod off at least 3-4 times. Sorry.

There were a few high moments... like the great video of Teddy Kennedy's formidable yachting skills. And only a numbskull could remain unimpressed by the poise, intelligence and heart of Michelle Obama. One can only imagine what kind of amazing speech she could give if it weren't confined to the comic-book level of the convention.

And that's what it has been so far. At best, the whole thing comes off as a sort of a dreary campaign version of and Oscars telecast. You come away convinced that the core message of the Democratic Party is a rock-solid devotion to defend multi-million dollar broadcast production values.

As I write late Monday night, the "debate" over the DNC Day One has boiled down to whether or not the spectacle hit hard enough or if it was too soft. Should the Dems have come out swinging and used all this free TV time to excoriate Bush, McCain and the Republicans? Or did they show shrew wisdom by providing a reassuring, safe space for Michelle Obama to --as they say-- introduce herself to the American people and to humanize the image of her oh-so-risky and scary and perhaps un-American husband?

I don't have a firm answer to that one as it is difficult and painful for me to think in such absurd terms. Indeed, my overwhelming sense of this race at the moment is one of absurd despair. How, after more than 200 years of existence, has The Republic managed to degrade crucial political debate into such a swamp of baby-talk and mindlessness?

Hats off, for sure, to a shameless, morally decrepit John McCain who has skillfully succeeded --so far-- into turning this election into a referendum on Barack Obama's American-ness rather than a plebiscite it should be to boot out of office an incumbent party that has produced the most ruinous administration one can recall. Neither McCain not his handlers could pull this off by themselves. Nor is it just a case of a weak media.

Nope, folks, it's something much much more profound and depressing. The McCain campaign is merely capitaliziing on all of the backwardness, all of the superstition, all of the insularity, all of the ignorance and racism and plain simple-mindedness that infects the national body politic and permeates the culture. The McCain operatives are merely doing their job as well-paid political parasites and pimps on behalf of special interests who own a whole lot more than seven, or eight or is it nine houses.

In that rather perverted context, as I said above, I reserve judgment as to whether or not the Dems should've started punching back hard tonight. But whether they start pummeling Mr. McCain Wednesday night or the day after the RNC, they damn well better start. And soon.

As John Zogby warns, the clock is all of a sudden ticking very loudly.

As I wrote below, I am trying to take a break until Monday. It's a very hectic time as classes resume on Monday, my wife is in Chile dealing with an ailing mom and My Brilliant Daughter is heading for Moscow via Berlin (No she has not been hired as a military advisor to Putin) and I needed a break from blogging.

But...Just as Hillary now and then needs a national convention for cathartic purposes, I sometimes use the blog to share my trauma with you.

And so it it that I write this short note -- maybe just to make myself feel better.

But it's hard to describe to you the shock I'm feeling at this moment.

Yesterday afternoon I asked my staff to double-check how many homes my wife and I owned because, frankly in the whirl and twirl of late August hubub, I had lost count.

Turns out I had one. And the damn thing is mortgaged!

I could have sworn I had seven, or eight or maybe nine.  Maybe, it's a Senior Moment or something, but I just don't know why I was thinking that or --worse-- where I misplaced them.

While they were at it, I also asked staff to review my income as the last few years have been quite good for me. What a blow it was, then, to learn that I had fallen about $5 million short of what I had estimated to be about $5 million a year. Nor does my wife own that brewing empire that I swore was the source of the sixpack in the fridge.

The topper: I learned I don't even have a staff!

Until Monday. See u then.

The good folks at the Sunlight Foundation have started publishing The Party Blog, a running compilation of who's paying for what and whom at the Democratic and Republican Conventions. Please bookmark this blog immediately!

They're compiling some great stuff. Like, a party at the Denver DNC hosted by the biggest scumball of them all, the former Rep. Billy Tauzin who became a chief lobbyist for Big Pharma after ramming through Congress the Medicare "reform" bill which generates billions for drug companies. Here's some of the latest events to be listed by Sunlight:

• On Wednesday, August 27, a party called "Sharing Miracles," at the Denver Aquarium, hosted by Hon. Billy Tauzin, former member of Congress and President and CEO of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).
• Twin receptions, one at the Democratic Convention, on Tuesday, August 26, at the Ritz Carlton ballroom, the other at the Republican Convention, on Wednesday, September 3, at Carlson Hangar in the St. Paul Airport, called "A Toast to Travel, Hospitality and Real Estate Across America," with sponsors including Mariott, Starwood, TIA, IFA, Carlson, National Real Estate Organizations, American Hotel & Lodging Association, American Resort Development Association, Asian American Hotel Owners Association, Distilled Spirits Council, DLA Piper, NAREIT, National Business Travel Association, Printing Industries of America and the Travel Business Roundtable.
• A "Celebration of Free Speech," on September 2, at the Republican Convention, sponsored by the National Association of Broadcasters.
• AT&T is hosting more than a dozen parties at both conventions, most of them parties for different state delegations. The company is also underwriting both the Democratic and GOP Convention committees, and happens to be the #2 top donor to federal and candidates and parties since 1989, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. AT&T has spent more than $3 million on federal campaign contributions and lobbying combined in 2008 alone, 60% of which is directed to the GOP. It has also spent another $3.2 million on federal lobbying.
• Qwest's CEO, Ed Mueller, is hosting an event at the Denver Art Museum on Monday, August 25. The company is also giving the Democratic and GOP Convention host committees a total of some $12 million in direct and in-kind contributions. Qwest has given $682,000 to federal candidates and parties so far this election cycle, and spent $1.7 million on lobbying.
• A long list of financial service powerhouses are sponsoring a "financial literacy brunch" at the Democratic National Convention, including Allstate, AEGON, Bank of America, Capitol One, Charles Schwab, Edward Jones, Fidelity, Genworth, MasterCard, Mutual of Omaha, Nationwide, Principal Financial Group, State Farm, NASDAQ, US Bank, Visa, Wachovia and Wells Fargo. These companies are major campaign contributors and lobbying forces in Washington.

I do have a platinum American Express card but I don’t have a Democratic Convention Premier Package. So I don’t think I’ll be going to the DNC 2008 big bash in Denver next week.

The former costs me $300 a year and is well worth it. The latter, which is being furiously peddled among corporate big dogs, tells you everything that’s rotten with the American political system. And that includes the Democratic Party.

Premier Package donors get a comped hotel room at a Denver hotel, two credentials for the convention hall, two tickets to a party honoring the House Democratic leadership, two tickets to a VIP presidential election briefing election, two tickets to a congressional “late night” event, but only one ticket to a private party honoring that nice lady who fights for us regular folks 24/7, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House. Premier Package cost: a mere $155,000.

Sure, even without a Premier membership, I could easily get to Denver on my own nickel or on that of various news organizations. But for the first time in more than two decades I’m going to opt to watch a major party convention on TV and just plain stay away. Here’s my top three reasons for boycotting:

With twenty gazillion reporters and bloggers already enlisted I don’t think I’d have much to add.

Second, whatever news will come out of this stage-managed affair will be focused on the Great National Baby Boomer Pseudo-Feminist Cry Baby Me First Even Though I Lost Catharsis to be staged by Hillary Clinton and her supporters. No thanks.

But mostly, I’m staying away precisely because this year’s Democratic nominee is by far the most attractive since I started convention-going in the Reagan-Mondale era and, frankly, I don’t want to be reminded of what kind of fellow-Democrat company he keeps. Obama might be my candidate, but the Democrats are certainly not my party.

The liberal think tanks, the unions, the usual suspect progressives, are all going to be in a lathered frenzy of panels, presentations, talks and seminars foaming in and around the convention center, and convincing themselves they are now somehow driving the party. They might as well be scheduled for Sunday night on Mars.

The real power behind the Democrats are the nearly sixty corporations who are coughing up the bulk of the $55 million Denver tab, scooping up in the transaction much more than Premier Packages and martinis and shrimp with Speaker Nancy.

The most powerful economic and political forces in America are blatantly buying even more political access and influence. And the Democrats are only too happy to sell it. Giving unlimited bucks to so-called “convention host committees” is the Grand Canyon of campaign finance loopholes, with many donations not even having to be reported until a few days before the November election.

There’s insufficient space to parse through the entire list of DNC ’08 corporate sponsor. But next week, while you’re watching some Dem or another rail from the podium about the sinister influence of lobbyists and special interests, you might want to keep this mini-list of convention sponsors and just a few of the issues they’ve been lobbying on handy. With thanks to the Rocky Mountain News and the Center for Responsive Politics here’s just a smudge:

*ATT&T, Qwest, Comcast, Motorola: revisions in the 1996 Telecom Act, wireless, digital TV and broadband regulation, tax policy, pension reform, and FISA. AT&T was arguably among the primary beneficiaries of the bill providing immunity against prosecution for domestic spying, approved only with Democratic support. Denver-based Qwest, which has given at least $6 million in convention funding, has been at the center of massive corporate criminal scandal with former CEO Joe Nacchio (who was previously an exec for AT&T) sentenced exactly a year ago to six years in prison 19 and a $52 million fine on multiple felony counts of insider trading. No word yet if he gets paroled for a day or two to attend the Pelosi reception.

*Medtronic, Lilly, AstraZeneca, Merck, United Health Group: health care policy, Medicare, drug prices and drug importation policy, tax policy, pension reform, tort reform

*US Bank, Wells Fargo, State Farm, Allstate, Visa: consumer protection against credit card company abuse, bankruptcy policy, mortgage relief, tax policy, and financial institution bail outs.

Add to the list Lockheed Martin which wants more contracts for defense and for its border security installations, Coca-Cola which wants to water down regulation of junk food in schools, Xcel Energy and Ford who are very concerned about climate change (though in a different way than we are), Molson Coors that wants to loosen alcohol advertising regulation and wants to make sure that taxes remain regressive, and then there’s the Recording Industry Association of America—the forward-looking folks who brought you prosecution of kids using Napster.

One can argue that this is simply the way of the world and that the Republicans are even worse. The second part is true. Yet nowhere is it written that the Democrats are somehow forced or obligated to do business this way. Indeed, they choose this form of legalized bribery because they are, in fact, representatives and allies of their donors. It could be different if there were sufficient reason and will.

This week Barack Obama’s campaign crossed the record-smashing threshold of garnering donations from more than 2 million individuals. If each of those donors had been asked for a mere three bucks each additional to fund the convention, the Democrats could have astounded us all by banning corporate underwriting of the Denver show. But that would have meant the Dems would be accountable to a mass of small donors and not to a few dozen special interests. And that would hardly be the Democratic Party we know.

When I heard that Bill Stulla, known to us L.A. area boomers as TV's Engineer Bill, had died the other day at age 97 I promised myself that this weekend I would blog a fitting tribute to him.

Fortunately, the very talented critic Robert Lloyd has beaten me to it. And he's eloquently expressed why those of us who grew with up such characters wax so nostalgic for that era. Back in the 50's and well into the mid-60's as a matter of fact, even a massive market like Los Angeles had a number of local, home-grown personages on the air...something quite intimate and accessible and personal. Engineer Bill was only one of them. Add to the list, Tom Hatten's Popeye, John Rovick's Sheriff John, and --later-- the inimitable Soupy Sales. Says Lloyd:

Every city with its own television station had their counterparts, some Cowboy This or Captain That, famous within broadcasting range and completely unknown outside of it. On a national level there was "Captain Kangaroo" and eventually "Mr. Rogers," with their higher budgets and perhaps loftier ambitions, but they came from somewhere else. It was clear to me that Engineer Bill lived in my town, and not some imaginary Neighborhood, and that there was the real possibility that I could get him to read my name on the air, or even invite me onto his show, were I to do the necessary groundwork -– there were always a couple of live tykes on board for Stulla to play off. I was never going to do that groundwork -– you had to write a letter, at least -– but I saw him once, at a supermarket personal appearance.

Anyone who remembers Engineer Bill remembers Red Light/Green Light -- or Green Light/Red Light -- a play-along-at-home milk-drinking game that was his show's main gift to Southern California culture and parents. I have a clear image of myself participating in this bit of nutritional behavioral psychology -- though past the milk and the model trains, and the image of Bill himself in his stripey overalls and cap, it all begins to blur. He played cartoons -– the name of the program was "Engineer Bill's Cartoon Express" –- but everybody played cartoons.

There was nothing particularly brilliant about any of these shows or these performers, apart from the way they were available to their audience. Not to get all cracker-barrel about it, but the fact that we won't see their loose, modest like again doesn't strike me as progress. The loss is symptomatic of a greater loss: We have entered an age of remote consolidation, of absentee landlords, of the online marketplace that kills the corner store. (Perhaps it's time for a local media movement to mirror the local foods movement –- to frame it as the environmental issue it actually is.) The new matrix promises a "deeper" experience of its perfected products by throwing them at you from different angles and on different platforms. But the human touch gets lost.

Engineer Bill: Green light, dude! Here's a glass of non-fat milk hoisted high for you.

Friday I'll be guest-hosting Left, Right and Center on L.A.'s NPR flagship station KCRW 89.9 FM. I'll be chewing over the week's politics with Arianna Huffington and Tony Blankley.

You can catch the show streaming live at 2:30 p.m. or 7:00 p.m. PDT here on join in on the LRC blog here.

UPDATE: Here's a link to the the mp3 podcast of the show now posted online.

We surf fishermen like to think we know how to "read" the shore for holes that aggregate food and therefore fish. And when we get skunked, we are likely to say to each other something like "the only holes on this beach today were us."

Not today. The two biggest holes were on the air.

The always disgusting Rush Limbaugh was pontificating to his numb-skull audience on the John Edwards scandal by squeezing out this little gem:

"What could have John Edwards' motivations been to have the affair with Rielle Hunter, given his wife is smarter than he is and probably nagging him a lot about doing this, and he found somebody that did something with her mouth other than talk."

The there was this hole, some guy from the fraudulent Focus on the Family operation which squeezes a fortune out of millions of ignorant, scared and rather pathetic fundamentalists. Stuart Shephard, the web genius at FotF posted a video asking his Christian followers to pray for a torrential, biblical-scale rain storm next Thursday when Barack Obama accepts his nomination at an open-air stadium.

Now that's a pretty Christian and democratic sentiment, no? Even some muttonheads who tune in daily to FotF's fundamentalist rants took umbrage at this repulsive little show and the video had to be taken down.

Readers of this blog know very well that I don't grant the Right any monopoly on stupidity and crassness. But these two incidents, frankly, make me cringe at my fellow humans.

Don't you just love this story?

The leadership of The Los Angeles Times making up it's stated page count by adding in 350-page advertorial IKEA catalog inserts?

I suppose the good news is that we no longer have to worry about these folks' future. When and if the The Times goes under, these guys will have skills transferrable to the White House Office on WMD.

If we had to pick the single most obnoxious, repulsive, and simply loathsome individual to bob to the surface during Campaign '08 the winner would be Howard Wolfson -- hands down. Strand me on a desert island and let me choose as sole company either Wolfson or, say, the decaying corpse of Lee Atwater and I'm with Lee, baby.

Having served as Hillary's mouthpiece and hatchetman, he's now found his true calling as a shill for Fox News and has most recently burped up a grotesque little hairball: claiming that if John Edward's sexcapade had been revealed last Fall, then Hillary would have won Iowa and the nomination.

Bullpuckey. I was in Iowa at the time of the caucuses and I can tell you that everyone who was going to vote for Clinton voted for her. Edwards and Obama -- finishing second and first respectively-- merely split the anti-Clinton vote.

Indeed, if Edwards had been blown out of the water when The National Enquirer story first broke, there's no doubt in my mind that Obama's victory woud have been overwhelming in Iowa. He would have also swept New Hampshire and Nevada, effectively killing off Hillary's nomination in the first month of the primaries.

What a godsend that would have been. As we approach the Democratic Convention it's still All About Hillary, with all whining about how her supporters need a catharsis. Catharsis? How about a collective enema instead?

Back to Wolfson's asinine and clearly devious assertion... The head of of the University of Iowa's Hawkeye Poll calculates that he's got his math bass-ackwards. Read all about it on the fine Top of The Ticket blog at the L.A. Times.

Are we ever, ever going to be free of the horrible Clintons and their even more horrible coterie? At age 57, I have to assume, simply, not in my lifetime.

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Can't close out the day without commenting on John McCain's preposterous statement that "Today we are all Georgians."

What a skipload of faux pious bullpuckey (didn't I already use that word once before in this post?).

Nothing, absolutely nothing has been asked of the American people to support the people of Georgia, And nothing will, as we all know. Last time I looked, nothing was asked of the American people to fight Al-Qaeda nor to make any sacrifice to support a war in Iraq that we are told is the crucial battlefield of our time. That's an argument I clearly dissent from. But if you're the ones running this war, and you really believed in it, then you'd think you'd have the balls to ask a minimum sacrifice from your populace, like maybe coughing up a war tax so that the costs of the conflict aren't passed on to your own grandchildren.

Anyway, it's an insult to the suffering of the Georgian people for McCain to proclaim that somehow we are all carrying their burden. I don't know what you did last night after McCain's public blustering, but I played a poker tournament at the Commerce Casino. There was a guy across from me in seat 9 who had a thick Russian accent and while I did my patriotic best to bust him out, alas I failed. I pushed all-in with a set of 10's. He called me and sunk me with a full boat -- 10's full of 5's.

Damn Russians.