smorg

First impressions:

* Palin was meant to be a spokesperson. She’s folksy and has the same scary charm Reagan had. That being said, the winks and cutesy lieele head tilts were over the top and clear pandering.

* Biden put the hockey mom myth to bed by talking about being a single dad who lost a wife and daughter, then choking up.

* When the fact check is done tomorrow, the confidence her delivery had is going to dissolve. FactCheck is up and running.

* Biden knows foreign policy better than anyone on either ticket.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/110/senate/vote-missers/

Good thing he made it back to the Hill to solve this crisis! Hopefully they’ll all recognize him.

Poor Joe Biden. He just can’t make his big brain cooperate with his big mouth.
:)

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, “look, here’s what happened.”

Jesse Walker of Reason expounds upon this particular thought:

And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, “Who is that guy? What happened to President Hoover?”

Sigh.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26593948/

“I’m prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at the moment of conception. But that is my judgment,” Biden said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “For me to impose that judgment on everyone else who is equally and maybe even more devout than I am seems to me is inappropriate in a pluralistic society.”

Meanwhile Obama says he was too flippant in answering that the decision as to determine when conception begins was ‘above my paygrade’:

“And so, all I meant to communicate was that I don’t presume to be able to answer these kinds of theological questions,” he said in an interview broadcast Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12988.html

John McCain today announced a running mate who he met only six months ago and who he spoke with just once on the phone about the position before offering it in person earlier this week.

McCain’s first encounter with Sarah Palin came at a Washington meeting of the National Governor’s Association in February, according to a campaign-provided reconstruction of how the little-known Alaska governor was thrust into the national spotlight. The two discussed the position by phone on Sunday before McCain invited her and her husband to Arizona to formally make the offer.

Rolling Stone, 2004

“I was in the Oval Office the other day, and the President asked me what I would do about resignations. I said, ‘Look, Mr. President, would I keep Rumsfeld? Absolutely not.’ And I turned to Vice President Cheney, who was there, and I said, ‘Mr. Vice President, I wouldn’t keep you if it weren’t constitutionally required.’

“I turned back to the President and said, ‘Mr. President, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are bright guys, really patriotic, but they’ve been dead wrong on every major piece of advice they’ve given you. That’s why I’d get rid of them, Mr. President—not just Abu Ghraib.’ They said nothing.