I’ll be on vacation this next week, so no posts for the while.
Some thoughts about the last night of the DNC…
Best moment of the evening by far was seeing the stewed anger on Tom Finneran’s face as Tom Oliphant turned to him and offhandedly said (I paraphrase), “Oh, you probably know what it’s like to be an accomplished legislator who’s unable to reach the executive level.” And […]
ED! MARKEY! CAN’T! STOP! SHOUTING!
Is he too nervous or tone deaf?
Best line of the night so far, from Chet:
WGBH was worried that all of its viewers were going to be inside the convention.
Pundit after pundit keeps on fretting about the 55 minutes projected for Kerry’s speech. I’m fretting, too.
I should have checked a little before saying that Lieberman’s not participating in the DNC. Not only has he been in town since at least Sunday, he’s on the roster for tonight’s speakers. Scratch what I said before.
I have a question of how these conventions are produced. What, specifically, is behind the annoying convention of overdetermined cutaway and reactions shots? You know, the tearful elderly black woman at John Edward’s mention of the civil rights movement, or the buzz-cut military man at the mention of fighting soldiers. It’s what’s what made the […]
Lest the reader think I’ve gotten too starry-eyed over the speakers at the DNC so far, let me say that I agree wholeheartedly with William Saletan’s gripes about Obama’s speech:
Two things about the speech trouble me….One is the Democratic Party’s exploitation of hostility to free trade. Obama, like other speakers at this convention, complains about […]
An item in Wonkette grabbed my attention:
It seems that with the Democrats in [Boston] the only people “famous for Washington” left in town are either Republicans or their spawn. In this edition of Wonk’d, after the jump, are your sightings of political animals from both Boston and Washington, including The Bush Twins, Joe and Hadassah, […]
Thanks to my friend David, I was able to secure a ticket for last night’s convention proceedings. As you can tell from the picture, the bleacher seats aren’t the closest in the house (how do people follow a sporting event from that high up?), so no hobnobbing went on, just watching and taking in the […]
Across town, Lindsay at Majikthise has a post making the astute point that the obsessive press coverage of bloggers at the convention stems from the affront to the professionalization of journalism:
Journalists see themselves as professionals. Self-regulation is one of the distinctive features of a profession. Just as doctors reserve the right to decide who can […]
The standard retort you get from Log Cabinites is “Well, Kerry’s no better than Bush, he’s against gay marriage, too.” But do people really believe that? Whether one is for gay rights or not, is there not broad awareness that the Democratic party is on the side of them — however much they have to […]
Did Al Gore really just say he was going to speak about John Kerry as a person and then proceed to rattle off a bunch of K-E campaign talking points?! Either the two didn’t know each other very well in the Senate, or the Kerry handlers have massaged his speech to death. He’s not as […]
Mayor “Mumbles” Menino just gave the opening address - tanned, slimfasted and with a quality haircut. Clearly the man has no possibility for national office, given his patent lack of oratory skill, but there’s something touching about his speech - you just know that beneath the boilerplate there’s a sincerity and an embattled optimism that’s […]
I’d offhandedly mentioned a couple of posts back that there’s no real news at this convention and it was up to bloggers and the more established media to find the story. Boston2004 isn’t nominating a candidate, nor even introducing a vice-presidential running mate. Dan Kennedy is hardly alone in predicting the party convention’s near […]
I just noticed a new feature on Friendster that lists on each profile ten top books in one’s network of friends. They don’t detail the methodology, but I assume they just count Favorite Books of profiles within three degrees of separation. So imagine my surprise when the top books of my network came out as […]