You remember Jennifer Granholm, don't you? She helped run Michigan aground as its governor and now hangs her hat at something called a Current TV.

Leftward!

Well she apparently gave one heck of a speech at the D&C Convention. Bless her heart. more...

Posted by: andy at 08:41 AM | Comments (200)
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Via Byron York, Clint Eastwood gives his first convention interview to....The Carmel Pine Cone (his hometown paper, which is very cool).

“I had three points I wanted to make,” Eastwood said. “That not everybody in Hollywood is on the left, that Obama has broken a lot of the promises he made when he took office, and that the people should feel free to get rid of any politician who’s not doing a good job. But I didn’t make up my mind exactly what I was going to say until I said it.”

EastwoodÂ’s appearance at the convention came after a personal request from Romney in August, soon after Eastwood endorsed the former Massachusetts governor at a fundraiser in Sun Valley, Idaho. But it was finalized only in the last week before the convention, along with an agreement to build suspense by keeping it secret until the last moment.

Meanwhile, RomneyÂ’s campaign aides asked for details about what Eastwood would say to the convention.

“They vett most of the people, but I told them, ‘You can’t do that with me, because I don’t know what I’m going to say,’” Eastwood recalled.

It's a great interview with a lot of interesting behind the scenes tidbits like his use of the stool as a prop was a spur of the moment decision as he was going on stage.

Eastwood's convention remarks were alternatively horrifying and thrilling. On balance it was clearly a positive. My only problem with it was it was the wrong night. If it had been night one, it would have set a great tone.

The big take away...a reminder of how ephemeral these things are. Eastwood was the talk to the political world until the Democrats started their convention. Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton were the talk of the campaign until the jobs numbers came out to day.

We're less than 2 months away from election day and a lot of things will pop up and disappear. The only constants are a lousy economy and the fact that Obama is a SCOAMF.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:47 AM | Comments (184)
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I have an insight into Chris Matthews.

Hat tip to Dave S., who did that Matthews parody last week, predicting, hilariously, Matthews' reaction to Clint Eastwood:

You know what strikes me? You got this guy, Clint Eastwood, he gets up there and he just looks angry. He looks like an angry, old, white man. And he's speaking to a group of angry, old, white men. So it plays well in the house, but this guy is detached from the pain of those that are left out.

I start to watch this guy, the scowl on his face, and it occurs to me that his role in Gran Torino was more of a biography than anything.

Perfect. And this set my mind to considering Chris Matthews', for lack of a better term, "style."

Chris Matthews realizes that a knock on liberal men is that they are effete and kind of effeminate. So I think he's made the conscious decision to overcompensate, by playing up a near-caricature of the Regular Red-Blooded Blue-Collar Guy Who Throws Back a Gin & Tonic or Nine At the Local Irish Pub.

But I say this is a caricature, because I'm pretty sure Chris Matthews' list of blue collar friends begins at his doorman and ends at his Artisan Tea Barista. Because his idea of "being blue collar" is to deliberate putting things into terms several degrees cruder and more juvenile than necessary.

He definitely doesn't want you to think he's an egghead or refined. Mission accomplished -- I don't. But then, does everything have to be this crude level of playground machismo? Rewind the tape from that statement in a previous post:

He – the most powerful statement tonight he made is, I am the President. I am the President, and you're not, and I've had to do the tough things of leading this country, and you haven't, and you don't have a clue about foreign policy. It's all new to you, and you think all we have to do is take two tax cuts to solve our common cold because you don't have a clue as to how to solve this country's challenges. It was a profound statement of, I've got the best position in this country and in this race, because I am doing the job and you're just twiddling your fingers, thinking about what it might be like to be President. And that is huge...

It's all this crude parody of what Bubba -- or not Bubba, an urban Irish Bubba, a Paddy -- down at the bar is thinking. Or what Matthews thinks he's thinking. Which is insulting to Bubba, or Paddy.

His idea of "blue collar" is this never-ending stream of loud, drunken beer-swilled machismo; all gin-fueled pissing match, dick waggling bluster.

And it sounds really false from Chris Matthews (except for the gin-fueled part). Matthews, despite attempting to carve out a niche for himself as a Real Regular-Joe Who Also Likes Barack Obama a Whole Heck of a Lot, is, let's be honest, a soft chubby butterball who would most likely shit himself if an actual Real Man chinned up to him.

But this is what he does, day in, day out. It's all this punk mouth. Blue collar = punk mouth, in his mind.

You know, if you're R. Lee Ermey, I can accept this kind of talk. (Then again, I bet old Gunny is confident enough in his masculinity that he speaks less crudely than this.)

But if you're a soft, fat butterball of the exact effete urban pinky-out metrosexual type you're trying to define yourself against, then it all sounds pretty stupid. It sounds like an act, and it is an act, and the act is tired.

I think Chris Matthews is very similar to the Maureen Dowd in this, in as much as Chris Matthews tries to channel, I don't know, the mindthoughts of some macho masculine male man he once admired in West Side Story, Maureen Dowd's schtick is to channel, even in her advancing age, the snotty, bitchy eighth-grade Mean Girl she probably once was.

And that act is getting even cuter every day closer she gets to 60, let me tell you.

Matthews is what, 60? 63? 66? I don't know. Too old for this act, anyway.

For both of them: It's time to put away childish things. Let's start using our lower registers here. Let's start using our Adult Voices. Let's stop playing the punk and the bitch and try competing on the adult field of play.

Let's drop the whole schtick of pretending to be dumber and cruder than you both really are, because neither of you is terribly smart or elevated to begin with, so you haven't much margin for error here.

If you want to test my theory, try taking a very simple observation -- very obvious, very dumb -- but then do it Chris Matthews style, adding a lot of pointless dick-waggling bluster and unnecessary explication to it. Like, making it more difficult to understand with your unnecessarily convoluted analogy.

Like let's say you want to say Obama's got a confident, but easy, manner that appeals to many women. Simple enough, right? Here's that dumb observation, Matthews-fied:

It's like he's just this guy, right? And he knows who he is. And he's got a little swagger to him, a little Mick Jagger in the jimmy-leg, but not so much that you notice.

But your gal notices.

And this guy, right, he notices your gal, too, and that's a problem for you, because this guy's been around.

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

And that's how Obama wins Ohio.

It's this torrent of retarded gutter nonsense all to illustrate a point that hardly admitted of any additional clarification in the first place. It's like his idea of a real journalist is Bob Guccione.

Try it and tell me I'm wrong.

Posted by: Ace at 06:58 AM | Comments (287)
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Mitt Romney helpfully runs down all the pundits running down Obomba's gruesomely bad speech.

Even Ezra Klein noticed Obomba entirely avoided the jobs crisis.

Noonan:

Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.

It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.

I think she's spot on with that "which he considers writerly." This was one of the many problems I pegged with the speech: A good speech, like good makeup, seems natural. Like you're just talking. So the craft of it becomes invisible. If the craft -- or in this case, the contrivance-- becomes visible, then you're aware you're the target of a manipulation, and your bullshit repellant kicks on and you resist it.

Now Clinton wrote the hell out of his speech, but wrote it so it seemed like it hadn't been written.

Obama grabs at poetry -- he fancies himself a rara avis, you know -- but he's a bad writer. It's one of his many bad talents. Remember, he wrote of apes crunching figs in grottoes.

Wolf Blitzer: Gee, I was told to expect more specifics.

Now, I used the words "brazenly empty." Krauthammer pretty much nails it here ( video at the link).

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I was stunned. This is a man who gave one of the great speeches of our time in 2004, and he gave one of the emptiest speeches I have ever heard on a national stage. Yes, it had cadence, and yes, there were deceptions in it, but that is not what is so striking about it. There was nothing in it. This is a man who believes that government can and should do a lot. There is nothing in here that tells us how he's going to go from today to tomorrow. For any of the so called goals and what government is going to do, what is he going to enact?

At least Romney had a five point plan. What we heard from Obama was a vision. And he pulls numbers out of a hat. 100,000 new math and science teachers. 600,000 more people working in natural gas. Two million more trainees, and he doesn't say how we get from A to B. It's a vision. I have a vision of an America where there is no disease and everybody has a private airplane, but unless I tell you how we get there, IÂ’ve said nothing. And what is so surprising, is that - all he had left - he can't speak about his record on the economy, and it's not a good one. As we heard, he didn't speak about achievements, the one that's liberals like, ObamaCare, stimulus and etcÂ… they're unpopular.

So, at least he would talk about the future, what he's going to to. There was nothing there. I’m amazed that he was -- it was like this is a guy who is the A student in the class turning in a paper clearly a C, and the teacher is astonished and says, “How could you do this? Why did you mail it in?” I felt the Biden speech was infinitely better, because it was empathic and carried a message, but the Obama speech, I thought was flat and had no content in it. Otherwise, I loved it, really…

But you know who loved it...? Of course you do. Now, MSNBC got the Word of God that apparently Obama's running as a Foreign Policy President now, and that they're to talk up Afghanistan constantly.

Which they dutifully did. This was the first time they mentioned Afghanistan since December 2008, and baby, did they make up for lost time.

After pretending they liked it -- and making excuses about why people might not like it more (that darned cynicism getting to people!) -- they stopped talking about it after about 20 minutes and just started talking about Romney. And specifically talking and talking and talking about why Romney said nothing about Afghanistan (something Obama almost never talks about, but he chose to discuss it in his speech, so now that's what we all have to discuss, I guess).

So, they stopped talking about it. It was a distasteful subject, ash in their mouths. Even Lawrence O'Donnell conceded, understatedly, it was not among Obama's better speeches.

But Maddow, and especially Chris Matthews, just loved it!

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I think tonight he did it again, didn't he? (crowd cheers and applauds) But more than that, the profound thing he accomplished tonight - the President - was to turn the whole table on those who thought that the incumbency would be a problem, and the challenger would have it easy.
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He – the most powerful statement tonight he made is, I am the President. (crowd cheers and applauds) I am the President, and you're not, and I've had to do the tough things of leading this country, and you haven't, and you don't have a clue about foreign policy. It's all new to you, and you think all we have to do is take two tax cuts to solve our common cold because you don't have a clue as to how to solve this country's challenges. It was a profound statement of, I've got the best position in this country and in this race, because I am doing the job and you're just twiddling your fingers, thinking about what it might be like to be President. And that is huge, because we all thought the problem was defending the way things are, and he's made the opponents defend the fact they don't know what's going on, and that's the big development in that speech. What a home run that was. (crowd cheers and applauds)

Chris Matthews is praising something external to the speech-- Obama's an incumbent. Yes, we know, Chris. Your choice of discussing this external fact -- which has been true now for over 3 1/2 years -- demonstrates your aversion to discussing the night's actual news, to wit, Obama bombed.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 05:40 AM | Comments (393)
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Awful.

Employment growth remained weak in August, with just 96,000 new positions created but the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1 percent, according to a report that raises the possibility of more Federal Reserve easing.

The decline in the jobless rate came primarily because the labor force participation rate fell to 63.5 percent, its worst level in more than 30 years.

The press may try to spin this, but it's bad and may explain why Obama looked flat and uninspired last night.

Update - Today's must-read: "The awful, awful August jobs report." To me, this makes the Democratic convention not just bad, but infuriating. This many Americans are suffering and they put Sandra Fluke on a stage to talk about her need for free birth control? Insulting.

Posted by: Slublog at 04:52 AM | Comments (277)
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Happy Friday.

The best thing I can think of to say about Obama's speech is that-- well, actually how 'bout Clinton's speech? That was really something, eh?

But no, Obama's speech sucked. Guy Benson has recap:

He essentially urged voters to "stay the course," even as a large majority of voters believe our current course is badly awry. He served up a series of warmed-over promises, even as scores of already-issued ones lie unfulfilled. We were told he'd discuss entitlement reform with some specificity. He did not. He took a few shots at Republicans, but most of those seemed dialed back. He battled against the same straw-men he's been knocking down for years, to little effect.

Click over for Guy's whole thing.

Prince Harry is back in Afghanistan and instead of trying to hide it (a strategy that failed last time) the Ministry of Defence wants it in the papers: "Given the prince's proclivity for buffoonish behaviour, the military knows that publicising his deployment is a potentially risky strategy."

Now that the conventions are over, Romney is unleashing the campaign cash. Today he's starting to "carpet bomb" the airwaves in eight swing states. You can see all the ads listed here. There's three or four different permutations. They're okay.

Amazon is releasing a whole new line of Kindle products. If you're looking for a good ereader or a middle-of-the-road tablet, take a look. (But do us a favor if you buy one and click through the Amazon box in the upper right of the mainpage.) more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (338)
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Michelle Obama Wants You to Skip a Meal

No not so you'll lose weight you fatass - but so that you can give the money to the Obama campaign that you would have spent feeding your family with that evil, fattening crap you call food.

Ann Althouse got an email from First Lady Michelle Obama today, suggesting families give up a meal and donate that money to her husband's reelection campaign.

That's a lot of gall, coming from a woman who had a $4,500 designer dress custom made for last night's short talk, and who has been on 18 vacations costing a million dollars or more to taxpayers since waltzing into the White House.

And don't forget the $540 tennis shoes. Or some of her previous hits:

"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."

And that someone else is Barack Obama. And the pie is yours.

"For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country," she told a Milwaukee crowd today, "because it feels like hope is making a comeback."

"Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices; we are going to have to change our conversation; we're going to have to change our traditions, our history; we're going to have to move into a different place as a nation."

"The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know. "

"For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction."

Now they're just hungry for Obama's campaign.

"Together, we can help make sure that every family that walks into a restaurant can make an easy, healthy choice."

Which is having an un-meal for the One.

"We're going to have to make sacrifices, we're going to have to change our conversation, we're going to have to change our traditions, our history and we're going to have to move to a different place."

"He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed. "

"America is just downright mean."

Seriously when Michelle Antoinette is gone you're gonna miss all her comedic stylings. They're gold, Jerry! Gold!

Posted by: Maetenloch at 07:37 PM | Comments (691)
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"The Comedian" thanks to @slublog.

Dirty Debbie Yawns At Obama: Can't say I blame her.

Posted by: Ace at 06:08 PM | Comments (1394)
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Do you have any idea of the political risks Obama undertook by agreeing with his advisers to pursue a longstanding major foreign policy imperative of the country?

Posted by: Ace at 05:02 PM | Comments (710)
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Gabby Giffords just led the auditorium in the Pledge of Allegiance, which seems exploitative to me. I know it's partly a tribute to her, but it's also a nasty attempt to remind people of the non-fact relentlessly pushed by the media and the Democrats (but I repeat myself), that her shooter was a Republican Radical inspired by Tea Party messaging.*

Now Caroline Kennedy, who has a frantic career of Doing Nothing, is lecturing people who work for a living. Oh, she's talking about 40 states passing laws to "limit access to women's reproductive health services," by which she means abortion, of course.

40 states is a lot of states. Not all 57, but it does seem to indicate that this isn't really a winning issue for the Democrats.

Not sure what's going on with this. They really seem to be doubling down on it. I suppose it's about turning out single women.

I guess everything in this convention is about turning out Obama's Client Groups.

* Adding to my suspicions is that Caroline Kennedy, whose father was also not shot by a rightwing radical, was the next speaker.

Dog whistle? Oh yes.

Schedule: From 8 PM on:

8:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Gabby Gifford's non-surprise Pledge of Alegiance
Caroline Kennedy
The Honorable Xavier Becerra
The Honorable Jennifer Granholm
Eva Longoria
The Honorable Brian Schweitzer
The Honorable Charlie Crist, Jr.
The Honorable John Kerry

9:00 - 10:00

Video: Veterans

Admiral John B. Nathman
Angie Flores

Dr. Jill Biden

Vice President Joe Biden Video
The Honorable Joe Biden

10:00 PM – 11:00 PM (LOCAL)

Video and Remarks
The Honorable Dick Durbin

President Barack Obama Video

Celebration

Holy crap, that's awful.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to live-comment this. It's very easy to say, but... Good Lord.

Posted by: Ace at 04:02 PM | Comments (850)
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