Here’s a good one:

Analysts also were wondering how Palin, who made a point of mentioning Friday that she is commander of the Alaska National Guard as governor…

I’m sure Alaska’s National Guard is ready to defend against any attacks from… um… the polar bears on the ice cap.

And they could so TOTALLY take out the Yukon, thanks to Palin’s awesome leadership.

Puh-leeze. What deserves mocking is that anyone would actually say “well, I lead the state National Guard” as some kind of qualification for potentially being the President.

Biden is going to clean her clock at the debate.

I don’t know why I didn’t post on this here- just flat out forgot, I guess. I write in too many places and have always meant to copy most of them here, but can never seem to remember.

Anyway, I’ve been saying that McCain would pick a woman for his VP nominee, and I was right. He did.

It’s really his only chance- that he can snag enough of the women who didn’t really care about the issues and just wanted to see a female President, and now they’re angry that Obama won. That’s the GOP’s target demographic with the choice of Palin.

Oh, it’s being painted as a bold, “maverick” choice (God, how I hate that word). Blarg. It’s not bold at all; she’s popular, pretty, and marches right in line with the neocons and religious right.

Bold would have been a prochoice woman. Bold would have been a BLACK woman (fat chance of that).

But yeah, I’m bragging here, and yeah, I called it. Nyah nyah nyah.

As I was pretty harsh on Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, I figure it’s only fair that I talk about what I thought of the speech she gave tonight (well, yesterday night, since I’m writing this after midnight after working a later swing shift) at the Democratic National Convention.

Pretty good! I don’t think it was a GREAT speech, but I do think she came pretty close. It was certainly far, FAR above the concession speech; and it was better than the speech she gave endorsing Obama, which was okay but had one big section in it that I hated.

What was this speech missing? Well, I think she could have illuminated the fact that her supporters- if they really believe in the causes she was running on- not only should vote for Obama, but actively campaign FOR him and support him as strongly as they supported her.

The thing is… she’s not a terrific speaker. She’s good, but she’s not great. (She was certainly better than Mark Warner, who had the keynote speech… and just wasn’t that good.) For example, she could have very effectively ran through this part differently (Clinton’s original text in normal print, my addition in boldface):

I ran for president to renew the promise of America. To rebuild the middle class and sustain the American Dream, to provide the opportunity to work hard and have that work rewarded, to save for college, a home and retirement, to afford the gas and groceries and still have a little left over each month. If you agree with those goals, our choice is clear: Barack Obama!

To promote a clean energy economy that will create millions of green collar jobs. If you agree with that, you must support Barack Obama!

To create a health care system that is universal, high quality, and affordable so that parents no longer have to choose between care for themselves or their children or be stuck in dead end jobs simply to keep their insurance. To work for this, we must elect Barack Obama!

To create a world class education system and make college affordable again. One candidate has a deep appreciation for making college attainable without inside connections, and that candidate is Barack Obama!

To fight for an America defined by deep and meaningful equality – from civil rights to labor rights, from women’s rights to gay rights, from ending discrimination to promoting unionization to providing help for the most important job there is: caring for our families. To help every child live up to his or her God-given potential. Again, we see a totally clear choice- Barack Obama!

To make America once again a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws. Our candidate is the son of an immigrant, Barack Obama!

To bring fiscal sanity back to Washington and make our government an instrument of the public good, not of private plunder. There’s a clear record in favor of this, and it belongs to Barack Obama!

To restore America’s standing in the world, to end the war in Iraq, bring our troops home and honor their service by caring for our veterans. One candidate supports our troops being in Iraq for a hundred years… (pause for boos) and one candidate wants to get our brave troops home soon, safe and sound, and that candidate is Barack Obama!

And to join with our allies to confront our shared challenges, from poverty and genocide to terrorism and global warming. One candidate draw crowds of hundreds of thousands when he goes to visit foreign lands and can work with our allies effectively, and that candidate is Barack Obama!

Most of all, I ran to stand up for all those who have been invisible to their government for eight long years. The man who understands this and who has already worked hard during his lifetime, for communities and the forgotten, is Barack Obama!

Those are the reasons I ran for president. Those are the reasons I support Barack Obama. And those are the reasons you should too.

The call-and-response is a great way to draw your listeners into the speech, because even as they see the inevitable response, they cannot help but go along with you. By the end of this section, she would have made it totally clear that between McCain and Obama, there is (for those who believed in her) only one choice- Barack Obama!

Now, it might have been a bit of overkill to have done it quite the way I wrote it, but I don’t think so. I think, given the crowd’s appreciation for Clinton’s work in each and every one of those areas, they would have been enthusiastic for her mentioning the causes that SHE believed in… and then the Obama fans in the crowd would also be drawn into each paragraph.

Of course, these speeches are as much for the people at home as they are for the people in the hall… but the TV viewer can’t help but notice how the people in the hall are responding. That’s why writing this kind of speech is tricky; you have to cater to both audiences.

Clinton (and her speechwriters) did manage to make the point with the next paragraph in her speech, though:

I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?

In my opinion, this was (by far) the best part of the entire speech. It reminds the listeners who are fire-breathing Clinton supporters that it’s not about her, it’s about the causes that motivate her AND them.

The closing section of the speech, which was heavy on the women-overcoming-the-powers-that-be theme, should also have tied in the struggle for civil rights for blacks. Not much more was needed, but another paragraph or two linking the struggles and pointing out how they were the right thing to do would have been awesome.

All in all, though, it was a pretty good speech. Of course, like any Hillary speech, it was a bit overheavy on the “I Me Mine” stuff, but she IS a Clinton, after all. The big difference between her and Bill Clinton is that she never really learned the trick of how to be the central figure without seeming like you’re desperate to be the central figure.

I heard from a friend who lives in Beijing. She said one of the nicest things about having the Olympics in town was the vastly improved air quality- now it’s only “quite dirty” by international standards, instead of “outright horrible”.

Here’s an interesting article from Bloomberg about the air pollution. The gist of it is that China’s economy will actually show the effects of the measures they took to clean up the air for the Olympics (and that they’re continuing through the paraOlympics for the next two weeks) because so much of the area immediately in and around Beijing has big factories in it.

China, the world’s No. 4 economy, may have lost as much as 3 percent of its estimated 4 trillion-yuan ($585.3 billion) gross domestic product by shutting down factories in Beijing and surrounding areas for two months…

…The affected regions generate about 26 percent of China’s economic output, so the world’s fastest-growing major economy will slow during the next two months, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said in an Aug. 8 report.

That’s really pretty amazing, when you think about it. And it perfectly illustrates the point that a lot of global warming naysayers have- that making the changes needed to clean up the climate will definitely affect the bottom line.

Of course, the real question is whether or not we can afford to do otherwise.

Meanwhile, in Beijing, once the paraOlympics are over… it’ll be back to business as usual.