Christopher Hayes of The Nation:

But this kind of hits me where I live, since my dad is a community organizer, so lemme spell this out: the difference between a community organizer and a politician is that a community organizer can't tell anyone what to do. They have to listen. So they can't order books banned from a library to indulge their own religious sensibilities. They can't fire someone because they didn't follow orders to fire an estranged family member. They can't ram through a $15 million dollar sports complex that leaves their local town groaning underneath the debt. Unlike politicians, they don't have any power other than the power of people who want to see something changed.

Decades ago, before the ADA and a raft of other legislation, schools had essentially no requirements to provide decent education for special needs children. Then a movement of parents, engaging in - gasp - community organizing changed that. And they continue to fight day in and day out for educational equity for children like Sarah Palin's.

Too bad Sarah Palin just spit in their faces.

illdoc1:

Joe Klein of Time:

So here is what Giuliani and Palin didn't know: Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. They hired Obama to help those stunned people recover and get the services they needed--job training, help with housing and so forth--from the local government. It was, dare I say it, the Lord's work--the sort of mission Jesus preached (as opposed to the war in Iraq, which Palin described as a "task from God.")

This is what Palin and Giuliani were mocking. They were making fun of a young man's decision "to serve a cause greater than himself," in the words of John McCain. They were, therefore, mocking one of their candidate's favorite messages. Obama served the poor for three years, then went to law school. To describe this service--the first thing he did out of college, the sort of service every college-educated American should perform, in some form or other--as anything other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cynical in the extreme.

Roland Martin on CNN:

Steve Benen:

Watching the speeches, and the contortions Republicans have to go through to avoid mentioning the current president (and ostensible head of their party), it's like getting stuck in a "Twilight Zone" episode. The multi-millionaire former mayor of New York railed against "cosmopolitans." The multi-millionaire, Harvard-trained, former governor of Massachusetts railed against "eastern elites." Just 48 hours after the party's nominee insisted the convention would be less partisan, we're bombarded with the most ugly and nasty partisanship of any party gathering in years.

Jesse Taylor

Haha, “community organizer”. Barack Obama sold mixtapes out of the back of his Cadillac, that shifty bitch.

Ezra Klein:

...the speech was slave to the same priorities that governed her selection as vice president: It was aimed at wining the news cycle, not the campaign.

Oliver Willis:

...basically the GOP told the party the Reichstag was still burning...

Jesse Taylor again:

This is a speech to Michelle Malkin’s fucking comments section.

Sean at fivethirtyeight.com:

In the past several hours, Dems I’ve spoken with and who’ve flooded my inbox are energized. A woman friend and Democrat who had not worked for Obama’s campaign: “I am volunteering tomorrow.” An Obama organizer who was operating on fumes five months ago: “They are not getting away with this. 10 hours of call time tomorrow.” A shorter read of the mood: “Let’s get it on.” (...)

Fire up both bases equally, it’s not even close. Obama wins going away. In 2008, there are so many more Democrats, numerically.

Finally, Nate at fivethirtyeight.com:

I think some of you are underestimating the percentage of voters for whom Sarah Palin lacks the standing to make this critique of Barack Obama. To many voters, she is either entirely unknown, or is known as an US Weekly caricature of a woman who eats mooseburgers and has a pregnant daughter. To change someone's opinion, you have to do one of two things. Either, you have to be a trusted voice of authority, or you have to persuade them. Palin is not a trusted voice of authority -- she's much too new. But neither was this a persuasive speech. It was staccato, insistent, a little corny. It preached to the proverbial choir. It was also, as one of my commentors astutely noted, a speech written by a man and for a man, but delivered by a woman, which produces a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.

In exceedingly plain English, I think there's a pretty big who the fuck does she think she is? factor. And not just among us Daily Kos reading, merlot-drinking liberals. I think Palin's speech will be instinctively unappealing to other whole demographics of voters, including particuarly working-class men (among whom there may be a misogyny factor) and professional post-menopausal women. As another of my commentors put it:

Not only does Palin's inexperience trump Obama's... her "otherness" also trumps his. Where she comes from, the way she talks, her bio, lifestyle, and all the moose and caribou stuff... it makes her seem more exotic than Obama, who after all lives in the middle of America and has a life that people can readily understand.

Palin may be just as American as anybody, but she still seems to come from Somewhere Else.

This would be fine... even interesting and appealing... if she weren't attacking. But we have a deep, instinctive aversion to people who are part of us (even if we don't really like them much) being attacked by people we perceive as outsiders. Our instinct is to stiffen up, to protect.

This point may be a little bit overstated, but the fact remains that Barack Obama is extremely well known and Palin is largely unknown, and when that is the case, your perception of the known commodity is more likely to influence your perception of the unknown commodity than the other way around. If there's a certain Italian restaurant that you've been going to for years, and some stranger stops you on the street and tells you that they don't know how to cook their pasta, you're going to think that the stranger is a kook -- not that the restaurant is poor.

And not only is Barack Obama exceptionally well known, but perceptions of him are exceptionally well entrenched. In today's Rasmussen numbers, 63 percent of voters had either a very favorable or a very unfavorable perception of Obama. This is an extremely high figure.

Joe Sudbay nails how I felt last night:

This convention has such a creepy, disturbing feel to it. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just feels creepy. I really don't like having this group of people in my life - even if it's just on tv and in the news for now.

More substantially, I think Mark Schmitt is right:

...I did think that she was picked because she was the closest thing available, even if it required jumping her to the head of the class, to the next wave of the Republican Party -- the Sam's Club Republicans who could combine social conservatism with an appreciation for the real needs of vulnerable working families. There was a tiny bit of that -- the talk about the First Dude being a union member and the promise to be an advocate for families with special needs children. (This is my least favorite trait in modern conservatism -- the carving out of a sympathetic exception for the single family need or health problem that you have personal experience with. When a man did it -- Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon -- I called it "Miss America Conservatism," in the sense that each Republican has his or her little platform issue -- in Smith's case, mental health funding, because of his son's suicide -- that shows their soft side, and then they go back to the demeaning pageant of cutting taxes and slashing Medicaid. The lesson in having a child with special needs is not "we need more attention for kids with special needs," it should be, "life hands out lots of difficult circumstances and lots of families need different kinds of help, so we're all in it together.")

But at any rate, that was a minor note of the speech. The major note was one of fierce, sarcastic, unrelenting partisanship, amped up, as Josh Marshall notes, by following immediately in the wake of Rudy Giuliani's ugly attack, delivered with the passion of a man who for much of his mayoralty had been held to account solely by "community organizers."

And so Palin's was not the face of the future GOP. It was the face of the Republican Party that got so carried away with itself that it impeached Bill Clinton. It was the face of the self-righteous, nasty party of Tom DeLay, John Boehner, Bill Frist, and George Allen. It was the face of Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney, not the softer and superficially more accomodating tones of Ronald Reagan and, to be fair, the election-year George W. Bush.

This was exactly the face of the Republican Party that people have been voting against since at least 1998, when Democrats gained in congressional races amidst impeachment. It's certainly the face of the Republican Party that voters rejected in 2006, when they turned out Allen, Rick Santorum, DeLay, and others. And the fact of being a woman does not soften the partisan face; hard-partisan women like Linda Smith in Washington have had no more success outside of the reddest states than their male counterparts. (Which is why McCain had no pro-life Republican women with experience to select from.)

On top of the fact that Palin's retro approach has consistently failed, it also provides the perfect foil to Senator Obama's cross-partisan pitch. The challenge for Obama was to assimilate the Democratic nomination and a fundamentally progressive agenda with a cross-partisan, new politics tone and attitude. That required some cooperation from the Republicans -- he had to paint a picture in which they were partisans and he (and Biden, et al.) were able to get beyond that old partisanship. McCain, who had cornered the market on bipartisanship, made that move very, very difficult. So did Palin in her first presentation as a different kind of Republican last Friday and on Labor Day in Dayton. But the Palin we saw tonight is a perfect foil for Obama, allowing him to retain the cross-partisan, forward-looking vision, in contrast to the 90s-style, sarcastic partisanship exemplified in Governor Palin's speech.

Also, this:

Palin: "To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House."

Sarah Palin might have changed her mind on this one recently. However, a comment here notes that Palin actually slashed funding for schools for special needs kids by 62%. Budgets: FY 2007 (pre-Palin), 2008, 2009 (all pdfs).

For some reason I was getting no sound on Flash video. I killed just the Flash process in the Chrome Task Manager. Now Flash sound is working. This makes me happy.

Gruber:

Chrome is to web apps what preemptive multitasking is to an operating system.

Or, putting it too strongly, the difference between Safari and Chrome is like Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.

You can now (for the moment, at least) get replacement parts, including keyboards and trackpads, for your XO. If this sort of thing keeps up, I may actually fire up mine again... (via OLPC News)

Now, if only Chrome worked on Linux already...

I've decided that for my work at home dad lifestyle, a Wii Fit would be a good choice for off-season training. I know the things are hard to find, but I'm not in a huge rush, and what is driving me nuts is that I can't seem to just, you know, back-order one at retail and wait for it. I don't want a SMS telling me when to jump in the car and drive to Toy's 'R' Us and get in line. I just want to place an order and wait six weeks (or, of course, less). Any insights from my intelligent and well-informed readers?

What strikes me about Chrome is that it feels like a browser designed from the ground up in the post-"I keep a million tabs open all the time, some of which are more like applications than pages"-era (which is rather explicitly what it is, so perhaps that's what put the idea in my head...). Anyhow, very snappy switching between tabs, and the tabs on top UI has made me happily do something I've always hated, running the browser window maximized. Basically, doing this with Chrome puts the tabs right at the top of the screen, which, in accordance with Fitt's Law, makes them easier to hit.

Fred Clark:

Some unintentional candor, revealing the speaker's belief in an irreconcilable, binary opposition:

"I want to thank my fellow Republicans as we take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats and say, America we are with you and we are going to care about these people in their time of need."

-- Sen. John McCain, Republican presidential candidate, on plans to downscale the Republican National Convention as Hurricane Gustav approaches the Gulf Coast.

A variation of this also appears on a splash page at McCain's Web site:

"We will act as Americans and not as Republicans because America needs us now."

Two different hats. One of them, McCain says, is appropriate for caring "about people in their time of need." The other, McCain says, must be removed in order to do what America needs.

Two separate hats. And, McCain insists, they can't be worn at the same time.

Actually, that explains a lot.