A very good ad:

I like how Obama has moved the election to a referendum on change rather than a referendum on experience. Palin's pick only reinforces that meme...meaning that at the end of the day, voters will have to decide which of the two tickets offers a better chance for change. Needless to say, with ads like this, the Obama camp is making the choice easy.

Wow. I actually fell asleep during his speech, toward the end. It was written poorly and just didn't possess any energy. Worst of all, there were no specifics, just some bland platitudes towards the GOP plank.

At one part, he even railed against the Republican party for a minute. Why should people vote for a Republican to be responsible after the past 8 years? That was never made clear.

All in all, the fact they screwed up the background is the best summation of the entire event:

I'm surprised this hadn't occurred to me. But several readers have suggested that perhaps one of the tech geeks charged with setting up the audio/visual bells and whistles for the evening was tasked with getting pictures of Walter Reed Army Medical Center but goofed and got this instead. At first I thought, No, that's ridiculous. This is a major political party with big time professionals putting this together. Nothing is left to chance. I mean, is this the RNC or a scene out Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman? I still have a bit of a hard time believing they're quite that incompetent. But when you figure in what appears to be the utter lack of any logic for this school being behind McCain and the fact that it has 'Walter Reed' in its name, I'm really not sure you can discount this possibility.

Brilliant.

I hadn't seen any of the RNC before last night...it defied belief. Speaker after speaker got on to trash the Democratic ticket, claiming they'd "raise taxes" or "increase government" and completely ignoring the budget shenanigans the GOP has fostered for the past eight years. Next, Guiliani and Palin both attacked Obama for leaving college to become a community organizer (did they want him to leave Harvard Law School and immediately start racking in money at a big firm?!?) because that wasn't "real work". First the Republicans attack the government, and now they're attacking community organizers. Who's next? Traffic guards?

The oddest moment of the night came in Guiliani's speech, when he claimed that Obama's success story could happen "only in America" and the audience began to laugh. Maybe I just don't get it. Why would that be funny? Do they think America has too much opportunity?

Palin came across as a dyed-in-the-wool GOP knife fighter, eager to lie (Obama's tax plan actually cuts taxes for 85% of middle income Americans by over a grand....way more than the McCain plan, which costs $40 trillion but mostly deals with corporate taxes) and obfuscate (she actually fought for the bridge to nowhere....but now baldly claims she was against it!) to get elected. Ugh. Hopefully the media will call her out on her distortions (a few did last night.)

The contrast between the two conventions couldn't be starker: Obama's final speech, in which he said that we should never question the patriotism of those in the other party stands in clear opposition to every speech given last night, where GOP member after GOP member slammed the Democrats for being weak on economics or national security. It's like we're in bizarro-land, where President Gore has presided for the past eight years.

Sigh.