Dickerson doesn’t want Gustav to be political. His suggestion:
…here’s my idea: McCain and Obama should create a joint ad calling for donations and prayers to those affected by Gustav, and run those in place of the ads already scheduled. After all, attack ads—and attack ads in response to attack ads—make it onto the air in matter of hours. So there’s no doubt the McCain and Obama campaigns could do this if they wanted to.
Yglesias is at the Republican convention. His status report:
Politically problematic speech by unpopular incumbent president = canceled. Parties = not canceled.
The protests are also still on, and getting ugly.
"Can we conservatives please stop kidding ourselves about Barack Obama’s "qualifications"? Yes, if I had been a Democratic donor back in 2006, I’d sure worry about whether Barack Obama had what it took to be president. That was before he took on the toughest political operation in America, before he beat Bill and Hillary Clinton, before he won 18 million primary votes.
Obama’s nomination was not handed to him. He fought hard for it and won against the odds. "Qualifications" predict achievement. Once you have achieved, it doesn’t matter what your qualifications are. Who cares whether the guy who built a big company from nothing didn’t have much of a resume when he started? But if you are applying to run a big company built by somebody else, the resume matters …
The worst mistake in any fight is to under-estimate your opponent’s abilities. Look what happened to the people who under-estimated Reagan. If conservatives are to have any hope in the coming weeks, we should wake up to the fact that we face in Barack Obama a formidable man, who appeals to something important and deep in the American electorate. He’s not a superman, he has vulnerabilities, he can be beaten. But he won’t be beaten until we who are trying to beat him understand why and how he has come so far,"- David Frum, NRO.
Ross is waiting:
…if it turns out that the next two months transform Palin into a national laughingstock with no future outside Alaska, I won’t be terribly happy with John McCain’s decision-making process. I intend to wait slightly longer than 48 hours, though, before I pass judgment on that question.
It seems to me this is excessively generous to McCain. The bottom line is that he obviously hadn’t vetted this person in any halfway competent fashion. McCain’s first major presidential decision was rash, impulsive, ill-researched and foisted on the world with no warning. With this decision, McCain clearly wanted to indicate that he was breaking with Bush. But the manner in which he made it proves he truly is Bush’s third term – just more reckless.
That’s what Ambers and others have reported. Steve Schmidt was not so clear:
All Schmidt would say is Palin and McCain had discussed the pregnancy and considered it to be a private matter. He wouldn’t say if they talked about it before McCain picked Palin as his vice presidential nominee. "I answered that question nine times," he said.
They’re flying blind.
Q: Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?
SP: Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.
Tapper has a good question.
Jason Kottke flags a few interviews with James Powderly, who was detained for a Free Tibet protest in China. His answer to the question whether he was tortured:
Well, I think probably, a lot of people might disagree, even some of my other detainees might feel like what they received wasn’t torture. And relative to what someone might receive on a daily basis at a place like Gitmo it certainly is not particularly harsh. It’s kind of like being a little bit pregnant, we were a little bit tortured. We were strapped into chairs in uncomfortable positions, we were put into cages with blood on the floor and told we would never live, we were sleep deprived the entire time. There was an interrogation every night and they kept us up all day. They never turned the lights off in the cells. We were fed food that was inedible, we were not given potable water. Any time you threaten and take the numbers of family members and take down home addresses, there’s an element of mental torture there. There’s physical torture in the form of us having to sit in uncomfortable positions all day long and spending the night strapped to a metal chair inside of a cage. We all have cuts and bruises from that, and some of my peers were beaten up a little bit.
From a press conference:
I have heard some of the news on this and so let me be as clear as possible. I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics, it has no relevance to governor Palin’s performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18. And how family deals with issues and teenage children that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that is off limits.
A reader points out what is left implicit in the Palins’ statement:
I’m not sure how to say this politely, but if Bristol Palin is more than three and a half months’ pregnant, it is physically impossible for her to have given birth on the 18th of April to Trig.I know with "about five months" it’s difficult to be certain what they mean, which is why most doctors talk in weeks. But basically a pregnancy is calculated as 40 weeks, and is dated from the previous period so for the first two weeks of the ‘pregnancy’ one is not actually pregnant.Women tend to take at least six weeks to start ovulating again, and often several months. Say Bristol is very young and made a medically exceptional recovery – the very very earliest she could have become pregnant ‘again’ would be from mid May, which would put her at three and a half months pregnant.Also, and for me this is the clincher:
it’s pretty horrible down there for quite a while after giving birth, most doctors will order no sex for at least six weeks, and well let’s be honest, most men wouldn’t want to go there for at least six weeks. And most women certainly won’t be in the mood for just as long. Which means that again she is unlikely to be more than three months pregnant if she gave birth in April.
This seems persuasive to me. But it’s based entirely on a vague verbal statement. Why not kill this rumor with Palin’s medical records? A 43 year old woman’s pregnancy with a Downs Syndrome child would have been intensely monitored, and the records must be a mile long. Just release them, ok? If necessary in a closed room for reporters, just as with McCain. And we can all breathe a sigh of relief and move on.
The Dish 