What a difference a few hours make. It is almost like Sally Quinn, the Washington Post faith columnist, was blinded by the  light of truth on the road to Damascus. On CNN's "American Morning" on Friday, Quinn repeated her doubts as to whether Sarah Palin could "put country first" due to her family reponsibilities as a mother:

Everyone woman I know practically is a working mother. We have conflicts and guilts that men simply don't have. And, basically the burden of raising children falls on the mother, no matter what kind of a job she has. So, I think that to, you know, we're so far beyond the feminist argument here. This is not about feminism, it's not about sexism, it's simply about can you do the job?

Does the liberal senior editor of State, Dahlia Lithwick, secretly want the Democrat ticket to lose this year? You have to come to that conclusion when you read the complex mosaic of  debate "tips" that she provides to Joe Biden including, get this, imitate the perpetually annoying Campbell Brown. This is just one part of an array of tips Lithwick provides in a Slate article condescendingly titled, "How To Debate a Girl, and Win." Lithwick starts out by sneering at  Sarah Palin (emphasis mine):

Dear Sen. Biden:

How embarrassing is it for a newspaper to have a member of a presidential ticket campaigning in its own backyard and to completely miss something he said that has reverberated all over the Web? Such was the case on Tuesday when vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden was campaigning in Deerfield Beach. Amid all the standard Democrat talking points presented by Biden, there was this shocker made in response to a questioner with obvious BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) asking about pursuing the Bush administration with criminal investigations:

If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued. Not out of vengeance, not out of retribution, out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no one, no attorney general, no president -- no one is above the law.

With the massive and desperate MSM attack upon Sarah Palin, there is a lot of competition in the venom spewing department. However, Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer seems determined to make a strong bid for the most seriously deranged of all attacks upon Palin in her most recent column which starts out on her assumption that the Alaska governor is unqualified:

So. This is what being pandered to feels like.

John McCain picked Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and mother of five, to be his running mate to woo women like me.

He seems to think that my girlfriends and I are so disappointed that an utterly qualified woman is not going to be president that we will jump at the chance to vote for an utterly unqualified woman for vice president.

So does that mean Reimer thinks Barack Obama, with no executive experience and a less than stellar incomplete Senate term is also "unqualified?" She doesn't say as Reimer warms up for more attacks upon Palin:

Your humble correspondent is thinking of writing a story about Democrat voters who are insulted by vice-presidential nominee, Joe Biden. And I think I know just the place to find such Democrat voters---at a John McCain rally in Ohio. Just to save time and effort, I'm not even going to find out if the people I interview are even Democrats so I won't specifically identify them as such even though the headline for my story will read, "Joe Biden excites, insults swing-state Democrat voters."

Does that sound ridiculous to you? Well, guess what? That is exactly what New York Daily News staff writers, Michael McCauliff and Celeste Katz, did in reverse with their article, "Sarah Palin excites, insults swing-state Republican voters." I guess the crack investigative team of McCauliff and Katz figured that the best place to find Republican voters would be at an Obama rally (emphasis mine):

The theme of this Time magazine article by Jay Newton-Small, "Obama and Biden's Chemistry Test," is how wonderful the "chemistry" is between Barack Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden. However, when you read the details of the story, you can't help but wonder if there is already trouble brewing between the two. In fact, the Time story starts out on a downbeat note (emphasis mine):

On Saturday morning Barack Obama and his newly-minted running mate Joe Biden stopped at a diner outside of Youngstown, Ohio for some breakfast. Obama made a few brief comments to the press about Hurricane Gustav's imminent threat before turning to greet diners. Five minutes later, it was Biden's turn to be asked about the gathering storm. His answer was three times as long as Obama's, and included details of his daughter's time at Tulane University in New Orleans. As he kept talking Obama, about 10 feet away, kept glancing over at Biden. For an awkward 20 seconds or so, the Democratic nominee looked a little concerned about Biden's soliloquy. But soon enough, he left Biden alone, turning towards the door to chat with other patrons.

First we had a former national chairman of the Democratic National Committee laughing over the effect of Hurricane Gustav hitting New Orleans would have on Republicans as they prepared to hold their convention this week. Now we have a writer for The New Republic, Nate Silver, worried in the other direction in an article titled, "How Gustav Could Benefit the Republicans." Silver lists the ways he perceives that Republicans could benefit from this storm:

1. Allows McCain to Appear Magnanimous. By potentially delaying or canceling his "date" at the GOP convention, McCain appears as though he is giving something up to tend to the Gulf Coast. Sympathetic and neutral-to-sympathetic media outlets may view this as underscoring McCain's "America First" theme.

An angry Senator John Kerry is also an entertaining John Kerry.  And on ABC's This Week yesterday, Kerry provided us with a lot of comedy entertainment including his assertion that John McCain was forced to pick Sarah Palin as his running mate by Rush Limbaugh and "the rightwing." There are a lot of other comedy nuggets in this interview conducted by This Week host George Stephanopoulos who fails to challenge Kerry on most of his absurdities including the notion that that merely traveling though countries overseas on a brief campaign stint counts as foreign policy experience. The transcript is below but to fully enjoy the flavor, you need to see the video featuring a clearly perturbed John Kerry who seems not to have gotten over his 2004 election loss. The interview begins following an appearance by Senator Lindsey Graham and Kerry sounds a bit confused (emphasis mine):

If you are wondering why the stories in your local newspapers are starting to look so similar to other newspapers, it might be because they are following the new business model of South Florida newspapers: eliminating competition. All the major South Florida newspapers, Miami Herald, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel (now called SunSentinel), and Palm Beach Post have had big staff cutbacks recently. So who is left to cover the news? The skeleton crews still working at the newspapers don't have the capability so they came up with a solution: pool their resources and share their stories. A story in Friday's Sun-Sentinel, I mean SunSentinel, explains the brave new world of journalism (emphasis mine):

The San Jose Mercury News, in an editorial today, called Sarah Palin "clearly unqualified" to become vice-president. The reason? Lack of experience. Suddenly  liberal members of the media, such as Campbell Brown, until now not the least bit worried about Barack Obama's lack of experience are concerned about this issue. So how to explain away Obama's own lack of experience? Simple. The Mercury News has broadened the definition of experience to include the experience of running for higher office. You read that right. Barack Obama is now qualified to run for president because he has the "experience" of campaigning for nomination. We'll get to that new definition of experience but first let us visit the lead in of this editorial which sounded a bit peeved that John McCain's Palin pick stole the thunder from the Democrat convention (emphasis mine):

Joe Biden has been making much of having spent the first ten years of his life in Scranton, Pennsylvania to the extent that his first video ad is based on that city. So when Biden and Barack Obama made their first campaign appearance after the Democrat convention in Beaver, Pennsylvania, the subject of Scranton came up in Biden's speech. The problem is that he did some fibbing about Scranton. Biden claimed that he was 12 years younger than former PA governor, Bob Casey, and 12 years older than "Bobby" Casey, the son and current senator from that state. Actually Biden is only 10  years younger than the elder Casey, a minor error, but eighteen years older than "Bobby" Casey, not so minor. Even more important,  Biden mentioned that he lived only a few blocks away from the Caseys.

Can anybody recall Campbell Brown pestering Democrat officials over Barack Obama's lack of not only foreign policy experience but overall experience? I sure can't but here is Brown hectoring McCain Political Director Mike Duhaime about her sudden concern over lack of experience. Here is a transcript of the interrogation but to get the full flavor of Brown's attitude complete with cynical facial expressions, be sure to watch the video (emphasis mine):

In an effort to run down Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, a snarling Jack Cafferty managed to insult the entire state of Alaska on CNN's Situation Room: "Sarah Palin is in her first term as governor of Alaska,  that's a  state that has 13 people and some caribou." This was one small part of an acid-laced harangue by Cafferty on the subject of Sarah Palin,  (emphasis mine): 

What a difference a few weeks make. It wasn't too long ago that the liberal media were already congratulating themselves on Barack Obama's "inevitable" victory. Many of those reports crossed the line into flat out gloating in which the election itself was a mere formality on the road to the coronation of the Lightworker. Well, that was then and now it appears that Obama's halo of perfection has become quite tarnished to the extent that the liberal New Republic is worrying if their erstwhile messiah is heading towards a "long, disappointing fall." John B. Judis, a senior editor of The New Republic, bites his fingernails with a revealing article titled, "Avoiding A Long, Disappointing Fall." Dr. Judis gives his diagnosis along with suggestions for a cure as to what is ailing the Obama campaign (emphasis mine):

What do you do when you are the mayor of San Francisco and your poorly timed push for gay marriages is blamed for your party's loss in a presidential election, you get yourself involved in a sleazy sex scandal where you get caught sleeping with the wife of your campaign manager, and a much criticized policy of declaring the municipality you represent a "sanctuary city" results in a multiple murder by an illegal alien? Why you get the San Francisco Chronicle to write a glowing story about you enthusing about how you are a "hotshot to watch" with a bright political future on the horizon. Such is the case with San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, no stranger to other puff pieces such as this June story in Time magazine. San Francisco Chronicle political writers Joe Garofoli and Carla Marinucci use Newsom's appearance at the Democrat convention in San Francisco as a launch platform for gushing over their mayor's future:

As Bill Clinton and Joe Biden dominated center stage Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was presiding over "Unconventional '08," a street party held in an artsy warehouse corner of the city featuring indie bands and a knot of people young enough to be Biden's grandchildren. There, mingling beneath an art gallery facade full of iconic images of Sen. Barack Obama was the evening's host - the former Sen. Hillary Clinton delegate Newsom.

Before pouring sweet syrup over Newsom, Garofoli and Marinucci take us along on a brief but unpleasant trip down memory lane:

Spike Lee seems intent on inadvertently subverting Barack Obama's campaign. As we saw previously, Spike Lee suggested that rappers could be an important campaign asset for Obama. And now in an interview with an MSNBC reporter, Lee asserts that history can be divided into two epochs. Here is a transcript (emphasis mine):

 REPORTER: I'm joined now by Spike Lee who we found on the floor of the Democratic convention. First of all, it's such a key...

SPIKE LEE: Amongst the Indiana delegates...

REPORTER: And Florida too. Powerful delegations.

LEE: (garbled) Florida and Indiana. That's all right.

I guess the Associated Press decided it was too much trouble to put up even the pretense of objectivity in the election campaign. As a result, AP completely cast any idea of objectivity to the winds and flat out offered helpful campaign tips to Barack Obama in the form of suggestions from five of their reporters:

DENVER - There's no shortage of items on Barack Obama's to-do list for the fall campaign. How about a to-don't list? Five AP reporters offer suggestions.

How nice of AP to offer such help. And now the to-don't suggestions from the first of their reporters, Ted Anthony:

 No matter what, Barack Obama should never lose sight of the color gray.

It appears that Keith Olbermann might be vying for the title of Most Obnoxious Anchor On Television. First we had Olbermann dissing Joe Scarborough during a live broadcast on Monday from the Democrat convention. Then a day later, Olbermann managed to enrage Chris Matthews during another broadcast. And now it looks like Olbermann is going for broke in the insult department by pushing to have Tom Brokaw banned from appearing on MSNBC as reported in Page Six of today's New York Post:

At a forum on Sunday, when Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell called MSNBC "the official network of the Obama campaign," Brokaw said, "I think Keith has gone too far. I think Chris has gone too far."

Insiders say Olbermann is pushing to have Brokaw banned from the network and is also refusing to have centrist Time magazine columnist Mike Murphy on his show.

Film producer Spike Lee believes Barack Obama has a secret weapon that will be a big asset to his campaign: rappers.  Yes, in Spike Lee's opinion hip-hop music will be a key element in getting Obama elected. Lee expounded upon the importance of hip-hoppers in this election in the New York Times The Caucus:

Mr. Lee, who has often uses hip-hop music and casts hip-hop stars in his films, said that rappers should, well, feel free to mince their too-hot words at such a crucial time in American politics.

In particular, the platinum-selling artist Ludacris referred to Senator Clinton as an “irrelevant” epithet and attacked Senator John McCain with the line, “Paint the White House black and I’m sure that’s got ’em terrified/ McCain don’t belong in any chair unless he’s paralyzed.”

For good measure, he referred to President Bush as “mentally handicapped.”

Keith Olbermann seems to be suffering from a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease during the Democrat convention coverage. As noted earlier by NewsBusters' Mark Finkelstein, Olbermann, after commenting ecstatically about Michelle Obama's speech declared that he was "beginning to sound borderline sycophantic."

Also last night, an open mic caught Olbermann dissing fellow MSNBC team member, Joe Scarborough using profanity to describe his apparent disgust with Scarborough's analysis that Barack Obama has been falling behind in the polls.

"Jesus, Joe, why don't you get a shovel?" Olbermann snorted. Watch the video to the right or read the partial transcript below: