She appears to be wearing the self-same skirt which so enamoured Palin's daughter's boyfriend. Winner.

Sarah Palin dolls go on sale as John McCain's running mate's popularity soars

Two new action dolls have gone on sale of Sarah Palin, the Alaska Governor who John McCain has chosen to be his Republican presidential running mate.

Sarah Palin the action-hero doll goes on sale for $27.95

The dolls are the latest in a line of American political candidates who have been immortalised including John McCain and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Two variations of the doll are on sale - Sarah Palin the Executive and Sarah Palin the Super Hero - available from toy company http://www.herobuilders.com at $27.95 (about £16) for the executive doll and two dollars more for the super hero version.

It is designed to capitalise on Sarah Palin mania that has gripped Republicans after the electrifying speech by the self-confessed "hockey mom" at the party convention in St Paul, Minnesota.

More than 6,000 exultant supporters turned out on Friday night in Sterling Heights, a town in Michigan's Macomb County, to see Mrs Palin and Mr McCain

Where he once played to a few hundred people, Mr McCain was greeted by a crowd chanting "Sa-rah, Sa-rah!", "John Mc-Cain, John Mc-Cain!" and "U-S-A!"

Mrs Palin spelt out the McCain campaign plans to take on Obama Barack in the final 60 days before November's election, targeting patriotic voters unconvinced by the Democratic candidate's national security and economic credentials.

"We went right from the convention to small town USA," she said. "It's true that they grow good people, people who are working hard for America.

"You love your country in good times and bad and you're always proud to be Americans."

As Mr McCain discussed the need to launch domestic oil drilling, the crowd chanted of "Drill, Baby, Drill!"

Mrs Palin is due to conduct her first solo campaign event on Monday in Pennsylvania, home state of her vice presidential rival Joe Biden.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/johnmccain/270...

...and I agree with Linz's analysis.

However, that media report was wrong, the first half of the speech was very good and the audience there were lapping it up.

Linz analyzed what the man said. And other than that prominent redundancy at the beginning, "instructive illustration," he wrote a great piece, IMO.

You, on the other hand, find a critique of the PR aspects of the speech, an analysis that pays only the slightest attention to the ideas McCain presented, and present it as if it were parallel to Linz's analysis, which it isn't. Then you take the negativity of this PR analysis and use that to find "agreement" between Linz and the media?  

Unworthy of you.

=Mindy

It was a bad speech, primarily for its philosophical incoherence, secondarily for all sorts of reasons. Note, however, I said a freedom-lover should vote for him nonetheless, given the alternative:

It was reassuring to hear a presidential nominee quoting from the Declaration of Independence, committing to the pursuit of liberty's enemies and the staunch defense of its friends, vowing to unleash his running mate — the find of the century — on the Washington establishment, to veto pork, to allow drilling and new nuclear power plants, to reduce taxes and red tape, to downsize government ... all of that was edifying, and reason enough to vote for the Republican duo over the truly treasonous Obama bin Biden ticket.

I doubt the liberal media would agree with that. Been skipping paragraphs again Marcus? Too much sex after marriage?

McCain's speech is universally panned

Rather than the climax of the Republican convention, McCain's acceptance speech sounded decidedly unpresidential

Dan Kennedy guardian.co.uk,
Friday September 05 2008

The media verdict on John McCain's acceptance speech is that the Republican presidential nominee is a narcolepsy-inducing contortionist.

At the biggest moment of his political career, he delivered a flat, stupefyingly boring address that drained away all the excitement generated by Sarah Palin's pit-bull-with-lipstick performance the night before. His central message - that it's time to clean up Washington - was incoherent. Yes, McCain has some legitimate reformist credentials. But he's also a 25-year Washington insider who marches in lockstep with George Bush on such issues as the war in Iraq and tax cuts for the wealthy.

"It really is an audacious ploy, to tell people that the country's got to correct the mistakes made by a political party when that's the very party you represent," writes Tom Shales in today's Washington Post. "It's like staging a revolution against yourself - saying that the Republicans have got to go so the Republicans can move in and clean up the mess."

Last Friday there was no shortage of punditry to sift through following Barack Obama's speech. Today the offerings are comparatively light and perfunctory. The bloviators still want to bloviate about Palin's speech, which electrified the convention-centre crowd, if not necessarily the public at large.

"For all the hullabaloo about whether John McCain would match Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention, it wasn't even close," observes Jacob Heilbrunn in the Huffington Post. He adds that "most of his speech was a snooze, delivered in the tone of a kindly old uncle reminiscing about World War II before fretting about how those pesky Russians are stirring up trouble again."

Writing in Slate, Christopher Beam attributes the live audience's "tepid reaction" to "post-Palin depression".

And in the Boston Phoenix, Adam Reilly offers a telling (if unimaginable) hypothetical: "Suppose Sarah Palin had somehow ended up as the Republican presidential nominee this year. Suppose she'd picked John McCain as her running mate. And suppose he'd given the speech he did tonight. You know what people would be saying? 'Crap. She should have gone with Giuliani'."

Incredibly, McCain's handlers even managed to reprise the widely mocked green background that punctuated his dreadful speech on the night that Obama clinched the Democratic nomination. But colour coordination wasn't the main problem then, and it wasn't last night, either.

Damning with extraordinarily faint praise is the order of the day at the conservative National Review. "The eloquent absence of eloquence" is the headline on Peter Robinson's reaction piece. In a, shall we say, counterintuitive bit of speech analysis, Rich Lowry instructs us: "Don't focus on the oratory. ... Don't focus on the delivery." The ever-hopeful Jonah Goldberg adds: "I think there was nothing to the speech that actually hurt him."

Hurt? Maybe not. But McCain's speech certainly did not help the Republicans' already precarious standing. The new star of the party is the deeply flawed Palin. McCain's brain trust is desperately trying to smear the media for smearing the Palin family, but the truth is that most of the press clippings, including those about 17-year-old Bristol Palin's pregnancy, have been exceedingly kind.

The real focus of media inquiry has been on more-substantive issues: the bipartisan investigation into whether Palin abused her office by firing the public-safety commissioner for refusing to get rid of her ex-brother-in-law; her selective memory about the "bridge to nowhere"; her association with the Alaskan Independence party, whose founder proclaimed that he had "no use for America or her damned institutions"; and her anti-science positions on such matters as creationism and global warming.

Palin may have aroused the base, but she'll likely prove to be a drag on the ticket among the independents and conservative Democrats whom McCain needs to win.

Most pundits did give McCain decent marks for retelling the story of his captivity in Vietnam. But here, too, he managed to step on his own moment. By letting virtually every surrogate this week speak about McCain's POW experience in dramatic, hushed tones, McCain allowed it to be robbed of much of its power before he finally got to talk about it himself.

The most positive assessment of the speech I could find is by Walter Shapiro, writing in Salon. Though conceding that McCain fell well short of Obama's and Palin's performances, Shapiro says: "McCain may have found the right words to appeal to the voters he needs to win, especially an older generation in hard-pressed normally Democratic industrial states like Michigan and Pennsylvania."

Well, perhaps. But in the immediate aftermath, I think most observers are going to agree instead with Jeffrey Toobin, who on CNN last night called it "the worst speech by a nominee that I've heard since Jimmy Carter in 1980" - "disorganised, themeless ... [and] shockingly bad."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/05/uselections2008.john...

"Who is John Galt?"

and Bravo!

It goes to show how truly and utterly awful the Democrat ticket is that someone like McCain looks good.

I really hope he meant the stuff about reducing the size of government. Because if this convention has shown one thing it is that he's willing to play the game (by picking Palin just to gazump the Dems) in order to get into power. What is he going to do with that power? Which McCain will turn up in the White House?

Submitted to Real Clear Politics go there now to vote for the article. Unfortunately you can't link directly to the SOLO submission, only the "reader's articles" page, so you may need to search for it.

Very disappointed in McCain. His idea that self-sacrifice is a virtue is in direct conflict with the Declaration of Independence. At the sense of life level McCain seems like a pretty good guy. And all praise to his very real heroism as a military man. But his ideas are awful.

Bravo!