RNC08

When copyright protection goes too far, you get stuff like this.

Last night, I created and posted the video below to YouTube.  Immediately after processing, I received a notification from YouTube that ITN News, a British media company, has claimed all rights to footage of the Republican National Convention, and my video would be disabled unless I chose to pursue a denial of their claim.

No, there are two things to note.  First, the video was not obtained from ITN, but rather from C-Span.  Second, the video was used in accordance with C-Cpan's copyright policy here: http://rnc08.cspan.org/About/Copyright.aspx

So YouTube has effectively become the watchdog for ITN who is misusing the copyright process to a) prevent anyone from posting convention video and b) prevent anyone using video from another source for posting convention video.

People who know me will tell you this falls into the beating-a-dead-horse category, but I still maintain that if this Rudy Giuliani had shown up during the campaign, he'd be on the stage tonight. 

Speeches like this are what made me believe in the first place. This may have topped his 2004 convention performance.

Video clips at Ustream

Sarah Palin has polarized the establishment from the grassroots in a way we haven't seen in quite some time. This is happening both within the GOP and in the war between the GOP and the media/Democrats. Establishment Republican consultants are still waiting for Palin's first  round of interviews to declare this a done deal, though the speech last night went a long way towards assuaging their initial concerns.

But the fact still remains that if you are thrilled about Palin, you have a grassroots sensibility. If you are not, you have an elite/establishment sensibility. The delegates on the floor are the grassroots. Mike Murphy and Peggy Noonan are the elite. The dividing lines have always been there, but Palin provides the ultimate litmus test.

You can put me firmly with the grassroots on this one.

Before Palin, McCain was running an establishment campaign. He had a conventional strategy, relied on big dollar fundraisers, and didn't fire up the base. Part of this was who John McCain is -- he is not instinctively a red meat kind of guy. While McCain's bipartisan bona fides allow him to run stronger than a generic Republican, it was unclear that he could get the volunteer energy to squeeze out those last three points that only a good GOTV operation can bring. That's because the party faced an almost epic enthusiasm gap. This enthusiasm gap threatened to negate any of the benefits of McCain's bipartisanship. McCain's initial approach would bring him close -- but not close enough.

Palin injected a badly needed jolt of people power into the campaign. The maverick spirit is not gone. It's been reinforced in some key ways. McCain is still the same bipartisan guy he always was -- but Palin provides the grassroots with a reason to crawl on glass to make the phone calls and knock on doors and get out the vote. We didn't have that before. We have it now. Polls don't completely factor it in -- and the establishment tends to discount it as playing to the base. But it is the dark matter of campaigns -- that stuff that gives the campaign a good vibe that lets it put its best foot forward. 

Last night represented a triumph of grassroots politics in a campaign we thought had left it for dead. And just as with Republican icons before, the establishment will once again be proven timid and wrong. 

Full text below.

Have at it.

Palin's speech is particularly important tonight. The American people don't know her, and so this will be their introduction.

And therein lies the problem for the media. Dan Quayle reinforced the "not ready" narrative by making numerous gaffes, including at his announcement, and otherwise acting in ways unexpected of a Vice President.

Sarah Palin hasn't done that. Her introduction speech was pretty strong. Tonight, she'll put some more meat on the bones. Once the American people see that Palin in the national spotlight is not a bumbling idiot, or out of her league, Democrats won't have a leg to stand on.

CT Republican Chairman Chris Healy was on Fox News today commenting on yesterday's radical thug-o-rama where old men and  women were physically accosted and showered with dangerous chemicals from an "anti-war" mob 

 These knuckle-heads crossed the line, Christopher Healy, head of the Connecticut State Republican Party, told FOX News.com. "We're for free speech, not free bleach. We respect their right to protest, but do it civilly. Pushing, shoving, spitting, throwing harmful chemicals ? it's not the American way."

http://www.everydayrepublican.com/2008/09/02/fighting-back/

The only difference between what the unwashed hooligans did yesterday to the CT delegation and what the cybervandals and media enforcers are doing to Sarah Palin is this:

Bleach is supposed to remove dirt and slime. The media is hurling it at Palin.    

By far the most odious part of the smear-mongering around Sarah Palin is its intrinsic dishonesty. Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy may be off limits -- but why didn't it factor into the vetting process. It's not the pregnancy. It's the vetting.

Yeah. Right.

This is like questioning the agility of Obama's rapid response operation by replaying the Obama is a Muslim rumors in network primetime and assessing if the campaign is doing enough to respond, which is essentially what the media is doing by spreading the Daily Kos rumors. Make-believe biological impossibilities give way to startling revelations about the Palin family which open a door to questioning McCain's judgment.

If McCain's judgment is suspect, then the media basically maintains that Bristol Palin's pregnancy should have derailed Palin's VP prospects, had McCain known (forget the fact that he did). Is this what progressives and the media actually believe?

There's not a whiff of crisis in the air here in St. Paul. Just an enormous sense that the media has overreached and is really stepping in it.

I'm getting ready to make a belated entry in St. Paul, so I will be dark for most of tomorrow (as I have been for most of today tying up loose ends), but something about the Palin pregnancy controversy compels me to make a slightly provocative point that I also think aptly sums up the Republican identity in this week of GOP-centrism.

At its heart, the Republican Party is the party of regular people.

I don't mean this to come off as Average Joe chauvinism. This is not a point about income or wealth, though contrary to the stereotype of the GOP as the party of the rich, there is a strong argument to be made that we represent the Great American Middle in contrast to the Democrats' who represent the very rich/educated and the very poor/uneducated.

When I say regular, I mean regular in the sense of apolitical, well grounded in family and community, and as far away from a Beltway mindset as you can get.

Republican leaders at the national level have tended to tap into apolitical America more. Theirs are usually not the candidates who are scheming from birth to be President. They come to politics later in life after success in business, the military, or other worthwhile endeavors. If being a C-SPAN junkie were a prerequisite to being elected to Congress, we'd have veto-proof Democratic majorities in both chambers. If you upped that requirement to a Harvard degree, it'd be 80-20.

Nor would Democrats particularly dispute this. They claim the mantle of intellectual superiority as proof of their fitness to rule. They believe only those with the right "pedigree" should be elected President.

All of this brings me to Sarah Palin.

Monday night's speaker session is cancelled because of Gustav, a regrettable but necessary move by the McCain campaign. That means 4 nights of speakers will be compressed into 3, and that's if New Orleans is spared the brunt of the storm. Given that the schedule was already jam-packed with high-profile speakers, it's going to be difficult to get everyone of note a good speaking slot -- in marked contrast with the Democrats who put Ted Strickland and Tammy Duckworth in prime time leaving 30 minutes of idle network chatter most nights.

First, I can only assume that the media will not punish McCain for doing the right thing by giving the convention 4 hours of network prime time just as they did in Denver. That would mean 90 minutes of coverage on Wednesday and Thursday nights, or 2 hours of coverage on Thursday night.

Here's how things could unfold in primetime under a 60-90-90 schedule: