Newt says Colin closes the deal.

Newt Gingrich on the Colin Powell endorsement of Barak Obama:

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich of Georgia, a Republican luminary, agreed ... that the endorsement “eliminated the experience argument. How are you going to say the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, former secretary of state, former national security adviser, was taken in?”

It ain't over until it's over, let's not get to brash here, but..

In August, after announcing Sarah Palin was his vice-president pick I said:

I think John McCain just lost whatever chance he had of becoming President.

On one hand, McCain has robbed the Republicans of the one hammer they had, Obama was inexperienced. Here we have someone who had been mayor of a town smaller than the subdivision I live in and then has been governor for two years of a state with a smaller population than the county I live in. At a similar point in life when Obama was in Harvard Law School, Palin was entering beauty pageants.

On the other hand, the point that the Democrats have been making for the last week is that McCain has exhibited poor judgement. He was wrong about Iraq, he is wrong about Afghanistan, he is wrong about the economy and on and on. And he just made their point. If this is an example of the kinds of decisions he'll make once in office, we have been warned.

The DailyKos has a nice summary of how McCain is losing support among conservatives who think Palin was an abysmal choice. They also list the newspaper endorsements for Obama that mention Palin as part of the decision to not endorse McCain.

Colin Powell mentions the Palin decision as part of his reasoning in endorsing Obama.

The national Republican/Atwater/Rove machine have a 30 year history of showing they are much better at getting people elected then they are at governing. So, they could still pull this thing off with their buckets o' mud. But it looks bad for them right now.

Different Snakes

From Frank Rich:

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

Emma returns

Lilah found Emma last night, hiding in the closet. Emma was in the closet, not Lilah. Emma, while never the life of the party, seems a little more subdued than normal.

Fool me once...

So, Mona's cleverness with the door knobs became less cute. Emma, Lilah's snake, has been staying in one of the bedrooms. Mona 'broke in' last night and liberated the snake.

Emma is still on the run. She's too big for Mona to eat, and I'm not sure who would win, actually. But no carcass, no snake.

I switched out the four inside door knobs that weren't lockable this afternoon.

Breaking and Entering

All of our interior doorknobs look like this. Mona has figured out how to use the doorknob to open the door.

The Vice President

There was a minor dust-up after the VP debate about the constitutional role of the Vice President. Specifically, is the VP a member of the Executive or Legislative branch. 
Originally, the VP was person who came in 2nd in the race for President. This was changed with the passage of the 12th amendment.

That implies, to me, that the VP is part of the Executive branch since his/her selection was and remains a function of the election of the President. Since the passage of the 12th amendment, the selection of the Vice-President has been a choice of the Presidential candidate (or perhaps of the political machine of the day). While rare recently, it wasn't uncommon for the President to chose a different running mate for his second (or third and fourth - in the case of FDR) term. (Nelson Rockefeller who got dumped by Gerald Ford, was the last VP to not be invited to run for a second term.)

To say that the VP presides over the Senate and is therefore part of the Legislative branch ignores that all three branches bleed into the other. The President appoints the members of the Supreme Court, the Senate says yea or nay. The Chief Justice presides over an impeachment of a President and Congress tries and convicts. The Supreme Court passes judgement on legislation passed by Congress. This doesn't mean that sometimes the Supreme Court is part of the legislative branch.

There's no contradiction, in my mind, to acknowledge that a member of the Executive Branch presides over the Senate.

Vicarious Grand Canyon Trip

I'm happy for my friend Steve, who just got back from a 16 day rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. He considers it a highlight of a well-traveled life.

Me? I want indoor plumbing and a bed every night. I'm fond of civilization.