He certainly didn't, I don't know, accept his party's nomination for the presidential election last night or anything.

Honestly they don't want us talking about his green screen speech last night because it was boring as hell and was essentially a substance free series of lies about Obama and promoting of the John McCain personality cult.

Yep, sadly there are those who just cannot get off the subject and attempt to keep her front page. Even going so far as to abuse ratings and screaming at those of us who want to focus on the real issues.

Do you?

Like it or not, Palin is front page news. You can either let the Republicans define her, and consequently John McCain's judgement capacity, or we can find out the truth and publicize it. Obama is smart to not go directly after Palin, but he's counting on the press, and us, to do it for him. Like it or not she is a factor in this race. She is going to steal votes from Obama in certain demographics, UNLESS her true self instead of the pretty picture McCain wants to be publicized is revealed.

So ya, we should be talking about issues, but we'd BETTER be countering the Palin propaganda, and big time.

I don't see my comments and ratings here as having any effect on what's talked about in the papers or on TV.  That's determined by an unholy combination of Drudge, the Times, the Post, and the yak show regulars.

The ongoing Palin train wreck is more fun to watch and discuss than McCain's long-discussed-to-death shortcomings.  You guys are welcome to adopt some talking points and repeat them in the hope that more people start repeating them, but that's both useless and boring, so I won't be joining you.

make no mistake. She has no shred of humanity. I have read enough and heard enough about her to know that she will turn the knife in you while keeping the appearance of the Alaskan "hockey-mom". Right now Rasmussen reports she is more popular than more candidates. She is now being sequestered by the GOP so it is up to us to unmask her thuggishness, strip the facade of the compassionate reformer and let the American people know who she really is. I mean she mocked Obama's community service when he was 23 when at the same time she was a friggin' sportscaster.

Thanks for this diary. I agree. Democrats need to be defining the issues that this election is about and running our own race. Getting caught up in everything the other side does will do nothing to sell our ticket.

As the saying goes, "There's is no such thing as bad publicity", and too many Dems are giving the GOP tons of free publicity.

Couple of simple observations

1)  Bush isn't running for a third term.  McCain is actually a different person and even if some people don't recognize this enough of the voters will that trying to claim they are clones is not effective.

2)  To the degree that FUTURE policies would be identical to Bush policies that have failed this is an effective attack but it should rest on the individual policies and the Obama policy that is better.  This is a details fight and so far Obama is not very good at details fights.

3)  Attacking Palin as someone people shouldn't accept as SAME with them is unwise when you are running a candidate who already has his own ethnic group sown up 90% and relies heavily on ethnic groups that are not SAME with him.  Likewise if you are running a candidate who has quotes regarding working class people as "bitter" or religious folk as "clinging to religion" and yet relies on these groups that probably don't see this ivy league lawyer as SAME with them.  "Our candidate is SAME with you and the other candidate isn't" is not a winning strategy given McCain's VP pick.

If Obama want's to win he needs to do the following

1)  enforce that we are in tough times.
2)  show that he has a well thought out strategy to get us out that is better than McCain.

3)  enforce that we need change
4)  Detail how change with Obama is better than change with McCain because of detail X, Y, Z

The odd numbers are easy sells

The even numbers have been hard sells or haven't been tried which is why this is a close election.

don't you think its strange that on blogs that there has been more palin diaries in the past week than on mccain in the past 2 months?  something is v. v. wrong with that.