John McCain risks losing that unruly sounding crowd with his phony happy-talk toward Obama. Memo to McCain: the dishonorable way you and your team have conducted this campaign, and the sheer ugliness of the entire presentation yesterday, has ensured that should this country be so dumb as to elect you and Cruella de Earmarks, you won't have to bother asking for the support of Democrats. You'll have to be content to run things with your new evangelical friends and the welfare states they come from.

Remember when Prince Charles married Diana Spencer in hopes of sprucing up his image, and all he got was a place in Diana's shadow? I wonder if John McCain is as pissed as Charles was... and with a big NFL game on tonight, who thinks McCain will getting ratings anywhere near as good as these:

Palin pulled in 37.2 million viewers across broadcast and cable networks, according to Nielsen Media Research.

That's 55% higher than Day 3 of the DNC, when her Democratic counterpart, Joe Biden, and President Clinton took the stage (24 million).

It's also up a sharp 99% from the Republican convention's third day in 2004 (18.7 million) and easily bests the numbers viewers attracted by George W. Bush when he accepted the nomination (27.6 million). In fact, it came close to upsetting Obama's historic address last Thursday -- the most-watched convention speech in history (38.4 million viewers).

How did the Mac man become the sidekick on his own ticket??? First Barack out-shines him, and now this...

...or does Sarah Palin remind you of that female supervisor you had at some time or other that you just HATED? You know, the one who calls you into her office to hand her something she could have gotten herself or who asks you to run personal errands or blames you to her bosses for her mistakes? Maybe it's the voice, or the relentless snidery, but she really grates in that "I hate my 9 to 5 mostly because of my boss" kind of way... (which is why I don't work in corporate America anymore...!)

The media is drooling over Ms. Palin this morning, which I suppose is to be expected. But I suspect that out there in the real world, where people have real problems and wanted to hear more about her, and about where she and McCain would take the country, rather than sarcasm and attacks, more people than you'd think -- particularly women -- and women who have bitchy bosses -- are going to recoil.

Case in point: a focus group commissioned by the Women's Voices, Women Vote Action Fund and conducted immediately after Palin's speech ...

You know what the real insult of the Sarah Palin pick is? It's that had McCain picked one of the men on his short list, they would have been a colleague and an adviser. With Palin, who clearly can advise on nothing, McCain essentially hired an apprentice.
 

Worse, he hired an apprentice he didn't even feel compelled to vet in the same way he did the guys, and who is little more than a carrot dangled in front of women, ogling male talk jocks and religious fundamentalists. That speaks volumes about what John McCain thinks about the value of women.

Who was the genius who decided to start the GOP convention the week after labor day, otherwise known to the TV business as "premiere week?" Americans are officially back from vacation after Labor Day, and the fall TV season is in full swing. These guys are gonna get the stuffing beaten out of them by "America's Got Talent..."

The upside? Fox News won't have any challengers for the top convention ratings slot. Their viewers are about the only ones who will bother watching this week full of dull.

Worst job ever: RNC convention celebrity booker.

On MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell just declared herself "personally offended" by the "judgmental" talk about Bristol Palin's pregnancy.

 
And she added that, in her unbiased opinion, "people won't care" about the Palins' family drama. Really? Does she know what business she's in? And is this the same Andrea Mitchell who vigorously covered the irrelevant John Edwards scandal -- an awful development that nonetheless involved a man who is no longer running for president?
 

Earth to Andrea: the relevance of the Bristol Palin scandal is not the teen's love life. It's her mother's beliefs, including opposition to birth control and sex education, which are relevant to whether her views comport to those of most voters. It's her ability (or lack of ability) to run her own household, when John McCain has proposed that she be first in line to run the country. And it's about McCain's judgment in proposing, without a proper vetting, to bring this psychodrama into the White House.

Is it just me who finds it ironic that John McCain picked the unqualified (but exciting!) Sarah Palin in order to steal the media spotlight from Barack Obama, only to have the spotlight shift away from him again, and onto Palin?

It seems the evangelicals are doing their own, preemptive opposition research on the Palins:

.. the Palin family travails don’t stop at Bristo Palin’s pregnancy. Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella confirmed Monday that Todd Palin was arrested and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol in 1986 when he was 22. Sarah and Todd Palin, who had been high school sweethearts, were dating at the time.

Sources close to Sarah Palin  told the Christian Broadcasting Network that Todd Palin has been “forthcoming about the situation and has indicated that it was a lesson learned from when he was younger.”

While Todd Palin's arrest has no bearing on the campaign, and he seems to be a perfectly lovely guy, one wonders whether any of the information pouring into the media came up during ... I don't know ... a proper vetting of the woman John McCain chose to place a skin cancer outbreak away from the presidency...