Joan Garry vents her fury over the Log Cabin endorsement of McCain

Joan Garry writes that the Log Cabin Republican's endorsement of John McCain is like chickens voting for Col. Sanders. I concur.

Sarah Palin vs. The Big, Bad Media; or how did she do on her home turf in front of a lone interviewer?

[updated]
I was unable to watch last night for a variety of reasons, but the first reviews are kind of interesting.

Apparently, in the most low-key of settings with a sweet, ole' guy interviewer, Palin didn't do too well, except if you're judging on personality and tone. And as the New York Times TV reviewer reminds us, that may be all that matters to some. (Apparently the Times thinks American voters are a tad stupid.)

Slate: The ABC News anchor flummoxes the GOP amateur

Salon: Making a mockery of 9/11. Writer and Salon Editor-in-Chief Joan Walsh gets the award for the best line of the day. In talking about the Palin interview, she wrote:

It's the day we learned beyond any doubt that John McCain put his manhood in a blind trust to win the presidency.

New York Times: Showing a confidence in prepared answers. The Times TV reviewer thought tone mattered more than, well, expertise or competency.

Kevin Drum does his own review of reviews and notes one attitude from the right: The idea that Charlie Gibson had some gall to actually ask Palin substantive questions and expert real answers from a person who could become president.

James Fallows: Palin's lack of knowledge of the Bush Doctrine probably disqualifies her for the job.

What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the "Bush Doctrine" exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years.

Josh Marshall calls this moment "painful" and provides the video to prove it.

[updated 11:21 a.m. Central]

More links to reviews.

Hat tip to Media Bistro for providing the first few links in its Morning Newsfeed.

Today's Must Read: Everybody take a deep breath

I agree with David Broder that both Democrats and Republicans need to chill out. In talking about the presidential election, Broder writes:

...the uncertainty of the outcome is overwhelming.

Remembering

Dueling Lesbians: Perhaps someone should tell conservatives there's more than one of us on the air

Ahhh, you just can't make this stuff up.

Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the conservative Media Research Center, is upset by the addition of "this lesbian" Rachel Maddow to the MSNBC lineup. Graham appears to be as outraged by Maddow's sexual orientation as he is by her leftest opinions. In his appearance on Fox, Graham doesn't waste any opportunity to repeat that Maddow is a lesbian. (Oh, the infamy of it all!)

Meanwhile, Graham seems to have failed to notice that CNN now has its own lesbian commentator, Hilary Rosen.

Court declares Florida gay adoption ban to be unconstitutional

Circuit Judge David J. Audlin Jr. says the ban hurts children and violates both the state and federal constitutions, The Miami Herald reports.

A proposal that would ban same-sex couples from fostering or adopting children in Arkansas is on the ballot in November.

Billie Jean King clarifies that she's an Obama supporter

The tennis great, Billie Jean King, clears up the confusion.

Open Letter to Progressives: Let's not let ourselves get "Braziled"

As the Obama-Biden ticket tumbles in the post-convention polls, there is more than a whiff of panic in the air of ProgressiveLand. You can smell it in the blogosphere and in the e-mails, Twitterings and Facebook messages flying around the Internet.

Joan Walsh summed the facts and the feelings up nicely on Salon.com today.

Democrats traumatized by the surreal losses in 2000 and 2004 feel like it's déjà vu all over again, with the sudden surge of John McCain and Sarah Palin in the polls. It's like a bad dream: Even the Obama fundraising juggernaut is stumbling, according to the New York Times, missing its internal targets and having to push harder for cash. Meanwhile, white women have flocked to the ticket with the white female vice president; according to the most recent ABC News poll, Barack Obama had an 8-point lead among white women voters last week; now he's trailing McCain by 12, a 20-point swing in one week.

I'm not writing to say that everything is going to be OK. To do so would be a lie because no one, absolutely no one, knows who is going to win on Nov. 4. Any pollster, any pundit, any beer-drinking buddy from down the street who says that this election is already locked up for John McCain or for Obama is simply a fool.

But I would like to offer some perspective on the psychology of this moment. To understand what may be happening, we have to understand the psychology of competition. Any individual competitor -- or a campaign or political movement -- can defeat itself. Right now, that's what I see as the biggest danger for Obama fans.

To fully explore this idea (and explain my headline), I need to detour into women's soccer. I suspect that Brazil's 1-0 defeat in the gold medal game had more to do with what was going on between the ears of Brazil's players than with what happened on the field.

If you follow the women's game at all, you know that the U.S. once dominated the world (and Brazil), but recently our team has been, at best, a fading power, while the immensely talented Brazil has been ascendant. To make matters worse, our star player, Abby Wambaugh, suffered a broken leg just before the Olympics. Few expected the U.S. to win gold, but we triumphed despite the fact that Brazil played brilliantly for most of the game.

While providing color commentary on the Olympic telecast, former national team star Brandi Chastain offered the best explanation I heard for Brazil's defeat. The U.S. has beaten Brazil so many times in the past that the Brazilians simply couldn't believe that they would win, Chastain said.

Action followed belief.

Reality blossomed out of prophecy.

Today progressives find themselves in the same position as Brazil, except that the stakes are far higher than an Olympic medal.

No one knows what will happen on Nov. 4, but there is one way for progressives to guarantee failure, and that's to remain convinced that we can't win.

For more perspective -- some cheerful and some not -- see these links.

A Democratic pollster puts the latest polls in perspective.

Jonathon Capehart from The Washington Post considers the situation.

CNN does a poll of polls and considers the electoral map.

Tied

The newest poll shows that the Republican National Convention gave John McCain the momentum, but it also shows that the race is now tied. Other polls gave McCain the lead.

All together now: Who decides a tie in a presidential race? Voters do. That's you and me, folks.

Post-convention bounce puts McCain ahead of Obama

[updated]

Now Obama is running to catch up, according to post-convention polls by USA Today/Gallop and three other pollsters. Nate Silver (no relation) tries to make statistical sense of it.

[update 10:58 am Central]

Ana Marie Cox adds more perspective and provides reasons for everyone, both Ds and Rs, to take a deep breath.

Today's Must Reads: The Republican assault on truth

There are two great entries today in the must-read category.

Leonard Pitts:

Yes, we’re all intellectually dishonest on occasion. But no one does it like Republican conservatives. They are to intellectual dishonesty what Michael Jordan was to basketball or the Temptations to harmony: the avatar, the exemplar, the paradigm. They have elevated it beyond hypocrisy and political expedience. They have made it ... art.

Joe Klein:

Maybe I'm getting old, maybe it's that I've seen this act so often before, maybe it's that the people I talk to when I go out on the road really are having a harder time paying for things like health care, gasoline and college tuition, but I'm finding the Republican attempts to derail the conversation from the actual state of the country really depressing and disgraceful this year. They practice Orwellian politics of the crudest sort.