Okay, I haven't been watching that much of the convention, but a few thoughts surrounding politics the last few days.

How come the police in Bangkok are so much more restrained than police in Minnesota? The protesters at the convention did what exactly to deserve gassing and so many arrests? Is Thailand the new bastion of liberty in the world? What else will we outsource?

Joe Lieberman kept making me think of Squealer the Pig from Animal Farm, the way his eyes and mouth curled up at the edges. Man, if that speech doesn't get all his ties to Democrats cut, we have no spine.

Palin's lipstick joke - imagine Hillary saying that one and getting called out for using the "gender card". Even uttering the word "kitchen" was over the line last October. How things change - when you're not a Clinton.

Jay Rosen collects a list of likely GOP strategies to control & spin the Palin rollout. Well worth a read.

Byron York over at National Review Online goes where other conservatives don't, wondering how Republicans would respond if say the Democratic candidate brought his unmarried pregnant daughter's young black paramour up on stage.

The email from Wasilla pretty well defines Palin's weaknesses, if Democrats can only get it together enough to nail her on them.

But boy has it been impressive watching the Republicans pull together to portray Palin as a Saint even greater than St. McCain. And she's certainly held her own despite 18 million cracks in her story. But I can see why Republicans might expect the public and the media would suspend disbelief.

Nevertheless, I have a more optimistic feel than I had a few days ago, even though I think McCain and Rove executed a rather brilliant move with the Palin pick. She's rallying the troops, the excitement and media attention is so much better than with any other alternative - as Digby and others note, the first reality show candidate, though some might offer that to Obama - and when she goes down, which I now feel pretty sure she will, it'll be to be lifted up on the cross of the wrongs done by terrorists, liberals (do I repeat myself?), environmentalists and anti-Christians. I think Rove chose building the base over winning the current election, perhaps sacraficing the unwitting McCain in the process. Kay Bailey Hutchinson or Olympia Snowe or Carly Fiorina might have pulled in disaffected Hillary voters. Palin? No way. If Obama can focus on bread-and-butter issues and keep from killing Democrats' morale by giving in on wedge issues, he should have it won. The numbers are with him.

Speaking of Obama, where is he? Why's he so quiet? CNN has already given all its airtime to praising the Republicans - we can't just surrender all the media time to them, especially since some in the media are actually disgruntled and fed up with Republican tactics. 2 months left, no time to take a media sabbatical.

And yeah, Alberto Gonzales was found to have taken highly sensitive information on terrorism home and left it in his briefcase cause he forgot his safe's combination. And of course the Department of Justice decided not to prosecute, unlike say Sandy Berger who provided a field day for conservative pundits with his security breach.

Oh, mocking and irony in a speech? Yes, it's politics, folks. We do it here at TPM, Maureen Dowd has made a career of it as has Rush Limbaugh. It's part of the landscape. Fight back. But be carefull how to fight back against the lies - don't reinforce them as true, make them stand out as character flaws.

Palin's money grabs at state level and overspending $22 million at town level is the perfect analogy of the corporate nanny state. But take a page out of the Rove playbook - you can't just say she's not a reformer - you have to take the reform image and blow it up, bring out the warts and the ugly sides. Sure she's a reformer - she reformed her tax code to allow more pollution and provide windfalls for companies providing useless services and would reform environmental protection to drill drill drill and clearcut clearcut clearcut. She was so busy reforming for corporate America she never quite got around to reforming health care and roads. Kind of like another reformer, George Bush, who never got around to reforming his budget back to a surplus. Reformers - nice people, good intentions, lousy results.

Oh, 5000 people is a *town*, not a *city*, yet Republicans keep trying to sneak the 2nd word in (when not acting like Democrats are demeaning small towns). Alaska - our *biggest state*. I guess Dick Cheney was important coming from our 4th biggest, Wyoming (okay, I don't know if it's 4th and I don't care enough to look it up).

Perhaps someone should start a list of small town mayors who don't think they're ready to take over the presidency of the #1 superpower. "Humble mayors of America, we salute you". Balancing a small budget and building small roads is a valuable job, but somehow not the automatic makings of Abraham Lincoln v. 2.0.

As they say in the software industry - "Palin - just say no to alpha releases".