ARNOLD KLING has thoughts on Kerry’s strategy.

THE NEW REPUBLIC’S JASON ZENGERLE reports on seeing Joe Wilson at the Democratic convention:

To my ears, Wilson’s explanations rang hollow, either misrepresenting the charges against him or making new claims that were impossible to verify. His performance left me convinced that his credibility is pretty much shot. But the rest of the room didn’t seem to agree. They gave Wilson a prolonged standing ovation after his speech–and the former ambassador had a big smile on his face for the rest of the afternoon. His “road to Boston” may have been bumpy, but you could tell he was glad he came.

Indeed.

SANDY BERGER UPDATE: Trent Telenko has a substantial post with lots of links and analysis.

THE STEM CELL ISSUE must be polling really well for the Democrats:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein began her first official national online petition drive in 12 years in the Senate on Thursday in an effort to persuade President Bush to reverse his August 2001 decision that limited federal support for stem cell research.

Feinstein’s drive came after Ron Reagan, son of the former president, addressed the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday and urged greater support for embryonic stem cell research, which advocates say could create treatments or cures for a host of conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, the ailment that led to the death in June of former President Ronald Reagan.

Stem-cell opponent Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan) is even getting pushback at home. I think the Democrats are right on this issue, and I’m glad they’re pushing it.

UPDATE: For a contrary view, read this piece by Michael Fumento. I tend to like Fumento, when he’s not calling Rich Hailey fat, but I think that there are two issues here. One is the argument — more-or-less made by Ron Reagan, Jr. — that we’d be curing Alzheimer’s now if it werent’ for those mean old Republicans. That’s rather weak. The other is the argument that we’ll be able to do everything we want with adult stem cells anyway, so there’s no harm in banning research with embryonic stem cells. This may turn out to be true eventually, but I’m not convinced that embryonic stem cell research won’t play an important role in getting us there. It’s a bit like supporting a ban on propeller aircraft in 1930, on the ground that everyone will be flying jets soon anyway. . . .

KERRY’S CAMPAIGN STAFF made bogus dirty tricks charges regarding the bunny-suit photo, and as a result gave the story serious legs, most recently in the form of this fashion analysis from the Washington Post:

The suit did not humanize Kerry. It did not make him look tough. Maybe if Kerry had had a surgical mask hanging around his neck, the suit would have given him the heroic glow of a surgeon emerging from the operating theater to announce that the patient will survive. Instead, the image left one wondering whether the suit had a back flap and attached feet. . . .

Being generous, one might argue that Kerry’s intellectual curiosity caused him to ignore how ridiculous he would look in the clean gear. The chance to crawl around in a spaceship was too tempting. Most folks would find that hard to pass up. But he is not most people — he wants to be president. As a general rule, anyone aspiring to be the commander in chief should always try to avoid looking like a Teletubby.

It would have been better to laugh it off.

HUGH HEWITT on convention blogging:

Bloggers acquitted themselves well because they are a very smart group. In fact, I think it is hard to overstate how much better informed Matt Yglesias, Matt Welch, Mickey Kaus, and Tim Blair — all of whom I interviewed on air — are than every elected official I interviewed. These are serious thinkers though with good humor mixed in, and the blogosphere is simply the democratization of punditry, with the result that talent wins.

The arrival of the bloggers is a big deal. They’ll never not be here in the future, and now the question is who gets to blog the debates?

Hmm.

DARFUR UPDATE:

The Sudanese government has carried out a murderous campaign in its Darfur region through deliberate bombing of civilian targets and through support of Arab militias known as janjaweed raping and killing on the ground. Khartoum cannot be trusted to end the killing, though it may see some temporary gain in slowing or pausing it.

Yet current international measures seem to depend on the Sudanese government as a partner.

I agree that this is a dubious approach.

ABC NEWS is running a rather troubling story about mob connections for Kerry fundraiser Stephen Bing:

He is Stephen Bing, a wealthy film producer who, with little fanfare, has managed to steer a total of more than $16 million of his money to Democratic candidates and the supposedly independent groups that support them.

“To most of the people who track money and politics, they’re like, who the hell is Steve Bing?” said Chuck Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog organization.

Bing is perhaps best known for sparking a tabloid frenzy when he publicly expressed doubt that he was the father of actress Elizabeth Hurley’s baby. (A paternity test proved he was indeed the father.) He repeatedly has refused to say why he is funneling millions of dollars to the Democrats.

Lewis thinks it is cause for concern.

“We can identify who the big donors are, but how much do we really know about any of them?” he said.

In fact, Democratic Party officials said they knew nothing about the man who law enforcement officials tell ABC News is Bing’s friend and business partner — Dominic Montemarano, a New York Mafia figure currently in federal prison on racketeering charges.

This seems as if it has the potential for embarrassment. And wasn’t campaign finance “reform” supposed to put an end to this sort of thing? I guess it didn’t work:

“This is money to curry favor, to gain influence,” said Wertheimer. “The very thing that the Watergate laws were designed to stop.”

It’s as if the whole enterprise was a sham.

UPDATE: Much more on Bing and the entertainment-industrial complex’s relationship to politics can be found in this article by Eric Alterman:

The Center for Responsive Politics calculates Bing’s (pre-McCain-Feingold) 2002-cycle donations to the Democrats at $8.7 million. Recently George Soros came to Hollywood to raise money in a series of private billionaire-to-billionaire meetings for America Coming Together and The Media Fund, the coordinated anti-Bush organizations created to fit within the strictures of campaign-finance laws, to which he has promised $10 million. A kind of shadow Democratic Party, ACT and The Media Fund (under the joint fundraising umbrella of Victory Campaign 2004) are 527 organizations: they independently raise and spend money to identify voters and buy air time for advertising. These and other 527 organizations, on the left and the right, have come in for a lot of heat, because contributions are unlimited so long as the organization does not communicate with any candidate or official party committee—and everyone suspects that the concept “does not communicate” has been vitiated by Talmudic parsing. I’m told that after seeing Soros, Bing upped his contribution from $2 million to nearly $7 million, just like that. No wonder the constant refrain from the politically connected in Hollywood is “What we need more than anything is more Steve Bings.”

Maybe, maybe not.

AN INTERESTING REPORT OF OUTSOURCING AT THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION: See, I told you it would be an issue. . . .

JOE WILSON UPDATE: He’s not going away, apparently.

OKAY, THE OTHER THREAD’S CLOSED. Please post your sum-up comments here. And sorry about the delays and double-posts — between traffic, comment, and Internet backups, they’re kind of slow. Please give ’em a while to register.

My take: A not-bad speech, badly delivered. It was short on substance, and long on cliches, but nomination acceptance speeches often are. It was too long, and his delivery was rushed. The sweating and bizarre gestures didn’t help. I don’t think it will swing the momentum in his favor, which is what he needed. It may turn some people off.

UPDATE: No, I don’t know what happened to the other post. It just vanished when I saved this one. Dang. I’m going to see if I can get it back.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

And Ed Morrissey and Stephen Green were liveblogging.

MORE: Still trying to get the old thread back. (This is all that’s left of it). But reader David Schneider-Joseph saved some of it in his RSS reader. There were something like twice this many comments last I noticed, but at least some of it’s saved. I’m posting them separately later, if the thread can’t be saved.

And reader Richard Whitten comments: “McCain-Lieberman 2004!”

STILL MORE: David Hogberg comments here. And there’s this observation: “He was talking to Middle America tonight…in an attempt to identify himself as one of them.” More liveblogging here, and here. And here.

More thoughts on Kerry’s resume here. And there’s this: “The homeless are back! Did they de-camp from Lafayette Park during the Clinton years?”

MORE STILL: Here are some comments, posted below, that are worth repeating:

Kerry is not a horrible person, and neither is Bush. Neither is a particualrly wonderful candidate, and we have to settle for the least harmful instead of the best.

Kerry needed to convince me that he was honestly going to protect us. He dd everything he could, and I now realize that it was always too late, my mind was made up. Kerry has cared about the direction of the wind far too many times for me to ever trust him.

That’s tragic. He seems to really understand what the right answer is, but I imagine some number of people just don’t know if he would trade that for votes or poll numbers.

Yeah, that seems about right to me, too.

Meanwhile Patrick Belton — blogging from the convention center — has a more positive take than a lot of the people linked above. I wonder if Kerry looks better live than on TV. Even Belton has his issues, though: “weak attempt to sex up the fact his staff told him to plug his website: ‘So now I’m going to say something that Franklin Roosevelt could never have said in his acceptance speech: go to johnkerry.com.’ Umm, that’s because they have different names….”

Andrew Sullivan: “I really don’t know what the impact of this speech will be. I doubt it will help him much. I definitely liked Kerry less at the end of it than at the beginning. . . . I think this convention has been a huge success, tempered by a bad candidate.”

Jeff Jarvis: “It was, oddly, a military speech aimed at not using the military. . . . There was nothing to hate in the speech, nothing to love. It was competent.”

Jonah Goldberg: ” It sounds like it was written by a committee. The funny irony is that Kerry is a committee of one.”

Nick Gillespie was liveblogging. And Jesse Walker reflects that he’s not the target audience for these things. Me neither.

James Lileks comments:

“I defended this country as a young man, and I will defend it as President.”

This really intrigues me. I agree that Vietnam was a defense of the United States, inasmuch as we were trying to blunt the advance of Communism. So: only Nixon can go to China. (Only Kirk can go to Chronos, for you Star Trek geeks.) Only Kerry can confirm that Vietnam was a just war. This completely upends conventional wisdom about the Vietnamese war, and requires a certain amount of historical amnesia.

Mickey Kaus: “Good enough! . . . I predict a measurable bounce, if anybody was watching.”

Closed comments on this post now; I’m going to bed. Sorry Jay!

NEXT MORNING UPDATE: Tom Maguire liveblogged it. Excerpt:

“And as President, I will bring back this nation’s time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to.”

Why we had to go to war in Kosovo remains a mystery, but this has been a Kerry line for over a year. [Mini-update – Watching Frank Luntz and his panel of voters on MSNBC, this line is reprised, and the first panelist to comment mentions Yugoslavia, and thinks Kerry is kidding on this. The rebuttal goes national!]

Daniel Drezner: “Given the emphasis on a positive message emanating from this convention, Kerry took harder shots than I expected at Bush — but I thought his foreign policy critique hit home.”

Hugh Hewitt: “[H]e didn’t bore people, which was a real concern. His timing was often off, but not fatally so. So he gets a B. Not a home run, but a solid single. He needed a home run.”

And finally, I’m guessing that this is a typo in Howard Kurtz’s column this morning — or maybe an anonymous typesetter’s comment on what Kurtz notes as the remarkably unanimous praise for the speech from mainstream media:

For USA Today, it’s a series of stirring images:

“The Democrats have gone to a war footing.

“John Kerry accepted the nomination of his party Thursday night with a speech more muscular than any Democratic presidential nominee has given at a convention in four decades.

“{bull} Consider the images in the biographical video that introduced him: snapshots of a young Kerry squinting into the sun with the crew of the swift boat he captained in Vietnam, and of him standing ramrod-straight in a crisp white uniform as a Bronze Star was pinned on his chest.

“{bull} Consider the friend he chose to introduce him: former Georgia senator Max Cleland, a veteran who returned from Vietnam in a wheelchair, both legs and one arm blown off by a grenade.

“{bull} Consider the words he used in his speech: Strength. Tough. Fight. Defend. Force. Attack. Security.”

Heh.

THIS IS A RECONSTRUCTED POST: My open-comment thread letting people liveblog the speech vanished — the server was overloaded and was having problems before they restarted, and that may have something to do with it. Anyway, some of the comments were saved by readers, and here’s a good chunk. Click “more” to read the post and comments.

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PEOPLE ARE BEING CHUCKED OUT OF FLEET CENTER by the thousands, according to OxBlog. Apparently, too many folks are there. It’s probably the ones who snuck in.

IF OSAMA’S CAPTURED TONIGHT, The New York Times is ready.

And no, Ahmed Ghailani [Who? — ed.] doesn’t count.

ANDREW SULLIVAN LAUNCHES A BIT OF A CHEAP SHOT, in this post on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit’s decision upholding the dumb Alabama sex toy law: “Lawrence vs Texas doesn’t seem to be having much of an impact in the South. Surprise, surprise.”

Yet — as I noted before Lawrence was decided — state courts in many southern states had already found that homosexual sodomy was protected by a right of privacy under their state constitutions, in direct opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court’s contrary holding under the federal constitution in Bowers v. Hardwick, which was reversed by Lawrence. The U.S. Supreme Court was a follower, not a leader here. (And, though I don’t mention it in the piece linked above, a Louisiana appellate court even ruled that dildos are protected under that state’s constitution as outside the government’s legitimate regulatory power.) So I think Andrew’s casual slur is misplaced, and unworthy of him.

AMIR TAHERI has posted a critique of Kerry’s foreign policy. One-word summary: “Carteresque.”

It does shed some light on Kerry’s language from tonight’s speech about “responding” to attacks rather than preventing them.

UPDATE: Robert Tagorda wonders whether Kerry & Edwards want “stability,” or democracy in Iraq.

BEGGING TO DIFFER wonders if Kerry will respond to Al Sharpton on reparations? Not if he can help it, is my guess — though reportedly the campaign has said that he supports them.

CONVENTION BLOGGER ADELE STAN REPORTS:

BOSTON–Well, they’ve just passed out excerpts from the text of Kerry’s acceptance speech. I wish I could say that it looks like a knock-out, but if these are any indication, we can expect the same sort of buzz-word loaded stuff we hear on the campaign trail.

Maybe it’ll sound livelier than it looks in print.

JOE KATZMAN has a Darfur roundup. And via the comments there, here’s a draft of a hoped-for Bush speech on Darfur.

ANN ALTHOUSE has a number of interesting posts on the Convention, and also observes that The Daily Show’s coverage isn’t nearly as funny as it ought to be.

THE PRIESTS are nervous.

UPDATE: Reader Dexter Van Zile has further thoughts. Click “more” to read them.

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IS IT THE RETURN OF JOEMENTUM?

TACITUS thinks that the Convention bodes poorly for the Democrats.

UPDATE: More predictions of disaster here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Gerard Van der Leun thinks that Kerry is doomed: “it is no longer a question of Kerry and the Democrats losing in November, but only one of how great and lasting their humiliation and degradation is going to be.”

GREG DJEREJIAN IS UNIMPRESSED with Josh Marshall’s claims of a July surprise being underway.

UPDATE: Jan Haugland has comments, too: “If this recent accusation is true, Bush has already won the terror war decisively, just waiting for the perfect time to cash in the prize.”

I have to say, I’ve never heard of Ahmed Ghailani. Neither, I strongly suspect, have very many potential voters. Which to me makes it absurd to argue that Bush is trying to upstage Kerry by yelling “look! we captured Ahmed Ghailani!” — to an inevitable chorus of “who?”

I mean, Osama, or Zarqawi, maybe. But if you set the threshold this low, then the prediction becomes trivial: “They’ll probably try to make hay out of any Al Qaeda guy they capture close to the Convention.”

Yes. But that’s not news. That’s the normal order of business.

MORE: Tom Maguire observes:

MORE: Actually, the TNR second paragraph was “This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban’s Mullah Mohammed Omar…”, so I can be a bit flexible. But Number 22? No crow for me, thanks, but I may have some Buffalo Wings later. Unless the networks cut away, forget it.

Yeah, like that’s going to happen. Tom has many more useful links. And LT Smash collects many comments, some rather overheated. It seems that the people playing up Ghailani’s importance are mostly Bush critics, which should tell you all you need to know about what’s going on here.

BIG MEDIA BLOGGING: Mark Glaser writes on the sincerest form of flattery.

I’m going to try an experiment in collaborative liveblogging during and after Kerry’s speech (10 ET), so drop by.

UPDATE: David Adesnik:

Even though I am a huge fan of blogs [Full disclosure: I have a blog myself. -ed.], I don’t think we revolutionized coverage of this convention. After all, how can you revolutionize coverage of a non-event? In that sense, our failure was inevitable.

On the other hand, if blogging doesn’t add anything to the mix, why are mainstream journalists starting up blogs by the busload? TNR and TAP set up their blogs quite a while ago, but still felt compelled to set up new blogs dedicated exclusively to the convention.

The Associated Press has set up a convention blog staffed by a Pulitzer Prize winner with 40 years of experience covering conventions. That’s got to be a blogosphere first.

What all of this suggests is that there is an emerging distinction between blogging as a medium and bloggers as people.

Interesting point.