A VOLT OF ITS OWN: Mazda’s electric car.

REGRETS AFTER prostate surgery.

IN THE MAIL: Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.

THEY’RE SAYING THAT MCCAIN HAS PICKED SARAH PALIN. The Insta-Wife is ecstatic, which may bode well for that demographic. I’d like it if she had more executive experience, but to be fair, she’s got more than anyone else on either ticket. Is she too liberal on gay rights? Not for me, but maybe for some people.

UPDATE: Sissy Willis has more, including video of an interview of Palin by Larry Kudlow.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Judging from SayUncle, Palin will play well among the crucial bitter gun-clinger demographic. [They prefer to be called ‘blasty-Americans’ now — ed. Oh, good grief.]

Plus, the WaPo’s Ben Pershing on Sarah Palin’s Porkbusting.

The pick is getting good marks from Geraldine Ferraro.

And, Palin as the anti-Ted Stevens.“In an election where the Republican’s biggest liability isn’t Iraq but Ted Stevens and the Alaskan Bridge To Nowhere, McCain took his maverick mantle by the reins and just signed up the Anti Stevens to help him root out the corruption endemic in DC.”

This rather churlish response from the Obama campaign won’t help them — dissing small towns doesn’t fit well after Biden’s “nobody is better than anybody” talk. [LATER: McCain response: “I’d think the Obama people would have learned by now not to belittle the experience of women.”]

By contrast, I just saw Palin praise Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro as pathbreakers. And that “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” line was delightfully sly.

MORE: Reader Kyle Griffin emails: “Did the Obama campaign just accuse the Republican campaign of having a VP with insufficient experience? Was that really smart? Will we see an ad about that tomorrow from the McCain youTube team?” Yeah, it did seem like an unforced error.

An “I told you so” from Katie Granju. [LATER: Granju emails: “I’m telling you. She’s got the goods. Of course, I disagree with her on, well, mostly everything, but she’s super impressive.” Yeah, I’d never seen her speak before, and I was wrong to discount her, though I thought she’d said she didn’t want the job.]

More on Geraldine Ferraro on Palin.

Roger Simon: Obama the stodgy, McCain the Maverick.

An interesting angle from reader Frank Martin:

Question: Which state borders the Former Soviet Union?

Hey, will you look at that?, 2 years of foreign policy experience.

Well, maybe. And reader Joel Mackey writes:

As a conservative, disenfranchised from the Republican party due to their pork barrel spending, I find myself excited at the prospect of Sarah Palin as VP. Her stands against corruption, her focus on fixing issues affecting America, instead of political manuevers to gain and hold power for power’s sake, make me excited to vote for her.

The only memes that grab my attention with the Obama compaign are when he talks about reforming Washington, but his statements are so vague and his friends are so leftwing, that I suspect his rhetoric is code for changing to a more socialistic model. Whereas Palin would bring reform which would more closely resemble what Reagan would enact.

McCain has hit a homerun, possibly a game winning homerun. Her introductory speech brought a positive emotional response from me, very very rare.

If this reaction is common, I guess it’s a better pick than I had thought. But not everyone’s happy. Reader John Shirey writes:

I just don’t get it – if they were going to pick someone with such limited experience, then why not pick Jindal, who to me is one of the few Republicans I actually like (other than his absolutist stance on abortion), and despite his tender age seems extremely competent and well-spoken. The Palin selection also shows how limited his choices really were in that he couldn’t come up with a Biden-type pick (experienced, ready to lead) that somehow wouldn’t piss of the base (Romney, Giuliani, Lieberman, etc.).

As I mentioned earlier, the GOP has a bench problem. Though the Biden pick wasn’t exactly a game-changer.

Lots of thoughts at Ann Althouse — just keep scrolling as she has multiple posts. I like this: “Earth to nameless CNN website commenter: Women are not a minority.”

From Paul Mirengoff, disappointment.

Beldar put up a big background post in June. Ahead of the curve!

David Post: Sarah Who?

Jeff Goldstein notes a rhetorical snare. Heh.

From Josh Marshall, a Palin scandal. Guess the McCain vetters don’t think it amounts to much, kinda like the Biden thing.

And Col. Douglas Mortimer emails that it’s no big deal: “What’s the point of the being the Governor of a whole state if you can’t even get your sister’s asshole ex-husband fired from a gub-ment job? After all, its not like she’s been caught in a sweetheart real estate deal with a convicted felon, you know.”

MCCAIN AND OBAMA TAX PLANS compared.

INSTA-POLL:

UPDATE: Yeah, I left out radio. I’m an idiot.

DOING JOBS OTHER AMERICANS WON’T DO: The Typo Vigilantes.

JEFF TAYLOR ON problems with the banking system. “The present situation is portrayed overwhelmingly as an economic story when, in fact, it is primarily about regulation and public policy—the past 30 years of bipartisan, nearly universally-praised policy to be specific. And it is probably that universality of opinion that keeps misconstruing what is really happening.”

JIM LINDGREN: “Mandatory community service sucks in much that is private and diverse and spits out an excessively homogenized version of the good, a version that would come with a government seal of approval. It’s probably not an accident that many American groups who tend to favor greater government largesse are relatively stingy in their own donations to charity.”

SOLVING YOUR PROBLEMS with help from the Internet.

MICKEY KAUS ON THE SPEECH: “A little flat, and not just because of its now-required State-of-the Union laundry-list passages.”

STUDENT’S FOR MCCAIN. Obviously, we need more apostrophe education.

HERE’S A GALLERY OF PHOTOS BY RANDY NEAL, from Invesco Field last night. Plus, video at his blog.

FACT-CHECKING THE MCCAIN CAMPAIGN’S OBAMA FACT-CHECKS.

GEOTHERMAL PROSPECTS: As Geothermal Energy Heats Up, 5 Next-Gen Projects Take Shape. “Unlike wind and solar power, which are intermittent, geothermal energy is base-load power—available 24/7, 365 days a year. And the price of geothermal energy is stable, unlike economically volatile coal and natural gas. . . . Unlike conventional geothermal power, which has been limited to areas with stores of hot groundwater, EGS power plants create their own geothermal reservoirs by pumping water to hot, dry rocks located tens of thousands of feet under the surface.”

PARSING OBAMA’S GUN RHETORIC:

“We can keep AK-47s out of the hands of criminals.” All right, then! Can I have an AK-47? I’m not a criminal. He’s trying to say we can accommodate gun rights and gun regulations, but he won’t admit to anything near the level of gun regulation he’d support, so he ends up sounding silly.

This is what happens when law professors make speeches, and other law professors listen to them!

SANTA BARBARA’S RESOLVE AGAINST DRILLING FADES: “The speed with which opinions have changed in Santa Barbara County as gasoline prices have climbed has been astonishing. The vote there reinforces, at the local level, a shift evident in national polls and in the delicate willingness of Democratic leaders like Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive presidential nominee, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, to open the door to limited coastal drilling.”

RONALD REAGAN: Yesterday’s poll showed a lopsided Reagan preference, and I hear lots of Reagan-nostalgia on talk radio, etc. But if Republicans want another Reagan, they should recognize that he didn’t come from nowhere, and work on their farm team.

I’VE HEARD OF KNOCKING THEIR SOCKS OFF, but their eyelashes? “Daytime talk show diva and billionaire businesswoman Oprah Winfrey, who played a crucial early primary role in raising the prominence of her fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama, was so moved by her man’s Democratic acceptance speech Thursday night that she cried off her false eyelashes.”

MORE ON GUSTAV from Brendan Loy. It’s starting to look like a Texas landfall.

A LOOK AT missile defense in Poland.

DOG BITES MAN: Media Cheers Obama Speech. “Several members of the media were seen cheering and clapping for Barack Obama as the Illinois senator accepted the Democratic nomination Thursday. Standing on the periphery of the football field serving as the Democratic convention floor, dozens of men and women wearing green media floor passes chanted along with the crowd.”

UPDATE: Related item here.

OBAMA’S SET REALLY DOES LOOK LIKE George W. Bush’s “game show” set from 2004.

HERE’S THE FULL TEXT OF OBAMA’S SPEECH. As with McCain, I have to go to The Corner for these things.

UPDATE: The trademark five-minute take from PoliPundit.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hmm. Will this line play well with Hillary fans? “And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties of starting her own business, I think about my grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle-management, despite years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman.” Maybe, maybe not.

I liked the pro-nuclear line.

ANN ALTHOUSE IS liveblogging the Invesco festivities.

UPDATE: So is Randy Neal.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And Stephen Green is drunkblogging.

MORE: Stephen Green: “Did Obama REALLY just accuse McCain of being unwilling to pursue bin Laden? I don’t like McCain. I don’t (yet) plan to vote for McCain. But I would NOT go around impugning John McCain’s manhood.”

STILL MORE: Don Surber parses.

I’d say not bad, but not as good as Bill Clinton’s speech last night.

TalkLeft: “The language did not soar. The rhetoric, tone and demeanor were down to Earth. I give this speech, in this place, at this time, an A+. ” Stephen Green is less enthusiastic.

Josh Marshall: “I think he’s doing a good job inoculating against next week’s attacks (and responding to the earlier ones) without appearing defensive or reactive.”

Jim Lindgren liked the text.

Megan McArdle: “I was disappointed by the speech. Your mileage may vary, of course. But it was basically standard Democratic Convention Boilerplate: nothing we haven’t seen before from Obama, or for that matter, every Democratic presidential candidate in living memory.”