The Convention Blog

When the deal ends it ends totally. After the thursday night session, sitting in my hotel room,  it was satisfying to know that we had gotten to the end. This was made clearer friday morning when suddenly half of the cars that had been in the hotel parking lot were gone, the army was gone [...]

It was given the number of groups lined up to  take him up on the offer. Conservatives would like to, Obama wants to and the protest groups literally did fight this week. McCain did the job that needed to be done even if Conservatives didn’t like it nearly as much as they did with Sarah [...]

Wednesday was diversity night at the RNC with the bulk of the warmup speakers coming from minority communities and/or being female. This kind of signalling is important to show these communities that the Republicans are interested in having their business and it doubtlessly hasn’t ever been more important than it is this year. The 2004 [...]

First, we can’t upload photos from here because the internet connection available just isn’t good enough. I have a bunch of pictures but no way to upload them. Maybe friday. The weather has turned into what one would expect from Minnesota. It is now quite cool here instead of the 95 degrees and heat that [...]

Courtesy of our friends at the MA Republican Party, I have a guest pass for this week’s events here in St. Paul. This means that I can ride on the official buses, sit in the area and generally wander around the Xcel Center. The bus ride is unusual in several ways. First, the bus comes [...]

We have no idea what will happen here after this afternoon. Nobody does. This is because there is no way the Republican Party will allow itself to be seen as being indifferent to human suffering in the wake of a natural disaster for the second time in a few years. This is truly a lose-lose [...]

 Unlike the DNC amusement park based media party, the RNC one was held in the Guthrie Theatre and the adjacent Mill City Museum, a rehabilitated flour mill along the Missippi River. The event had a totally different but equally earnest feel to it than what the DNC party had. This was much more of a [...]

The DNC needed a lot of volunteers to actually pull off the Invesco event on thursday night. In exchange for several hours of work in a menial job, the deal was that a credential would be issued that would get the volunteer into the event. We left Regis at 8:30 in the morning, reported to [...]

He did too and so didn’t Joe Biden. The problem is that the city bus back here stops in front of their hotel. Oh well, time to find another stop. Listening to the end of the DNC last night, I wasn’t surprised Barack Obama showed up because I’d seen him leave his hotel half an [...]

Hillary Clinton was the star of the show at Tuesday’s DNC. People get the obvious part that she wasn’t Ted Kennedy in 1980, that is to say that she tried to unite the party instead of dividing it. She also did a nice job of stressing the contrasts between the Dems and Repubs [...]