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The minority count at the RNC last night, from ABC’s primetime hour of coverage:

This contrasts with Tuesday night, where a grand total of 1 Latino was seen (the same guy as seen on Wednesday night).

Is it just me or is the Republican party convention’s set at the Xcel Center really lame in comparison to the incredibly cool one in Denver? It seems to make everything so incredibly distant, whereas the DNC’s wraparound video screens brought everyone close to the stage.

Do visuals like this matter? I dunno!

Turns out I wasn’t using the right numbers for Palin’s term as mayor of Wasilla, nor was I accounting for her 4 years on the Wasilla city council. This post reflects the new numbers, 10 years of executive experience and 4 years of legislative experience.

10X > 11Y

That reduces to:

X > 1.1

Let’s be generous and just round that up to 1.5. The results for both tickets would be:

If I’ve done the math right, using the Republicans’ own screwily absurd logic about executive experience, it looks like in total the two tickets are balanced in regard to “executive experience equivalence.”

I think this exercise has demonstrated that this whole Republican talking point is about as absurd as any we’ve ever heard from them (though the “Alaska is next to Russia” one is a pretty close second).

I can’t help but wonder what you’d find out if you did a side-by-side comparison of the careers of Alaska governor Sarah Palin and Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius.

I ask because I’m struck by how entangled Palin has turned out to be in corruption, abuse of power and your basic pork-barrel politics-as-usual. Is this just par for the course for any ambitious governor? Or is this something specific to ambitious Republicans? Or is it simply an Alaska thing, i.e., Alaska vying to replace Louisiana as the quintessential example of corrupt statewide pork-barrel politics?

I’ve been continuing to think on the absurdity of the claim that Sarah Palin’s experience as an executive trumps Obama’s experience as a legislator. The whole argument comes down to an assertion that it doesn’t matter what that experience is — Palin has no foreign policy experience of any kind, but Obama has served on the Foreign Relations committee — all that matters is whether it’s executive experience or the vastly inferior legislative experience.

I recognize that in my original post, I failed to include Palin’s service as mayor of the metropolis of Wasilla, Alaska. So, in the interests of fairness, let’s re-run the numbers accounting for her entire executive experience. The new equation would be:

6X > 11Y

That reduces to:

X > 1.8333

Let’s be generous and just round that up to 2.5. The results for both tickets would be:

So, it really doesn’t change anything. The Democratic ticket still has more executive-equivalent years of experience, which just goes to show how absurd the whole attempt at painting Palin’s experience as comparable to Obama’s, Biden’s and McCain’s really is.

As if one needed any more evidence than the initial concept itself!

I had a dream last night. You will conclude after you hear about it that I’m a very strange person, indeed.

The dream takes place at the Republican National Convention (didn’t I tell you I was weird?), and an RNC delegate who is holding forth for the TV cameras on Barack Obama says “Obama is gay.” Immediately, a Democrat (who happens to be standing nearby) punches the RNC delegate in the stomach, and says “You can say whatever you want, but don’t tell lies.”

Now, wouldn’t it be nice if every time a Republican lied to the media somebody was there to punch them in the stomach? It would certainly cut down on the number of Republicans who have a habit of spreading falsehoods in the media.

Alternatively, it could be handled like this:

Campbell Brown impersonates an actual journalist

I’d sure like to see much more of that kind of thing from our tradional media outlets!

Surprisingly, this is one question that Google can’t answer reliably, it seems.

Why do I ask?

Well, first off, McCain himself is notoriously short at a pixie-ish 5′ 7″ tall. But the selection of Palin is so baffling that I’m looking for any plausible reason why McCain would have chosen her for VP, since she’s not only manifestly unqualified, but is also obviously completely uninterested in national issues, and laden with a whole lot of very problematic baggage in her personal and political history.

Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney are reported (neither at particularly reliable websites) to be 6′ 2″, and Joe Lieberman is reported to be 5′ 9″ tall. I can’t seem to find any information about how tall Tom Ridge is.

But Palin is said to be just over 5′ tall.

So, that must be why she was chosen — she was the only candidate who was shorter than McCain himself.

John McCain said yesterday in comments that were widely excerpted in news reports that I saw:

It’s time for us to take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats.

(or something to that effect)

This seems to me to imply that while Republicans are being Republicans, they don’t have the interests of the country as a whole foremost in their minds. This would be an admission on McCain’s part that would confirm what I’ve believed about the Republican party at least since the impeachment debacle.

So, if her daughter is really five months pregnant now, that means it’s virtually impossible for the daughter to have been the mother of Trig Palin (the child with Down Syndrome born just over 5 months ago).

OK, so the rumors about Palin’s fake pregnancy are scotched, but there are still plenty of details about the actual chain of events of the last few hours leading up to the birth of Palin’s last child that would make me question a parent’s judgment:

1. When she began leaking amniotic fluid at 4am, she decided to go ahead and deliver the address she was scheduled to deliver the next day to a Texas audience
2. Rather than going directly to a Dallas medical center for care immediately after the address, she instead went to the airport, to board a plane for an 8-hour flight back to Alaska.
3. Once in Alaska, rather than availing herself of one of the large medical centers in Anchorage, she instead chose to travel back to Wasilla, an hour away, to deliver the child in the small local hospital in her home town.

Now, the weirdness of these decisions in regard to the health and safety of the baby (who was one month premature) is bad enough in the context of a coverup — in that case, at least, it would be plausible that they’d decided to take these risks in order to maintain the coverup. But if the Governor were the actual mother, what in the hell was she thinking by endangering the life of a child that she already knew faced lots of hurdles in terms of health?

Even leaving aside the optics of a pro-choice, anti-sex ed. mother having a child get pregnant out of wedlock, I can’t see how the refutation of the earlier rumor gets her out of hot water on the question of judgment. She looks more and more to me like the kind of caricature career mother that Democrats are so often accused by Republicans of being — it was more important to her to deliver that political speech in Texas than it was to make sure her baby was born in the safest possible and least risky environment.

How can the Palin choice attract mothers and women when she appears to be such a bad one? At the very least, it calls into question her judgment under pressure.

Let’s see.

Republicans are claiming that Sarah Palin’s executive experience trumps Obama’s legislative experience. It should be possible, then, to figure out approximately how many years of legislative experience equal a year of executive experience.

Obama has been a legislator since 1997, so that’s 11 years.

Palin’s been a governor for 2 years.

So, 2 years of executive experience is greater than 11 years of legislative service.

That would be, where X is a year of executive experience and Y a year of leglslative experience:

2X > 11Y

That reduces to:

X > 6.5Y

So, this means that McCain, with 26 years of legislative experience, has the equivalent of 4 years of executive experience, so that means Palin has fully HALF the experience of McCain.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, has 35 years of legislative experience, which would be the equivalent of slightly less than 5.5 years of executive experience.

This would mean that the Republicans have a total of 6 years of executive experience, and the Democrats 7.5.

Hmm. Something can’t be right here.

Mathematically, the equation is not that Palin has the same experience as Obama, but that she has more experience. That means that all of the Senators’ numbers are less than the calculated values.

Say the multiplier is 8 (i.e., Palin’s experience would be equivalent to 16 years in the legislature). In that case, the numbers would be like this:

Er, um, well, that can’t possibly be right.

In fact, there is no way to say that Palin’s executive experience trumps Obama’s legislative experience without also demonstrating that the Obama/Biden team has more experience between them than the McCain/Palin team.

Unless, of course, you throw in POW years as equivalent to executive experience.

How much you wanna bet some Republican moron will suggest exactly that?