Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Todd nicely captures what I mean when I say Palin has a libertarian vibe to her:

What strikes me about McCain-Palin is that this is the first all-Western ticket in history. I’m not sure how to say this exactly, except that the vibe you get from them is a distinctive vibe. Just Clinton-Gore in 1992 had a sort of “Southern” vibe. And the western vibe doesn’t feel like the Texas vibe (thank goodness), which is something still distinctive unto itself. In terms of personal style, for instance, George W. Bush and Anne Richards were very similar characters despite their ideological differences.

What is the “western” vibe? This is purely subjective, but to me it is the feeling of no-nonsense, self-reliant, egalitarian, outsiderism, sort of Barry Goldwater-ish. Is it libertarian? Not exactly, but it does have that sort of feeling to it, to me at least. It feels like Goldwaterism. And I think this trickles through to the worldview of the candidates and then to policy. It seems pretty clear to me (especially after last night) that John McCain sees himself as Gary Cooper riding into to town to single-handedly clean-up corruption and gun down the rascals.

So I have watched most of the big time speeches of both conventions. On the Democratic side I saw Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama. On the conservative side I have seen Huckabee, parts of Romney, Fred Thompson, parts of Guiliani, and all of Sarah Palin.

In comparing the two conventions, the one thing that stuck out most prominently for me was the audience chanting USA. In the Republican convention practically every speech brought one if not multiple instances of the crowd chanting ‘U S A’. I don’t remember the crowd ever chanting that during the democratic convention. I honestly think this speaks towards the difference between the two parties. One party is excited about their country and the other one, well not so much.

I think the best speakers go in this order: Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and Mike Hucakabee. By the way relative to Biden and Bill Clinton, I thought Barack’s speech was rather lackluster.

As a side note, I find it somewhat annoying that CNN provide the full speeches for most of the Democratic convention speakers but you can only get snippets from most of the the Republican convention speakers.

UPDATE: McCain’s speech was the blowage. Makes one wonder how he won the nomination.

Over at Poynter Online, this observation rings true for me:

Claiming that media queries about Sarah Palin are being fueled by “every rumor and smear” posted on left-wing websites, John McCain’s top campaign strategist said mainstream journalists are giving “closer scrutiny” to McCain’s running mate than to Barack Obama. Steve Schmidt told Post staffers that the McCain camp is in the middle of the worst media “feeding frenzy” he’s ever seen.

The reason for such careful scrutiny when the presidential candidate has been virtually ignored in comparison? I think Fred Thompson nails the reason right on the head.

Link: sevenload.com

We are seeing such a strong reaction because the people on the left know that Palin is an excellent choice. She excites the base. Which is problematic since Obama is going to struggle with getting the moderate vote. The best chance he has at getting elected is a strong democratic base turnout and weak republican base turnout. With Palin in play it’s likely that the conservative base’s turnout will increase which combined with McCain capturing the moderate vote places Obama’s chances at getting elected in much dicey water.

Palin is scrutinized in a way Barack never has been because she is credible threat to his being elected.

Over at the The Volokh Conspiracy, David Benstein nicely explains why I can’t get fully behind McCain:

After eight years of “no child left behind,” Medicare expansion, aid to Africa for AIDS, drug warring, abstinence education, nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth and so on, and more of the same promised by McCain, the better question is, is there any problem that Bush and McCain DON’T think government should solve?

Upon discovering some problem, if you determine that the solution is the federal goverment, then might I suggest to you that you go back to the drawing board and actually find a solution.

Why do so many people insist on using the societal organization that has all the guns to implement their ’solutions’ to their ‘problems’? Silly me, it seems I just answered my own question.

Well at lest Governor Palin seems to be close to an actual libertarian. If only she were the presidential candidate. Now that’s someone I could vote for.

No not the kick ass Nine Inch Nails song. Apparently the sun has been producing less than expected amount of sunspots.

According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.

Illustrating the usefulness of experts:

In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.

The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.

Astronomers have being studying sunspots for four hundred years. And yet they can’t predict how many sunspots will occur in the month of August. This makes me want to support legislation for reducing global warming. Scientist can’t predict a relatively simple phenomenon compared to the complexities of global warming, nevertheless we should apply austere regulations on industry anyway.

By they way, whose ready for global cooling? This was the most moderate August of my thirty years of life. It can only mean one thing: Global Cooling. We need to increase industry to increase the greenhouse affect to hold onto as much of the scant amount of heat the sun is going to be providing us. I support legislation clearing cutting down whole forests. We can’t have those damn plants converting all of our precious CO2 to oxygen. We need that CO2 to stay warm.