Pun Salad

Some bloggers enthusiastically blog about, even live-blog, convention speeches. Good for them, but I can't stand to watch speeches, either Democrat or Republican. Evaluating them (example) is much like being the cowpie judge at the state fair, awarding points for consistency, shape, aroma, and color. I'll pass.

So:

• Shawn Macomber lends support to the thesis that way too many kids were irretrievably harmed by exposure to a certain author.

• Dave Barry is on the convention floor, and provides a minute-by-minute:

  7:41 -- I step onto the convention floor and am immediately caught up in a surging mass of humanity consisting of every Democrat who has ever lived. Grover Cleveland is in here somewhere. Yes, he died in 1908, but the crowd is so dense that he is unable to fall down.

  7:43 -- Somewhere in the distance is the podium, where an important Democratic dignitary is speaking about Change. He is for it. Down here on the floor, we are wishing that our fellow surgers would change to a stronger deodorant. We are pressed together so tightly that some of us could easily wind up pregnant by as many as eight different people, and I am not ruling out Grover.

  Dave deserves our thanks for throwing himself on the live grenade that is political convention coverage. Click the link for his description of "strong and direct buttular contact" with a famous politician.

• Meanwhile, Barack Obama is displaying his devotion to the principle of free speech:

  Barack Obama is striking back fiercely and swiftly to stamp out an ad that links him to a 1960s radical, eager to demonstrate a far more aggressive response to attacks than John Kerry did when faced with the 2004 "Swift Boat" campaign.

  Obama not only aired a response ad to the spot linking him to William Ayers, but he sought to block stations the commercial by warning station managers and asking the Justice Department to intervene. The campaign also planned to compel advertisers to pressure stations that continue to air the anti-Obama commercial.

• Great. So fortunately the other guy believes in the First Amendment, right? Well…

  In April 2006, when Don Imus still roamed the airwaves, he asked Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., about the charge that his campaign-finance legislation violated the First Amendment.

  McCain’s response was revealing. “I would rather have a clean government than one where quote 'First Amendment rights' are being respected that has become corrupt,” McCain said. “If I had my choice, I’d rather have the clean government.”

  So it looks as if whoever takes the oath on January 20 will be needing to cross their fingers when it comes to that part about "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

• Plus which, I doubt either candidate will take a strong stand on the birdwatching menace.