Obama’s keynote

I’m watching the Democratic Convention. Missed it last night, so I didn’t get to see Clinton and Gore.

Howard Dean seemed a bit lackluster; I was hoping for more fire. I got the fire from Barack Obama, an assemblyman a state senator from Illinois who’s running for the Senate. Man, what a speaker! I’m not the only one who’s impressed; his campaign website’s just gone down, presumably under the load of millions of people checking him out at the same time right after his keynote speech. Here’s a taste:

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America — there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

(And yeah, that’s Obama.)

If you missed it, here’s a RealPlayer stream.

I guess that’s why it needs calibration

Trying to calibrate my laptop’s battery by running it all the way down. The indicator’s been showing a tiny sliver of red for like half an hour now, and I got the shutting down in a few minutes if you don’t plug me in message like ten minutes ago, but it’s still going.

And here’s a link to the Videos page for the Democratic Convention, if you want to watch any of the speeches.