alias Bruce.

DNC Morning-After, Four.

OBAMA'S ACCEPTANCE SPEECH AT INVESCO FIELD: He absolutely nailed it, with equal parts policy substance (although I know he could have given dollar numbers about paying for his program with closed tax loopholes and I wish he had), meteoric rhetoric, and come-and-get-me ferocity (his killer line was, "John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell -- but he won't even follow him to the cave where he lives."), and if I were McCain's people right now I would be very, very afraid.

AL GORE'S SPEECH: A compellingly Gore-ish catalogue of the reasons why 4 more Bush Regime years will be a planetary and political disaster (his best line: "The carbon fuels industry -- big oil and coal -- have a 50-year lease on the Republican Party, and they're drilling it for everything it's worth."), and further proof that while Gore's oratory will never drive a crowd into an ecstatic frenzy, he is formidable in his rebirth as a crusader for saving the human race from its corporate-fueled march toward extinction.

DNC Morning-After, Three.

BILL CLINTON'S SPEECH: A classic, and class, act by a masterful politician that sealed the door against any (public) bitterness in the Clintons' endorsement of Obama, and that also sliced and diced poor unpresidential John McCain with the tools that have made Bill Clinton legendary: outrageous intellect, wit, and raw juice.

JOE BIDEN'S SPEECH: Biden, in his earnest, sometimes-clumsy Biden-ness, was mercifully gaffe-free, and was devastating in his rebutting criticism of Obama's shortage of experience by slamming McCain's utter lack of judgment.

THE ROLL-CALL VOTE: Here's hoping that Hillary Clinton's grandly choreographed role of halting the roll call vote was sufficient to bury the hatchet of some of her supporters' bitterness over a race they, in fact, justifiably lost.

OBAMA'S SURPRISE APPEARANCE AFTER BIDEN'S SPEECH: Tough on Joe's star turn, perhaps, but a ton of fun, and a smart way to inspire the crowd and to pay tribute to the Clintons, who Obama called out by name.

JOURNALISTS (e.g., NPR) REPEATING RNC TALKING POINTS ABOUT OBAMA'S UPCOMING STADIUM SPEECH BEING A FANCY PRODUCTION THAT WILL POTENTIALLY ALIENATE THE MASSES: Plain silly; for you skybox journalists who don't know, a lot of ordinary people routinely enjoy themselves by packing into stadiums to see stuff, which in this case will let a lot more folks participate in the event than the closed-hall conventions to which journalists have become comfortably accustomed.

DNC Morning-After, Two.

HILLARY CLINTON'S SPEECH: A killer, brilliantly composed and paced, passionately delivered argument for unity against the prospect of 4 years of McBush, whatever you believe about her candidacy and her character as a campaigner.

OTHERS WHO SPOKE: They gave what I thought were very nice-sounding speeches, whatever it was they said.

Low Blow.

Here is an email I got this morning from Democrats.com, headlined "McCain Owes America An Alzheimer's Test:"

"While Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama were rocking the Democratic convention in Denver, John McCain made his 13th appearance with Jay Leno to joke about his age.

"But McCain's age is no joke. He will turn 72 on Friday and would be halfway to 73 if elected and sworn in on January 20. That would make him the oldest first-term President ever, two years older than Ronald Reagan.  He has survived four skin cancers (melanomas), including one in 2000 that was classified as Stage IIa.

"McCain is two years older than his father was when he died suddenly of a heart attack at 70. He is 11 years older than his grandfather was when he died suddenly of a heart attack at age 61.

"The United States cannot afford the risk that McCain would die suddenly in the middle of an international crisis.

"Nor can we afford the risk of dementia. 22% of Americans over 70 are affected by mild cognitive impairment, while 13% of Americans over 65 have Alzheimer's. Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's at age 83, but early signs were evident during his first term. Britain's "Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher developed dementia at age 75.

"McCain has never had an Alzheimer's test, even though he has 6 of the 10 warning signs , including his inability to remember recent facts like the number of homes he owns, the $1M lawsuit he filed in 1990, or the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

"John McCain owes America a thorough test for Alzheimer's and cognitive impairment long before Election Day."

Now, come on.

I am as horrified at the prospect of President John "Bush Without the Brain" McCain as anyone. And I'll grant that if the email's claims are factual, there are indeed medical questions to be asked. But that doesn't make them grounds for a political attack ad. Imagine if we had a 72-year-old crusty progressive nominee with McCain's identical medical history, and a righty website sent out a fright-wig email like the one I just quoted. We lefties would be popping capillaries screaming about scare-mongering and character assassination. And we'd be right.

John McCain's voting record, his long-standing witlessness, and his fecklessness on the economy, Iraq, energy, the environment and other issues are reason enough to boot him from the campaign bus as soon as humanly possible. We don't need our so-called allies picking up the Rovian playbook on this one.

Shame on Democrats.com and the overzealous, possibly over-caffeinated operative who made the decision to ship out that email. Don't be surprised if they take a justified shellacking from both the center and the right for this. They've got it coming.

Sheesh. Makes you wonder who your friends are.

DNC Morning-After, One.

Both as a personal challenge and to offer some relief from the torrent of theater commentary on the Democratic Convention, I'm keeping my comments to one sentence apiece.

MICHELLE OBAMA'S SPEECH: A little stilted, perhaps lightened up and toned down by her fleet of consultants, but still her speech is bringing something back to me...  yes, I'm starting to remember again...  right, this is what it's like to have a dynamic, socially conscious, impressive First Lady.

TED KENNEDY'S SPEECH: A triumph for a party squirming to reclaim its principles, and a tour de force for a man with terminal brain cancer who can still raise the roof with the ferocity of an unabashedly liberal warrior.

HILLARY CLINTON'S MANEUVERING: The latest from the Spoiled-Rotten Entitlement Camp – a reported deal by which Clinton's name would be entered into nomination but she would then declare unanimous support for Obama – lowers the  Clinton Contingent to newly churlish levels of divisive self-indulgence.

Keep It Up, Cos.

I know I've hit Bill Cosby pretty hard in this space from time to time. He deserves it. Slamming yo's from the podium for their dysfunction while displaying no such public fury about the nation's misguided policies and its misdirected billions of dollars is an inexcusably fickle stance for a so-called "grandfather" figure of black America. Cosby's fiscal generosity toward Historically Black Colleges and Universities is terrific, but it is no justification for his (professionally convenient?) silence on the immoral behavior of American political leadership when it comes to key matters affecting poor black communities. If you're going to hammer the yo's, Bill, let's hear you also slam the militarized policing of the War on Drugs and the moral and fiscal criminality of the War in Iraq while communities here are starved of vital resources.

But I'm writing today, actually, to heartily praise William H. Cosby, Jr., Ed. D., for remarks he made during a July 31 visit to Baltimore. According to the Baltimore Sun, here are a few excerpts of what Cosby told a large outdoor audience in the (highly black, highly poor) Park Heights neighborhood of the city:

"You may have dropped out of school for whatever reason, but you now realize that's not going to do it. We got something for you. We got community college for you. You may feel so broke, so poor and think, 'I can't become a doctor, I can't become...' But we got something for you: community college."

"It's people in your house just sitting around, and you want them to get up. We're going to suggest community college to them, and they're going to say, 'Well, where it is?' They're going to run through a whole bunch of excuses. Don't get mad. Because the person you're talking to is depressed. And depressed people tend to find excuses to just lay there, wearing out your furniture and burning out your TV. I know you're tired of them, but we're going to get you ready to take them down to community college."

"Your children have no business going to the street for love. There is no love there. The only thing out there is how to write your entrance exam to jail. That's all that's there, lost young men looking for love."

Now, that is the way a grandfather is supposed to talk. Discipline underpinned by truth and understanding.

Way to go, Cos.

Now all we need you to do, Bill, is to get on CNN and be as pissed off about potential education funding being squandered on the Iraq War as you are about yo's laying around in their grandmothers' living rooms.

The Isaac Hayes Movement.

We interrupt this blog for a few words about Isaac Hayes. Dead on Sunday at 65. Co-wrote "Hold On, I'm Comin'" and "Soul Man." Bald-headed soul and his own ideas about chains. I Stand Accused. Theme from Shaft. By the Time I Get to Phoenix. An 18-minute hit song. Rap before it had a name. And yeah, South Park. He had just completed a movie with Bernie Mac, who died Saturday. What to make of that. Why ask. Listen instead.

Silence.

I have spent the past week being quiet. And for the most part, not talking. At all.

It wasn't as hard as I feared. For me, actually, it provided some relief. Which is what I wanted. For us verbal types who tend to be burbling with words whether we mean to or not (and whether others want to hear them or not), shutting up can be our best shot at freedom from ourselves. And doing it in a very remote and beautiful place where cell phones don't work also provides freedom from the piped-in soundtrack of manufactured noise we have learned to live with.

I think there is a lot to be said for spending days or hours or minutes at a time being silent in a very quiet place. For instance:

- You hear stuff that you've been trying to say to yourself for a long time but that never made it through the noise of your daily habits. You know: the habits of what you think you think and what you think you're doing and who you think you are.

- You find out that talk is overrated. You can say, or hear, most things with a fraction of the verbiage we're used to. Saves air. Saves effort. Saves space.

- You are freed from the seamless aural stockade in which we spend so much of our days: TVs and radios and piped-in music and announcements in stores and offices and elevators and restaurants and malls and even public bathrooms. (There is a big shopping center near my house that even pipes music outside into the green spaces where you walk between stores.) Have you noticed that there seems to be a universal corporate agreement that silence is intolerable? What's up with that? I think I have an idea, but that's another blog.

- Your ears work better. You can hear the sound of your clothes rustling as you move, your feet traveling across the ground, your lungs working with no help from you, your blood zooming happily through the veins near your eardrums. Pretty cool. And that's just inside of you. Wait til you go outside and take a walk.

- You can solve problems. Things you've been stuck on big-time. Because you don't have trucks driving through your brain.

- You're reminded that there are underlying levels of good that even W and Cheney and torture and slavery and murder and the terror industry can never, ever destroy. Which is why those levels of good will always persist and ultimately prevail -- to perhaps be met with new versions of W and Cheney, of course, which will again be overcome. A long-term project, continually massive and continually winnable.

- You sleep better. You lie to yourself less. You like people more. You like the world more, in fact. Which gives you even more reason to defend it.

And those are just a few of the good things about silence. If you haven't tried it, I recommend it. In whatever way makes sense to you. And if it's difficult, remember that we are going against the grain of our noise training, and keep at it. It's worth it.

Now it's time for me to be quiet. More soon, about the recent Race and Reconciliation conference, and Emmett Till's cousin, and Eric Clapton, among other things.