Walt Handelsman

After Sarah Palin's rousing, red meat speech last night, it'll be hard for McCain to top it tonight.

Sarah Palin sets her sights on the Democrats.

Here's some stuff, looking back at the convention, that'll be on my full-page spread in Newsday tomorrow---Enjoy!

Everyone has an opinion about Palin.

If this is any indication of the in-depth investigatory process of a McCain administration we're in trouble.

John McCain seems to have thrown his main argument against Barack Obama out of his arsenal.

With Hurricane Gustav stealing the early part of the show, the GOP find the silver lining.

A simple midday taxi ride turned into a scary, weird and surreal event when I stepped out of my cab and into a protest rally that went a little crazy. Between watching a group of protesters getting shot with rubber bullets, to interviewing a rooster, to running into Jeb Bush...it was just another day at a national political convention.

Enjoy---Walt

It's not all out-of-control protests and long-winded political speeches. I just scored 2 tickets to a Smashmouth concert! Tonight I'll be head-banging with the GOP!

---Walt

It feels more than a bit strange being at the big story and finding out you're not.

Well, I'm sitting in my Minneapolis hotel room basically tearing up a bunch of funny cartoon ideas that just don't work in light of Gustav bearing down on New Orleans. I spoke with my old editor and close friend, Jim Amoss, at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans last night. I asked what the feeling was down there and he summed it up this way: "Just pray for us, Walt."
The sting of Katrina will never leave the souls of New Orleanians who lived through the storm and suffered, and continue to suffer, through the unbelievably slow rebuilding of their city and their lives. The idea of another killer hurricane hitting almost three years to the day of Katrina must be brutal for them. Many of my friends have fled to Mississippi. Let's just hope that somehow the storm weakens.
Meanwhile...Up here, the delegates, the media and the event planners are in kind of a weird holding pattern. Will the convention be cut short. One rumor is that John McCain may not come at all. Bush and Cheney have cancelled and many of the delegates wandering around the hotel seem out of sorts. They came here to have a party and realize now that it will be a totally different deal.

More later---Walt

Well, after running around at the DNC for a week. I thought yesterday would be a relaxing sleep-in, eat, drink and rest day. But after McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, I found myself sitting in my nasty Denver hotel room all day glued to the TV trying to make some sense of what it all meant.

My first reaction was that McCain had made the purely political pick of a woman to attract disenfranchised Hillary voters and middle-of-the-road soccer moms (er...hockey moms) rather than looking for the most qualified candidate who could step in on Day One if, God forbid, something should happen to him.

It's wonderful that he picked a woman, but is Sarah Palin really the most qualified woman in the GOP universe for the job? I mean, honestly.

Does McCain really think that the millions of women who supported Hillary will vote for him becuase of Palin, regardless of the fact that she is basically the polar opposite of Hillary on the issues that most democratic women supported Hillary for in the first place?

I just ran into a woman buying a paper at the Denver airport who was standing there just shaking her head as she looked at the Palin headlines in the paper. "This is an insult!,"she said. "He must think woman are so stupid"...OUCH!

More from the Twin Cities.

---Walt