It’s been a long time since I’ve rested as well as I did last night.

Thank you, Bill Clinton, for delivering a ringing, unequivocal endorsement of Barack Obama. Thank you, Barack Obama, for choosing a running mate who is not afraid to speak truth to power. Joe Biden finally confronted the debacle that Republicans have visited upon the American people. And he addressed directly the “issue” of Barack Obama’s patriotism by introducing his great uncle who helped liberate Buchenwald. Nice touch.

Follow up:

Admittedly, there was a lot of testosterone in the room, and that makes me uneasy. But I’ll take that if it banishes the sniping about gender and race that has been the undercurrent of the last few months and upon which Republicans feed when they run out of solid ideas—and that happened a long time ago.

I’ll leave it to others to celebrate the incredible rhetoric that filled the convention hall last night. Truly, it should be celebrated, because it represents the highest ideals of the Democratic Party.

As promised, I moved outside my PBS comfort zone and looked around at the media. First, I went to CNN, my second choice for televised news. Then, I thought I’d mosey over to the networks to see how they were handling the swelling tension of Bill Clinton’s anticipated arrival. What I found at NBC was “America’s Got Talent,” and they weren’t talking politics. At ABC, it was “Wife Swap,” and at CBS that compelling feature “America’s Greatest Dog”. I went back to CNN just in time to hear Anderson Cooper (or was it John King?) grouse that the networks would only devote an hour to convention coverage. A quick check of CNBC revealed, “On the Money,” and I when I went to FOX and MSNBC, the commercials were so long that I flipped back to CNN to catch the former president’s speech without waiting to sample their coverage.

At CNN, the commercials were instructive. I saw two McCain ads bashing Obama. The first was a neocon nightmare aimed at the most uncompromising of Zionist voters: it prominently featured an Israeli flag and quoted Obama as saying that Iran was a tiny country that posed no threat to the United States and that this made him “dangerous.” The second has been widely discussed in the media: it features numerous quotes by Hillary Clinton saying negative things about Obama during their primary battle.

The other CNN commercials were paid for by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (construct your own snarky descriptor); AT&T, the telecommunications giant all-too-willing to share customer records with the feds; the environmentally-caring folks at Exxon Mobil; the Society for Human Resources Management. a group with headquarters in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, where members can buy an Employer’s Guide to Union Campaigns for $239; and General Motors, which featured the $46,000 (is that a reduction?) Yukon Denali, an SUV that gets 14 miles to the gallon.

In other words, the Republican Party and its supporters paid CNN to televise the Democratic Convention. They must have thought that whatever viewers saw last night would be enough to convince them to pull the lever (or, regrettably, touch the screen) for McCain come November.

More sleepless nights ahead…