For a few years of my life, I worked part time as a fact-checker at a magazine. It's a tedious job, going through text and ferreting out mistakes, exaggerations, or outright falsehoods. Thankfully, when it comes to politics, we have the services of the good people at Factcheck.org, a non-partisan truth squad who make it their business to sound the alarm when politicians start spinning their improbable yarns. This week, they've dissected the speeches at the GOP convention, and their conclusions aren't pretty.

Among the worst of the untruths were those put forth by Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani.
John McCain took some liberties himself, mind you.

For comparison sake, you can see what they made of Barack Obama's convention speech as well.

They conclude that while both McCain and Obama stretched the truth here and there, Palin and Giuliani were guilty of outright fibs.

According to Vanity Fair, Cindy McCain's outfit from Tuesday night's convention cost more than many people's entire domicile, including my own:

Cindy McCain Oscar de la Renta dress: $3,000

Chanel J12 White Ceramic Watch: $4,500

Three-carat diamond earrings: $280,000

Four-strand pearl necklace: $11,000–$25,000

Shoes, designer unknown: $600

Total: Between $299,100 and $313,100 Wow! No wonder McCain has so many houses: his wife has the price of a Scottsdale split-level hanging from her ears.

(All prices except Laura's shoes and Cindy's watch are estimates, and the jewelry prices are based on the assumption that the pieces are real.)

I wonder if Cindy got stuck with one of those sub-prime mortgages on that outfit?

Tommy Christopher co-hosts "Unusable Signal" on BlogTalkRadio, debuting Friday at 11pm. Click here for the Unusable Signal homepage.

The Nielsen numbers are preliminary but it appears more people tuned into watch John McCain's speech last night than did Barack Obama's last week. But only barely. About 38.9 million viewers saw the McCain speech, compared to about 38.38 million for Obama. The ratings appear to mirror the national polling, which consistently has the two candidates neck and neck.

Across all broadcast networks Thursday, Sen. McCain's speech ended the night with a 4.8 rating/7 share, compared to Sen. Obama's 4.3/7 average, according to overnight numbers from metered households in 55 U.S. markets measured by Nielsen.

The GOP can crow and the McCain camp is no doubt encouraged they made the right choice picking Sarah Palin. She's got the Republican base fired up and they tuned in to the convention in droves.

Abuse of power usually begets obstruction of justice, whether in Washington DC or Alaska. Brian Ross does his job:



And the Anchorage Daily News has more:

Bottom Line: Gov. Palin is stonewalling on Troopergate; the Legislature [Alaska's] should issue subpoenas.

We knew this was coming.

A number of pro-choice groups are targeting Sarah Palin, spending a ton of cash in an effort to make sure women - particularly undecided voters, no doubt - don't take too much of a liking to the feisty Alaska governor and cast their vote for John McCain in November.

Three major advocates of abortion rights are planning to spend nearly $30 million to defeat John McCain's run for president, citing his new running mate as the core reason, The Hill reports.

NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood and EMILY's List plan to spend $30 million, combined, to defeat McCain's presidential run, citing his anti-abortion running mate as the main reason.

"This is the most anti-choice ticket in history of the Republican Party," NARAL Political Director Beth Shipp told the paper. "McCain put someone as outside the mainstream as you can on his ticket, which is Sarah Palin."

That was one of the things I wondered as I watched John McCain's speech last night, along with how many jokers were busy inserting McCain into scenes from "Road House" with the aid of McCain's handy green, then blue, backgrounds. ("You're gonna be my regular Saturday night thing..." ugh.)

I surmised that it belonged to the McCains' co-pilot, or was used to house the army of butlers that serves them, then are hunted as human quarry for the amusement of guests. The color was set to Bollywood garish, perhaps to fool us into thinking we had already fallen asleep and begun to dream.

Well, TPM has solved the Mystery of McCain Mansion. It turns out to be a middle school. No, that's not where he met Cindy.

Well, several readers have written in to tell me that the building is actually the main building on the campus of the Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, California. And sure enough, this page on the school's website makes it pretty clear that they're correct.

The article goes on to surmise that the person in charge of setting this up must have been looking for a picture of Walter Reed Army Hospital, and just picked whatever came up.

Could this be the same person responsible for RecipeGate? Tucker Bounds assured me that intern had been "dealt with."

Tommy Christopher co-hosts "Unusable Signal" on BlogTalkRadio, debuting Friday at 11pm. Click here for the Unusable Signal homepage.

Welcome back to The Palin Machine.

There's a story going around that Sarah Palin, during Wednesday night's speech, had to fly blind from about halfway through the speech on. The teleprompter supposedly sped through the applause lines, and Palin had to channel her inner Robin Williams to ad-lib her way through it.

Not so, say Politico's Jonathan Martin and a commenter at Yes to Democracy. From Politico:

Perhaps there were moments where it scrolled slightly past her exact point in the speech. But I was sitting in the press section next to the stage, within easy eyeshot of the teleprompter. I frequently looked up at the machine, and there was no serious malfunction. A top convention planner confirms this morning that there were no major problems.

Bob Schlesinger from US News corroborates Martin almost exactly. Then, from AB at Yes to Democracy, who did an analysis of the speech as written versus as delivered:

Some superficial differences show up because the text is formatted slightly differently in both versions, and there are a very few extremely minor differences such as they're/they are, but guess what?

The only real difference is that in the speech delivered, she ad-libbed the pitbull/lipstick joke she's used before.

Of course, this whole debate misses the point, which is that we are debating the merits of a Vice Presidential candidate based on her level of skill relative to Ron Burgundy. Come to think of it, that's not a bad comparison. "I'm the Vice President?"

Tommy Christopher co-hosts "Unusable Signal" on BlogTalkRadio, debuting Friday at 11pm. Click here for the Unusable Signal homepage.

According to ABC News' Jake Tapper, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin sent a fundraising solicitation that included accusations of "attacks directed toward me, my family and John McCain" by "Obama/Biden Democrats." (As opposed to what, Starsky/Hutch Democrats?)

Tapper asked the McCain campaign to provide examples of the "Obama/Biden Democrats" she was referring to.

The response I got was that Obama spokesman Mark Bubriski erroneously attacked Palin as a supporter of Pat Buchanan.

That's it. That's the evidence.

An attack on Palin herself.

In other words, they can't name one person affiliated with the Obama-Biden campaign who attacked the Palin family.

There's no confirmation at this hour that Palin's response to the Buchanan smear was, "That pinko Lib? No way!"

This isn't the first time Palin has used her family for political reasons this week, and it surely won't be the last. Given Fred Thompson's weird rock-concert-intro "when you live in a box" voice-over, there doesn't seem to be anything too sacred for this ticket to exploit. >

Tommy Christopher co-hosts "Unusable Signal" on BlogTalkRadio, debuting Friday at 11pm. Click here for the Unusable Signal homepage.

A classic Freudian slip from Tom Ridge, "John Bush":

Sarah Palin's nomination was announced 8 days ago. Since then, she's given some speeches, but hasn't taken any questions. John McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden will submit themselves to media scrutiny on the weekend talk show circuit. But Palin will be a no-show. In fact, after a brief campaign swing, Palin will be heading back to Alaska. All of this leads one to the obvious question...