I cried several times during Michelle Obama’s speech last night to delegates at the Democratic National Convention and when the cameras panned the crowd I saw several other women wiping tears from their eyes as well. I thought Mrs. Obama did a masterful job of telling her life story and providing a visual picture of the embodiment of the American dream. There’s so much about Michelle and Barack Obama’s lives that should resonate with the American public, Michelle’s father’s struggle with multiple sclerosis, her parents sacrifices to put both their children through college. Barack’s broken family and his mother’s battle to provide for her children as a single mother. I was especially touched by Michelle Obama’s description of her husband’s reaction to the arrival of their first child, “He’s the same man who drove me and our new baby daughter home from the hospital ten years ago this summer, inching along at a snail’s pace, peering anxiously at us in the rearview mirror, feeling the whole weight of her future in his hands, determined to give her everything he’d struggled so hard for himself, determined to give her what he never had: the affirming embrace of a father’s love.” That story should be relatable to every parent in America, especially those who didn’t grow up in a two parent household.

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Updated on Friday, August 15, 2008 at 09:58PM by Roxanne Walker

So the G.O.P. has found its issue for the 2008 election. For the next three months the party plans to keep chanting: “Drill here! Drill now! Drill here! Drill now! Four legs good, two legs bad!” O.K., I added that last part. And the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid. Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives. What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

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Updated on Thursday, August 7, 2008 at 02:06PM by Roxanne Walker

Updated on Thursday, August 7, 2008 at 02:39PM by Roxanne Walker

Updated on Thursday, August 7, 2008 at 09:48PM by Roxanne Walker

Forging the missing case for war In further chronicles of Bush government deceit, author Ron Suskind drops a bombshell: The White House ordered the CIA to fake a letter linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida. By Louis Bayard Aug. 06, 2008 | Ron Suskind is really good at burying a lede. Diligent, linear-minded readers will have to ford through 370 pages of his alternately incisive and gauzy book, “The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism,” to reach the accusation that has set the nation’s blogs abuzz. In September 2003, according to Suskind, CIA officials — at the direct command of then-CIA director George Tenet and at the behest of the White House — deliberately forged a backdated letter from Iraqi security chief Tahir Jalil Habbush to Saddam Hussein. The phony letter claimed that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had trained for his mission in Iraq and that al-Qaida had facilitated mysterious shipments from Niger to Iraq. The letter was the “slam dunk” the Bush administration had been seeking so desperately: evidence of a direct operational link between al-Qaida and Saddam’s regime.

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