Update: The bad reviews are universal. Worse than bad. They made a sex joke about their grandmother? Even the conservative press is appalled. Send them off to graduate school (not Iraq, we should be asking people to come home from there, not to go there.)

************************

Amy Sullivan and Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly say the Bush daughters were a bust. So did the Fox News commentators tonight.

Even Conservatives Hated Them....The verdict from the Fox News crew on Jenna, Barbara, and Laura is not good.
Bill Kristol: "The last half hour did not help, as far as I can tell, Bush's campaign for reelection."
Mort Kondracke: "Those two girls were ditzes. I'm surprised they were allowed on the program."
Fred Barnes: "I think she [Laura] had no place up there or the daughters either....Their mother said they'll be pursuing their own careers. I would advise them to look in some field other than comedy."

So do the TalkLeft commenters in the open thread on tonight's speeches. One wrote:

Did anyone watch John Kerry's speech today? Both Fox News and MSNBC played it live...I think for the duration. It was long. He promised veterans he'd protect their rights when they came home. No fire though. He needs to ratch it up a notch or two.

Finally, this morning, the Dems have been getting some rebuttal air time. Their rapid response team is beginning to show up on Fox and MSNBC. Where has it been so far? I commented on this last night while watching Hardball. So did Daily Kos. Better late than never, but they have a lot of catching up to do.

Bump and Update: As anticipated, the Government asked the Court to toss the Detroit terror convictions:

********************
original post from midnight:

Admitting that the Government withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense, the Department of Justice will ask the Judge in the Detroit terror trial to throw out the convictions.

The convictions of two Moroccan immigrants for conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism and of a third man on document fraud charges represented one of the government's most significant victories in the war on terrorism in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

....Rosen and the Justice Department have been investigating allegations that two assistant U.S. attorneys withheld information from the defense. The department is continuing an investigation of one of the prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino, who has responded by suing the government. He alleges that Justice undermined the prosecution and sought to make him the scapegoat.

Attorney General John Ashcroft must share the blame for this travesty of a trial. So must Richard Convertino, who is no whistle-blower in our book. More here and here.

This morning a handful of Act Up protesters got floor passes and inside the Garden to wave some signs on the floor. The RNC officials looked baffled. The protesters were quickly jumped on --actually it looked on tv like people were swatting at them like flies--and tv news reports some have been "detained" by authorities.

If you have more details, please put them in the comments.

As an aside, Jerome Armstrong from MY DD got a press pass for a few hours yesterday and listened to the speeches. He sounds disgusted with the Republicans. Go read.

Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post analyzes Guliani's peech and its attacks on Kerry and finds them misleading because they were taken out of context.

Gov. Arnold must be too wrapped up in his new position as leader of the GOP. While concentrating on "girlie men" at the RNC, he abandoned his obligation to protect his state's juveniles.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill Tuesday that sought to help judges decide which juvenile crimes were serious enough to merit prosecution in adult court. In a statement, Schwarzenegger said the bill would "seriously compromise public safety" by preventing some of California's most dangerous juvenile offenders from being tried as adults. He also suggested that the measure would erode a ballot initiative, approved by voters in 2000, that sought to toughen penalties for young criminals.

....The measure was endorsed by 10 organizations, including the state's association of Juvenile Court judges and the Judicial Council. In a letter, the Juvenile Court judges said the bill would have helped them "better exercise their discretion in determining whether a child" should be tried in adult court.

....The bill's author, state Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), said "the governor made a mistake." She said her measure, which had extensive support, was merely designed to guide judges and eliminate ambiguity in the law. Advocates of the bill agreed, and said they were puzzled and surprised by the governor's veto. "This is totally bizarre," said Carole Shauffer, an attorney with the nonprofit Youth Law Center in San Francisco. "It appears to be a knee-jerk reaction to juvenile crime rather than a thoughtful response to this particular issue."

Arnie, get back to Sacremento and right this wrong.

Michael Scherer in Mother Jones hits what's missing from the Republican Convention and Madison Square Garden--

There's something missing from this convention. Call it energy, spirit. Call it people....There's an aura of weirdness about this convention. It's different from last month's Democratic show in Boston.

How so?

On the first night in Boston, Bill Clinton had sucked every bit of air out of the FleetCenter. The journalists packed their risers; the nosebleed seats overflowed. You couldn't carry on a conversation. It was an early climax, not topped by either Kerry or Edwards, but it set the tone for the four days.

I agree with Scherer's description of the Fleet Center, so I have no reason to doubt his description of the Garden. I can say that outside the vicinity of the Garden, New York seems like a shadow of its normal self. Traffic isn't bad. I went from midtown to SoHo tonight in almost no time. SoHo had street parking available. There are no hordes of people, and that has included my trips to the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, midtown and Hell's Kitchen.

While there are plenty of tourists in Times Square, they don't seem connected to the convention. They seem mostly interested in eating their ice cream cones. All over town, looking inside restaurant windows, I've seen plenty of empty tables. Glancing up the avenues in the late afternoon and early evening, it seems most taxis have their "available" lights on.

There's still two days to go, so I don't want to proclaim New York a snooze yet, but I have to say, it's leaning that way.

Laura Bush, Stepford wife. Why isn't anyone commenting on her fairly obvious botox job and not so obvious but probable lip filler.... It was fair game for Theresa Heinz Kerry. Is there a "don't ask, don't tell" policy going on?

New York police report that 1,000 protesters were arrested Tuesday:

Nearly 1,000 protesters were arrested across Manhattan on Tuesday as swarms of activists massed in the streets for marches to the site of the Republican convention - by far the biggest day of arrests since the demonstrations began last week.

There were no immediate reports of violence, but police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said officers showed "great restraint in the face of relentless provocation" by the protesters.

No violence? Then why were they arrested? Wasn't it just last week Mayor Bloomberg was offering shopping discounts to non-violent protesters as a welcoming gesture?

Heightened security against the protests has turned Manhattan into a crazy-quilt of barriers, heavily armed police and street-corner activists.....Outside the New York Public Library, in the streets near the famed Herald Square and at the site of the fallen World Trade Center, demonstrators pointed themselves toward Madison Square Garden and promised to get their message across that they want President Bush out of office.

On the library's stone steps, hundreds of protesters gathered for the march. Verbal confrontations erupted as police moved them away from the library's front door and wrapped the block in orange netting, and about 75 people were taken into custody before the crowd thinned out.

From Garrison Keillor speaks against remaining neutral in the face of the Republican threat:

This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as
embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and
communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads.
They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen
in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and
they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by
Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln
spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to
death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag
burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their
sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and
mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate
takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

His point? Don't stay neutral. Get out there and do your part to defeat Bush.

Trolls are abounding in the comments tonight. There have been over 800 comments today and so many of them disregard the posting rules of this site: no profanity, no name-calling or personal attacks and urls have to be in html format. Sometimes I delete the offending words and leave the rest. Not tonight, no time, and most of them are from regulars who know the rules. So, if your comment is missing, it's been deleted for one of those reasons. If you find your comments blocked, it's because you've been banned for being a multiple offender. If you don't like three strikes rules, vote against them. On election day.

Update: I've banned a log of trolls tonight. There's too many and they are lowering the level of discourse on the site with their noise. Expressing a difference of opinion is fine, trolling is not. If you don't know the difference, you're probably a troll. Post at your own risk.

Update: Dr. Ace is history. True Liberal (not) is next, soon as I find his ISP number again. Steel is gone. Please don't feed the trolls. Again, thoughtful disagreement with the opinions expressed in posts and comments is fine. Snide comments, insults, name-calling, off-topic links and rants and garbage is not. I intend to take out the trash more frequently, so here's fair warning.

Hardball tonight --it's impossible to distinguish between the journalists and the Republican strategists--and there's no one providing balance. What's up with that? It's David Gregory, Howard Feineman, Christy Whitman and an unknown woman.

Live--a protest disrupts the Hardball set, the police chase the protester right through the broadcast set--MSNBC switches to the Garden.

Turned over to Fox News and the reporter is covering John Kerry's movements and the French journalists. Good for them.

There was a protest at Fox News today and it got a little out of hand with the arrest of Medea Benjamin. Atrios went but didn't have a camera.

Update: Some country singer named Larry Gatlin is on Hardball now making a total a** of himself. He 's talking about shopping at Saks. He just asked the passersby to be quiet because they're on television. What on earth is he doing on a political show? The guy should stick to crooning, assuming he's any good at that. Who's next, the Osmonds?