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Will Rural Voters Make It Three in a Row for Republicans? Rural and exurban voters made George Bush president -- twice.

By all rights, there should be a revolt at this week's Republican convention against John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate--for the very same reasons so many Republicans opposed President Bush's selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. Palin is, if anything, less qualified for the vice presidency (and the presidency) than Miers was for the court. But there is one big difference: Palin passes all the right-wing litmus tests, which means she is unlikely to suffer Miers' fate. It's amusing to watch Republicans play gender politics. At the time Bush chose Miers, he was under pressure to pick a woman to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. But most of the plausible women jurists were either too moderate to satisfy conservatives or so right wing that they faced serious confirmation problems.

The GOP opens its convention here Monday as a party in peril. Hobbled by an unpopular president, a disillusioned and divided base, and low poll ratings on almost every domestic issue, the party of Nixon and Reagan and Bush may well be at the end of a historic 40-year grasp on power, say conservative thinkers and political historians. Republicans lost the House of Representatives in 2006, and are now at risk of losing the Senate. They were defeated in special elections this year in congressional districts that in some cases hadn't elected a Democrat since the days of Lyndon Johnson.

He leads nationally in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll by 53 percent to 43 percent. He leads, too, by a wide margin in estimates of the Electoral College. Virtually all of the closest states left at this point voted for President Bush four years ago. The presidential race is not over, but at this point, Obama has a better chance of becoming president than McCain, and as a result, the questions ought to be going toward him as much or more than McCain -- questions not of tactics but of substance.

Watch this! It's truly terrifying! Share it w/friends and family. This is a must see. It puts all the facts together about the NSA "failure" to protect use from the 9/11 hijackers because of Bush leaders refusal to follow FISA laws. NSA Takeover Secret govt agency kept intel from FBI about 9/11 hijackers, for money & power to spy on all. The upshot is that these non-elected US govt agents were able to convince our Congress that they weren't to blame for keeping intel about 9/11 terrorists living in USA for over a year from FBI. Instead NSA chief convinced US Congress that the NSA could have prevented 9/11 if they had more money and power to spy on everyone in USA. Now they have it.

watch this; abuse of power

By running an attack campaign that is almost a parody of George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 exertions, McCain is chucking away his greatest opportunity, which is to show that he could reform Republicanism and offer voters an alternative way of breaking with a past they have come to loathe.

Green issues are shaping up to be a key ingredient in the Democrats' strategy to turn disaffection with President George W. Bush's GOP into expansive down-ticket victories this November.

Now John McCain is pea-green with envy. That's the only explanation for why a man who prides himself on honor, a man who vowed not to take the low road in the campaign, having been mugged by W. and Rove in South Carolina in 2000, is engaging in a festival of juvenilia. The Arizona senator who built his reputation on being a brave proponent of big solutions is running a schoolyard campaign about tire gauges and Paris Hilton, childishly accusing his opponent of being too serious, too popular and not patriotic enough. Even his own mother, the magical 96-year-old Roberta McCain, let slip that she thought the Paris Hilton-Britney Spears ad was "kinda stupid."