For those of you who missed Barack Obama's stunning speech last night, you really should check it out at the Convention website. It looks like it will be posted any minute now -- they're still working their way through Tuesday's speakers. It galls me that his speech ended just before the networks began their coverage at 10pm. I distinctly remember watching hours of the Democratic National Convention on network TV as a kid in 1988, in particular one young speaker by the name of Bill Clinton who talked for a long, long time. I suppose the attitude today is that people can watch the convention on the cable news channels (ugh), but you know, a lot of us don't have cable. And we wonder why Americans are so politically apathetic. All I can say is thank goodness for PBS. The fact that most Americans were watching tripe when Obama gave that speech is just a travesty.

Fortunately, they did get to see Ron Reagan's excellent plea on behalf of stem cell research. I'm feeling a little less enthused about Teresa Heinz Kerry's speech. While she started off well, with a display of her multilingual talents and the assertion that someday smart women will no longer be derogatorily called "opinionated," but "informed," she lost me a bit when she drifted into the philosophical ether. And this is certainly not to say the First Lady can't wax poetic about the state of our union, but I think the Kerrys need to show their human side right now. It was something of a missed opportunity.