Palin is having a hard time holding the attention of the drunk C-Listers with “limited access” credentials hanging out in the basement. No idea whether or not that’s a good proxy for the overall effectiveness of her rhetoric. To my ear, Huckabee blows the rest of the GOP away as an orator.

Give Sarah Palin this much — her understanding of the geopolitics of energy is every bit as daft as that of much more seasoned conservative pseudoexperts. She can spin out outlandish and ultimately nonsensical scenarios about Iran (or Venezuela) deploying the mythical “oil weapon” and she, too, can ignore the fundamentally global nature of hydrocarbon markets by prattling about “energy independence.”

Sarah Palin: “Wherever he goes and whoever is listening John McCain is always the same man.”

Do we really need to recite the issues on which John McCain has flip-flopped? Estate tax. Top bracket income tax cuts. Torture. Immigration. Climate change. Add more in comments if you like.

I suppose I should say that I was able to gin up a “limited access” credential that’s gotten me, well, not inside the XCel Energy Arena per se to watch the convention, but inside the Arena’s basement to watch the speech on TV. Like I could back at the motel. Except other journalists are around. People in the basement seem very interested in the open bar sponsored by Diageo. Beyond that, I’m not sure what the benefit of having come here was. So far Palin’s speech seems . . . okay.

Speaking as a native New Yorker, may I say there’s perhaps nothing more absurd than watching a former mayor of New York City sneer at people who like cosmopolitan towns.

Rudy Giuliani just did a fair hit on Barack Obama for telling a pro-Israel group that he favored an undivided Jerusalem and then back-tracking a day later and having his staff clarify that he actually had a sensible position on this issue. As I say, fair hit. But then Giuliani came back to say that he and John McCain really do take the position that Obama swiftly abandoned — namely that it would be unacceptable for the part of Jerusalem that’s inhabited by Palestinians to become part of Palestine.

I suppose some pro-Israel groups like to hear that kind of rhetoric but it’s really a ludicrous position on the merits that would make it impossible to ever achieve peace — it’s the Israeli version of the “right of return.”