He Was All in the President's Butt
Man, Salon's War Room is chock full of great blogged tidbits today. First Spike Lee's commentary about Sharpton's speech:

"The speech was tremendous," said Lee, "and it was obviously embraced by the crowd." It was the red-meat speech the convention was waiting for, Lee said, going right at the man in the White House. "As we say in Brooklyn, he was all in the president's butt."

And even more about Brit Hume. Seems he's not a bit hip-hop fan:

The multiracial hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas came out to perform their hit, "Let's Get It Started." Flipping channels to try and catch the performance, I found that the only network carrying it uninterrupted was Fox News. And just as I was getting suspicious about why Fox News was giving a hip-hop group time that could have been handed over to their pundits, the song ended and Fox anchor Brit Hume came back and said, "The Black Eyed Peas with their rendition of a song that's popular in the swing states, especially the refrain 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,' which the Kerry campaign believes will have particular resonance."

In other words, Hume was saying, "Here's what you'll get if you vote for John Kerry, America -- darkies running wild all over the place." When Black Eyed Peas were replaced by a tape of the Isley Brothers, Hume deemed them, "a melody more familiar to most Americans." Which Americans? Not the young ones -- black and white -- who kept "Let's Get It Started" on the charts for weeks. But then, in the eyes of Fox News, those people do not count as being part of America any more than the Black Eyed Peas do, or most of the people gathered in the FleetCenter, among whom many, and not just the young ones, were digging the performance. In America, as defined by Fox, hip-hop has not dominated the charts and penetrated the consciousness of American pop music and its followers all over the country. Hume's comments were not just an expression of disdain, but a denial of reality. Or rather, like the government Fox News speaks for, Hume's remarks were the essence of a polity that insists on its own reality, the reality they say is so despite any evidence to the contrary.