LIGHTNING ROUND: CONVENTIONAL POLITICS NO MORE.

• Bill Clinton will speak in the Wednesday night slot at the Democratic National Convention, and in a reversal for the GOP, Dick Cheney will speak at the Republican National Convention the same night as President Bush. In other convention news, tickets for Obama's Invesco Field nomination acceptance speech sold out in under 24 hours, and John McCain might delay his own acceptance speech to accommodate the Redskins-Giants NFL season opener.
• Amy Sullivan reports in Time that Christian supporters of Barack Obama are outraged over the content of a recent McCain campaign ad, "The One," which allegedly paints the Democratic candidate as the antichrist.
  
• A new McCain advertisement once again accuses Obama of being a "celebrity," predictably going after the Democrat's decision to take a ten day-vacation in Hawaii. Instead of whining, which is apparently all McCain can manage to do these days, Obama releases a more positive ad that discusses such trivialities as moving the United States towards renewable green energy, job creation and infrastructure repair.
• Matt Stoller has a great post on the efforts of the "rightroots" and their pathetic attempts at creating a technology-based grassroots "movement." Responding to the boasts of one winger that they possess a 10,000-strong email list Stoller reminds us that "10,000 emails is equivalent in size to about 2% of Moveon's list when it first formed in 1998 -- and Moveon's list was built without help from partisan media."
• The new Democratic party platform released yesterday, discussed by Adam below, apparently was the product of a compromise between the Obama and Clinton camps, reports Marc Ambinder.
• Accountable America, a project led by Tom Matzzie of MoveOn.org, is putting the screws to Republican donors who are thinking about contributing to Swiftboat-like causes, The New York Times reports.
• I'm loathe to report on sex scandals, but it is worth noting that John Edwards has admitted to ABC's Bob Woodruff that he did indeed have an extramarital affair, though he claims, improbably, that the affair did not lead to the "love child" reported by the National Enquirer. The worst part, as one of Ezra's commenters points out, is that this could have destroyed Edwards, his cause and possibly the Democrat's chances this year had he been the nominee -- and he was supposedly the uncontroversial choice! Am I the only one who feels like I'm reliving the Eliot Spitzer affair all over again?

--Mori Dinauer