The Democratic National Convention is past the halfway point in Denver, which tonight will emerge as the unlikely epicenter of Steven Spielberg's cosmic restitution for Indiana Jones 4. The director is taking only incremental steps toward recovery for now, however, joining contemporaries Ken Burns and Davis Guggenheim as the DNC's guest contributors of short films for each night. The good news: Spielberg's short celebrates American military veterans, and we guess the guy knows his American military veterans. (NB: It's narrated by Tom Hanks.) The bad news: Kind of like Cannes, Spielberg will be around just long enough to drop off the tape before heading back to lick his Clinton-supporting wounds. Insert frowny emoticon here:

Remember how Barack Obama gave that inspiring speech in which he pointed out that what William Faulkner wrote back in 1951 — "the past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past" — was still totally true today? Obviously he was totally right. The past isn't past; but it is (if you have been watching cable news anyway) most emphatically post-. We are post-feminist, post-political, post-Sex & The City, post-9/11. I am almost tempted to call it the "OMG So Over It Already! Election," except we are venturing into a post-OMG era. On Monday night we watched the "fresh" new MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow get props from some obsequious guest for coining the term "post-rational" to describe all this madness. That was ridiculous enough to seem "post-"something in itself, so we took the opportunity to put together a post-linear, post-chronological (and, of course, post-rational) post giving you a brief history of our favorite "post-" terms of this campaign (and all time.)

Nth Power founder Nancy Floyd, whose firm invests in clean-energy solutions, spoke at the Democratic convention last night. I tracked down her full speech. Nth Power's investments haven't exactly threatened Kleiner Perkins on ROI. But Floyd has a plan to fix that. Wanna guess? Don't miss the part where she panders to the DNC's Mac fans.Nth Power has invested $420 million in 35 companies in the past decade. Most optimize existing energy resources, rather than trying to create alternative power sources. But today, Nth Power only has a piece of one public company that hasn't gone transformers-up: Comverge, which builds load control and advanced metering systems. Floyd's speech envisioned a future of clean, efficient energy. Energy delivered by hungry startups. Startups funded by Nth Power. And by President Obama's administration.

We have to say this for the porntastic anonymous American Apparel ad spoofer: he or she is just so god damn aware of the vagaries of pseudoculture that it is impossible not to admire his or her attention-getting sensibility. Unless, of course, this all turns out to be paid for by Dov Charney, in which case you can expect a very sternly worded rebuke from us. So watch out. Today, the personal (wear) becomes political; it's The Assassination of Barack Obama as imagined not by a publicity-seeking artist Yazmany Arboleda, but by publicity-seeking artist "anonymous spoofer." And of course a big dick is involved, for reasons we can't quite understand:

Did you watch Hillary Clinton's speech last night? She went on late, and long, but we watched. It was pretty good! She is much better at giving speeches than she used to be. We are depressed that no one does big angry barnstorming Jesse Jackson speeches anymore except the tiny white tomte from Cleveland but whatever. Her speech was good on its own merits. A well-delivered and pleasantly inoffensive series of uplifting syllables. The second it ended liberal favorite Keith Olbermann was all "she hit it out of the park, masterful, blah blah" and his MSNBC colleague Chris Matthews made even less sense, but they were quite tired from being on TV, outside, in the rain, for 72 hours straight or so. What did the well-rested print pundits say? Everyone wants to marry that speech.

"Those are the reasons I support Barack Obama. And those are the reasons you should too." [Observer]

• Anne Hathaway: "I was kind of afraid of [Barack] Obama the first time I saw him... I was afraid to trust him and I was afraid to have hope when I first kind of became aware of him. It was around the time that he gave his speech on race that I just said 'I can't deny how I feel about you, Barack Obama.'" Please just stop talking, Anne. This is almost worse than the Madonna/McCain/Hitler thing. [AP]

• Michael Lohan is is convinced his daughter is drinking again, and that Lindsay's relationship with Samantha Ronson is to blame. In other Lohan family news, Samantha may be writing a book about her relationship with Lindsay—whose 48-year-old father recently popped the question to his 24-year-old girlfriend, Erin Muller. [MSNBC, E!, OK]

Every convention needs a good catchphrase! Bill Clinton had "A place called Hope" in 1992. Michael Dukakis floated on the wings of Ann Richards' "Poor George" speech in 1988. And John Kerry to this day wakes up every morning in a cold sweat, screaming "Help is on the way!" Come to think of it, maybe memorable catchphrases aren't all that predictive of success. But this year's Democratic Convention already has two in as many days. There's "yes we can," the Obama theme that already feels like an old standby, because he's been campaigning for president for 12 years. And now there's the new one Hillary Clinton coined tonight, "No way, no how, no McCain." That one impressed everyone because Clinton's "PUMAs" are getting cozy with John McCain. The Democrats need to stop coining memorable slogans every day, or they'll end up with a library of mindless partisan sayings and talking points, and might just win the election. Click the video icon to watch Clinton try and push her supporters back into the party fold.

Tonight was going to be a sad and even tragic night for some Hillary Clinton supporters no matter what. Those who threw themselves into the presidential candidate's long and ultimately bitter campaign against Barack Obama were going to have a tough time listening to her speak anywhere on the Democratic convention schedule other than at the triumphant end. When Clinton came out, and the cameras panned to her husband Bill, it wasn't hard to imagine his regrets overwhelming any happiness in the moment. Clinton gave a well-received speech that seemed genuinely conciliatory. "Barack Obama is my candidate and he must be our president," she said. But her most ardent supporters still have to decide whether to let go of their anger and go along with this. In the clip after the jump, CNN finds a choked up Clinton delegate who is still not convinced Obama has the experience to lead. She does have enough party loyalty, though, to say (twice!) that she's not voting for John McCain. Click the video icon to watch the emotional breakdown.

"Hillary Clinton will be on hand for Barack Obama's acceptance speech, but according to a source close to former President Bill Clinton, he will not: the source tells CNN that Clinton will not join his wife at Invesco Field Thursday night." (That's the entire story, at the moment.) [CNN]

If you thought Anne Hathaway had bad luck with boyfriends, we're hearing more today about her even trickier track record with politicians: Skeevy, lying, disingenuous heartbreakers whose hollow promises ring in her ears long after they've been exiled to retirement, disgrace and worse. Honey, we know! We even relate a bit to her early skepticism of Sen. Barack Obama, recalled this week in Denver: "I was kind of afraid of Obama the first time I saw him. ... And I was afraid to trust him and I was afraid to have hope when I first kind of became aware of him." But now, with most of her diaries, nude photos and other personal effects safely in federal custody, what matters most is who's minding the store in Washington. Which means exactly the mile-high rebound it sounds like — coming around on Obama and signing on for the long election slog ahead. And feeling good doing it, if her new, unapologetic take on celebrity politics is any indication:

Have you heard about Google's "Big Tent," the $100 luxury newsroom Google has set up for bloggers at the Democratic National Convention? If not, here's another story on the Internet where reporters go, Oh man, Google is totes on the pulse, giving all the intrepid young blogger kids at the Democratic National Convention this week a safe place to get massaged for free by ladies and plug in their 'iPones" — read the label — while they change the world together!

Bill Ayers was a founding member of the Weather Underground, a patently ridiculous white radical organization that specialized in being dumb hippies. They liked to blow up symbolic things like statues. Once they put a bomb in the Pentagon! No one was hurt except for some files. Anyway. This was years ago and since then, Bill has become so goddamn respectable that Mayor Richard Daley tapped him to head a "public-private partnership" dedicated to improving Chicago public schools. Barack Obama was on the board of a philanthropic foundation with Bill in 1999 which means, according to this fantastic attack ad, that Barack Obama wanted to blow up the Pentagon just like the terrorists of 9/11. Except worse! Ha ha this ad is ridiculous and you won't see it on TV because no one will air it, except for an obscure little company that owns local stations covering a quarter of the country. (And us. And we cover the world! Except for China probably.) A McCain fundraiser named Harold Simmons funded the ad through one of those shadowy nonprofits the kids are so into these days called the "American Issues Project." Simmons was, you may be shocked to learn, also a Swift Boat Veterans for Truth funder. This particular ad is so distorted that CNN and even Fox News have refused to run it! Which leaves, of course, the local channels owned by Sinclair Communications. The Sinclair Broadcast Group owns the largest number of local TV stations in the country, mostly throughout the South and Midwest. They last made headlines in 2004, when the company refused to allow its stations to air the Nightline segment that named American casualties in Iraq (they hate the troops!), and then six months later when they made all their stations broadcast a crazy Swift Boat documentary about how John Kerry committed treason in Vietnam. Oh, and then they were the ones behind the Armstrong Williams debacle, in which Williams was revealed to be a White House-paid propagandist while hosting a syndicated show as an ostensibly independent commentator. The show was produced out of Sinclair's "New Central" office, which produced much of the insane "news" content Sinclair feeds to its many stations. (Sinclair received a $36,000 FCC fine for their trouble.) But besides a GQ story on Sinclair back in '05, no one really pays any attention to the work of Sinclair. They reach nearly as many homes as an actual television network and purposefully exert more control over the message they broadcast than any 24-hour news network, but because they own podunk affiliates in flyover country, no one notices. Per Wikipedia:

Sure, it makes sense that gay media mogul Paul Colichman, owner of Out and the Advocate, is taking some flack because he doesn't support Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. To gay rights advocates, after all, Obama is far preferable to his opponent. But Colichman's critics would do well to distance themselves from comrade-in-arms Neal Boulton, the Genre editor who slammed Colichman in Page Six today and declared his own support for Obama "whether he says he's for gay marriage or not." Pansexual playboy Boulton should realize that's easy for him to say, but for Colichman and his gay partner it's an entirely different story. Boulton is already married to a woman. The marriage is one of some devotion, and a natural outgrowth of Boulton's attraction to women. And it's hard to imagine the editor settling down with a man.

Did you skip the opening of the Democratic National Convention last night? You didn't miss that much. Sure, Michelle gave a great speech. And Ted Kennedy, who is suffering from brain cancer, generated some of the evening's most emotional moments. But the best part? When the two Obama girls, Sasha and Malia, made appearances center-stage and promptly stole the show. Clip after the jump.

"We’re absolutely confident there is no credible threat to the candidate, the Democratic National Convention, or the people of Colorado." [Times]

There were a few points when it seemed Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention was going to come apart, its swelling high points and applause lines overwhelmed by a few too many awkward halts and reflexive uses of the term "you see." But by the time Obama wrapped up, her vulnerability and lack of polish looked like smartly-deployed correctives to the idea her husband is smooth, arrogant and lacks humanity. If you agreed with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann when he said "I'm beginning to sound borderline sycophantic on this" speech, you might have flipped over to Fox News Channel, only to listen to a choked-up Juan Williams saying similar things about how poignant the historic oratory was. Everyone seemed to be raving about Michelle, including the guy on Fox who warned, "She didn't give the Gettysburg address — let's not pretend." If Obama scored points by being a heartfelt novice, her kids closed the deal, even as they interrupted their father's prepared remarks and gently corrected him on what city he was in (Kansas City, not St. Louis). It might seem exploitive come morning, but for now enjoy the clip after the jump. UPDATE: Plus video of Michelle Obama's "I Love This Country" moment.

Michelle Obama is scheduled to speak at the Democratic Convention in about an hour. It's the first thing any reasonable number of people will care about at the big political show in Denver. When the speech ends, and talking head spin mode begins, everyone should remember the TV people are completely desperate to conjure news at the pointless, made-for-media convention. Here's some evidence, in the form of a CNN segment that seems to be hinting that Pepsi controls the Obama campaign and entire Democratic party, because of its logo.