Former President Bill Clinton took advantage of his prime-time speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention last night, unleashing a 48 minute speech that argued passionately on behalf of the Democratic Party and Barack Obama.

Clinton showed off his strong speaking chops, mixing policy with emotion and laying out plainly the reasons why voters should follow the Democrats’ lead on everything from creating jobs to education to foreign policy.

It was a speech reminiscent of the centrism that got Clinton elected in 1992 and re-elected in 1996, and the former president turned to that ideal again and again, arguing that Obama and the Democrats were the party of centrists, that cooperation was the best way to get things done in politics, and that Republicans were obstructing attempts to get things done in D.C. Read 

The Secret Service is investigating claims that an anonymous group of hackers managed to steal copies of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax returns.

An anonymous letter was sent to Romney’s accounting firm and political offices in Tennessee and published online, demanding $1 million in Internet currency not to release tax returns from before 2010. Romney has released his 2010 and 2011 returns, but has so far refused to release any earlier tax returns.

There’s a good chance that the hackers’ claims are a lot of hot air. According to Romney’s accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, there is no evidence that any tax return files were stolen. Local police indicated there had been no reports of alarms or break-ins at the building housing the firm’s offices. Read 

Another action movie star has thrown his weight behind Mitt Romney. Unlike Clint Eastwood, though, this one took to the Internet to get his message across.

In a two-minute video posted on YouTube on Saturday, Chuck Norris and his wife Gena had one simple message for viewers: vote out President Barack Obama. In the video, Norris warned that the United States was at “at a tipping point and, quite possibly, our country as we know it may be lost forever if we don’t change the course our country is headed.”

In particular, Norris’ warning was aimed at Evangelical voters. As his wife pointed out in the video, “It is estimated that in the 2008 election, 30 million evangelical Christians stayed home on voting day and Obama won the election by 10 million votes.” Read 

Yesterday, the Obama campaign promised that Michelle Obama would give a “personal, passionate speech” at the Democratic National Convention yesterday. By all accounts, Michelle Obama did just that. Sources ranging from the BBC to the Detroit Free Press to the New York Daily News to the Charlotte Observer all used the words “impassioned” to describe her speech.

Her speech apparently fired up Twitter as well. When her speech concluded, there were 28,003 tweets being sent per minute on Twitter, nearly double the 14,289 tweets per minute sent after Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.

But how was the speech? Opinions varied, as you might expect, depending on which side of the aisle you asked. Here are a few quotes analyzing Michelle Obama’s speech: Read 

There are numerous theories circulating as to why this recovery is different from the rest.

At this point during Ronald Reagan’s term, America had added 5.1 million net new jobs. At this point in Obama’s term, America has added a mere 30,000.

Some of this can be attributed to technological advances and improvements that have made more and more jobs obsolete, but that certainly is not the primary reason. Read 

When Mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio took the stage Tuesday night in Charlotte to give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, he immediately was compared with Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the superstars at last week’s Republican National Convention in Tampa.

Both are young, bright, charismatic Hispanic leaders. Rubio is 41, Castro 37. They represent the rising Latino population, which has become a powerful political force in our politics. Both speak movingly about their immigrant experience — Rubio as the descendant of Cuban refugees from the dictatorships of Batista and then Fidel Castro, Julian Castro (no relation) as the scion of a penniless grandmother who came here from Mexico for economic opportunity.

But if both shared the immigrant experience, they drew opposite lessons from it: Rubio learned the value of self-reliance, Castro the importance of government lending a helping hand. Read