Each Saturday on the Politics Now blog, you'll find a list of stories that caught the eyes of The News' political reporters. Here's a sampling of what they were reading this week:
The Democratic National Convention dominated the news this week, and fact-checkers quickly looked into the claims speakers made, while pundits opined.
Politifact evaluates the claims in former President Bill Clinton's speech here, and The Atlantic devoted two posts to examining the speech's art, one by James Fallows, another by Molly Ball.
Howard Kurtz reports in The Daily Beast that President Barack Obama's acceptance speech was written with the help of focus groups, even if it was thought of as being flatter than other convention speeches.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan gives a critical review of Obama's speech and finds "soft, distracted extremism" in the Democrats' convention rhetoric and says Clinton's speech was "smaller" than he is.
Meanwhile, in Albany, the scandal surrounding Assemblyman Vito Lopez continued to unfold with new questions arising about whether a new Capital ethics watchdog panel would investigate Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's role in taxpayer-funded payments to two of Lopez's victims.
Danny Hakim broke the story for the New York Times, while Jon Campbell of Gannett News Service wrote about developments Friday, which included a statement from Gov. Andrew Cuomo threatening to appoint his own Moreland Commission if the panel does not act appropriately.
