Transcripts from last night

By Jennifer J. Foster

If you were wrapped up in American Idol during Hillary Clinton’s speech, click here to read the transcript.

If you were too enthralled with the Dancing with the Stars finale to catch Barack Obama’s speech, click here to read the transcript.

AI roundup

By Jennifer J. Foster

Now that we’ve had our morning political roundup, here’s the morning American Idol roundup:

For a quick update on last night’s finale, read this offering from freelance writer Anna David. I haven’t always agreed with her assessments of the contest (especially when it came to Syesha Mercado. David inexplicably found Syesha’s refreshing and unique talent to be offensive in some way), but she hit the nail on the head about last night.

I will only add that I didn’t feel the “inevitability of Archuleta” the way she says she did. I felt like he definitely went into the finale last night as the underdog to David Cook, who had come on over the previous four weeks. Two weeks ago, Paula Abdul told him, “I feel like I’m already looking at the new American Idol.“ And that praise was well deserved.

But David Cook just didn’t bring it last night, and David Archuleta did. It was no contest.

One cloud over the morning for David A. fans: DialIdol.com, the site made famous for its nearly spot-on predictions, estimates that David A. fell well short of David C. in fan voting last night. But since it makes predictions based on measuring the contestants’ busy signals and doesn’t account for votes by text message, it’s unclear how accurate that prediction is going to be.