Everett family featured tonight

LOS ANGELES - An Everett family that credits Vice President Al Gore with saving their son's life will be featured at the convention tonight.

Dylan and Christine Malone's struggle to keep insurance for their infant son, Ian, has been well-chronicled in the Seattle media. The 11-month-old boy was born badly brain-damaged and unable to breathe properly. He requires nursing care that the Malones figure costs $108,000 a year.

They are in Los Angeles, where their story will be told in a video presentation tonight as Gore accepts the nomination.

In February, Gore told a Seattle rally how the Malones were in danger of losing their health insurance. On a network news show the next day, a representative of Aetna Insurance said the coverage would be maintained.

Ian's father is certain the boy would be dead without Gore.

"Maybe politicians are therapeutic," Malone said.

A Republican in L.A.

Fresh from co-hosting the Republican National Convention, Rep. Jennifer Dunn is playing skunk at the Democrats' garden party.

Each morning in Los Angeles, she and two other chairs of the GOP convention are giving the opposition view.

An example, on pro-business Democrats: "I can just remind you that it was the Democrat Justice Department that went after one of my favorite companies, Microsoft."

Gregoire gores Bush

Washington Attorney General Christine Gregoire made what for her is a rare sharply partisan speech at the convention, comparing the environmental records of Gore and Republican Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

"In Texas he actually let the polluters write their own laws, and now Texas leads the nation in industrial pollution," Gregoire said. "The Al Gore who came to my home state of Washington and climbed Mount Rainier with his son will fight for a solution."

She called Houston the nation's smog capital, saying, "Houston, we have a problem."

A friend's testimonial

LOS ANGELES - In an affectionate nomination of his old college roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones told Democrats yesterday of canoeing and hunting with Al Gore "and chasing through the woods with coon dogs in the middle of the night."

A friend of 35 years, Jones recalled the friendship of two young men who roomed together for four years at Harvard.

Once, neither of them could make it home for Thanksgiving, "so we made a fire in the venerable old fireplace in our room, wrapped a big turkey in a couple of rolls of tin foil, and roasted it right there in our dorm."

Tipper Gore, he said, could testify that was "some of the most ambitious cooking Al has done since then."

He also recalled shooting pool and watching "Star Trek" when they should have been studying.

Turning serious, he recalled other times - the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and of Robert Kennedy "and our country's tragic involvement in Southeast Asia."

"I remember how Al struggled to hold on to his faith at a time when it seemed like America was losing its way," he said.

Mostly, though, the actor recalled the fun of their youth.

"I nominate my friend Al Gore," he said, "as the next president of the United States."