Via MyDD, Biden announces it himself:

Hey guys, I'm not the guy. See ya.

He and Richardson can now fight over secretary of state.

So who's left? Assuming slotted speakers at the DNC are not the Veep, then Kaine is out. He's speaking Thursday night before Gore and Obama. Kerry is speaking Wednesday.

Who's that leave? Daschle, Sebelius, and "dark horse".

Of course, slotted speakers can always be rescheduled...

Every candidate must produce a single Overarching Narrative from which all other sub-narratives depend.

The Overarching Narrative is composed of three sub-narratives: the Narrative of the Self, and the Narrative of the Other, and the Narrative of the Place. While the Overarching Narrative may require a paragraph to explain, the sub-narratives cannot require more than a fairly short sentence.

McCain's Self-Narrative: a tough maverick who'll kick ass and take names.
McCain's Other-Narrative: a vain and effeminate foreigner who can't protect you.
McCain's Place-Narrative: The world is a dangerous place, bristling with imminent threats.

(Cross-posted from "Bayh-Bayh-Bayhden.org")

    Some say Obama chose a VP already.
    Well, maybe it's time to un-choose.

    While this diary resembles my previous di on similar topics, there's a lot more to say:


JOE BIDEN

1. Biden is a plagiarist. Even if it was 2 decades ago.

    Actually, more than a plagiarist; just peep the Wik,

(look out below)

Many of us are in the late summer doldrums and getting a bit edgy about where the state of the race lays.  We've seen McCain attack and Barack act cool.  We've also pointlessly obssessed over national daily tracking polls and every state poll that comes out.

But whats probably infuriated us the most is the tenor of the campaign from McCain, the complicit media to ingore the clear hypocrisy of the McCain myth versus the McCain man and Obama's seemingly refusal to hit back hard.

We've come to realize the media, which we hate to admit is incredibly important in helping citizens reach their decisions about whom they vote for, will NOT go after McCain.  I mean 'He was a POW for 5 and a half years!!!!' after all.

So what do we do?

Ezra Klein wrote an extremely thoughtful piece today in his blog that exposes a certain double standard between the way John Edwards' affair has been received versus how the torrid affairs of other politicians, including several who ran for president in 2008, have seen their infidelities treated.

Klein argues that the phoniness that the media is now guffawing that they always saw in Edwards is not something extraordinary [that say, you couldn't find in John McCain] or unique to just John Edwards.

So what is it about this current affair that has seemingly has Edwards down for the count when other politicians have survived their infidelities?

Having once been the happy owner of a 13.75% mortgage -- obtained through a state program for first time home buyers at a time when the bank was advertising 18% -- the inflation rate of the early 1980s is not something for which I'm nostalgic. But for those longing to bring back the days of Ronald Reagan, this should warm those cockles.

U.S. wholesale prices took another unexpectedly steep jump in July and shot up at the fastest year-on-year rate in 27 years, according to a government report on Tuesday that was certain to fan fears about a potential surge in inflation. ... The Labor Department's Producer Price Index, which measures prices at the factory door, climbed 1.2 percent after a 1.8 percent gain in June.

"Core" inflation, for those people who don't use energy or eat food, was also up sharply, while home building took another plunge. The decline in gas prices next month will probably cool things down a bit, which is good, because if we continued at an average of the last two months we'd be looking at an 18% annual rate.

But be of good cheer! So far wages aren't coming close to keeping up with this new round of inflation, so that traditional "price-wage-price" spiral is only "price-price-price." That's better, right?

A Diary by Deoliver 47 appeared earlier today entitled, "Cindy's Dad Jim Hensley - Mob Ties?" http://www.dailykos.com/...  The Diary has now faded away but it asked some very pointed questions about the sources of the Hensley family wealth, a family fortune that has made John McCain a successful politician and one of the wealthiest members of Congress.  Specifically, these questions relate to the criminal history of various members of the Hensley family, including Cindy McCain's father, Jim Hensley, and the alleged connections the family has had to organized crime.  These questions are certainly worthy of scrutiny, and hopefully, they will find their way out of the blogosphere and into the mainstream media.

We all have noticed that prior to "digging" at John McCain, a nod is given to his military service. This giving of status before taking it, has its beginnings in the deference paid to British nobility.

At what point to political speculations go beyond mere amusement and bet-fodder to outright spooky? It’s one thing to have predicted Obama to take the nomination nearly a year before he throws his hat in the ring but that’s nothing next to predicting McCain in early December of ’07 (in the now epic The Republican Candidates are the Most Unelectable Gang of Freaks in American History). But then to go on and nail down Senator Joe Biden as Bama’s Veep in late May of this year? I know what you’re saying: who is this iSenseChange and how is he so dead-on-balls accurate for this election? How can we reward this latter-day NeoNostradamus for the sheer prescience involved in these utterly uncanny picks of his? What glorious accolades can we lay at his freshly oiled feet, what leafy laurels around his surely massive skull? Judging from the lackluster response to my admittedly weird entries thus far, I’m guessing a handful of reads and less than ten comments. Half of which are my own. Fuck it, says I. Ignore me at your peril. I am the Kossack Kreskin. And I have massive nuts.

McCain-Lieberman '08:   Armageddon' Excited!

More rampant speculation over at Politico about how McCain appears to be increasingly 'vetting' Lieberman as a breakout runningmate for the 2008 election.

That would be awesome - Elmer Fudd and Droopy Dog on one ticket, together at last!  

Senator McCain,

Many times you have told the story of the North Vietnamese guard who drew a cross in the dirt on Christmas Day.

http://thepage.time.com/...
http://www.npr.org/...
http://query.nytimes.com/...
And on page 228 of your book "Faith of my Fathers"

Never however, have you mentioned the year of the Christmas Day when this experience happened to you.

At Rick Warren's forum on Saturday, you called it "a moment I'll never forget" and you have talked about it many times. So give me a Straight Talk answer, Senator McCain, which year was the Christmas that that guard drew a cross in the dirt in front of you?

The Gulag Archipelago contains absolutely no reference to the cross in the dirt story.  I have to agree with the thinking that the story on McCain's cross story would have been better off left untouched.  The Saddleback church event may have shown us how easy it is to question McCain's honesty, but the cross story is a bust.  Who cares anyway?

Yeah, I wrote more below.

Despite evidence that increased domestic drilling will only have a minor impact on market prices and that these will accrue in the distant future, McCain and the Republicans continue their "Drill Here, Drill Now" mantra. Today, Johnny Boy donned a hardhat and took the chopper out to a gen-you-eyne oil rig to give his claim the visuals required to drive this one home. Minor probem:

By now many bloggers are familiar with issue as to whether John McCain's Cross in the Sand Story is really a good story that was quite simply lifted from the Gulag Achipelago, a book written by one of McCain's own heros, Alexander Solzynitzhn.

One of the things people have been trying to do is to simply pinpoint when the story supposedly took place as well as to determine the first time the story was recounted by McCain.

In the process of trying to satisfy my own curiosity, I came across some interesting tidbits I thought I'd share.

Eight years ago, then Governor George W. Bush revealingly joked about his backers at the 2000 Al Smith Dinner.  "This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores," Bush said, adding, "Some people call you the elites; I call you my base."  With his own quip Saturday night that "$5 million" is his definition of "rich," John McCain made no mistake that he is Bush's natural heir.

Andrew Sullivan reminds us today of something that is missing in all this talk of crosses in the dirt.

More below the fold!

John McNicotine is now for the tobacco lobby after years of working against it.  He not only opposes the cigarette taxes he used to support but also opposes FDA regulation of the tobacco industry after years of supporting it.  McNicotine is an ex-smoker and should understand just how addictive nicotine is, and he even acknowledged the exceptionally high death rate for tobacco users when he joked that cigarette exports to Iran were part of his plot to kill Iranian citizens.  For McNicotine to cave in to the tobacco cartel is the ultimate flip-flop:
http://www.boston.com/...

Why has McNicotine caved in to the interests of the tobacco drug cartel?  It couldn't possibly have anything to do with hiring tobacco lobbyist Charlie Black as his senior adviser.  Move along folks.  There's nothing to see here:
http://firedoglake.com/...

Now let's use the traditional Rethug "moral values" and "sanctity of life" frames against McNicotine!  There's more in the flip.