I don't see it either. I also don't remember the press corps getting into a tizzy when George W. Bush allowed the guy running his own VP-vetting process to install himself as the choice -- notwithstanding the fact that said guy had a hundred questionable business relationships in the paramilitary and energy industries; notwithstanding the fact that the move smelled of something a lot worse coming. Which of course it did.

Ah, double standards. Where would the mainstream media be without them?

David Fiderer on the Huffington Post is saying this is ginned-up nonsense springing from the lamentable habit of some journalists to bite on spurious and unconfirmable GOP insinuations:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-fiderer/how-the-wall-street-journ_b_106600.html

What's up with that, Mr. Leonard? I don't know who's right, but I'm wondering if that affects your view at all.

For once, Ms. Walsh, you and I are in total agreement. I can only assume Obama's close association with Rahm Emmanuel had something to do with it. A massive leadership opportunity lost.

Let's hope it doesn't become a trend. By all means, Salon, hold the senator's feet to the fire.

... to write the posts for today, as per your request, Ms. Hepola. :-)

Kaine, Biden, Sebelius, Bayh, but you make some good arguments.

Have to go with Kaine first. I think he's on board, and I think he means it. He's good enough to be an asset but not well-known enough to be a liability. Plus: Virginia. Tasty.

Not convinced that Bayh will deliver Indiana, and what's worse, it's giving a serious leg up in the future to a guy who stands for absolutely nothing but bland accomodation. Yeah, he won't hurt, but Obama says, anyway, that he's looking for more than that. Anyway, voting for Evan Bayh would be like voting for Miracle Whip on Wonder bread.

I love Sebelius, and any HRC supporter who takes umbrage at the suggestion that she might be the pick reveals him/herself to be a massive fraud and hypocrite. HRC didn't wage her campaign to break the glass ceiling only for women named HRC, and to select another woman over her would be to make manifest the notion that women politicians, like their male counterparts, should be evaluated on the basis of their merits and not their gender. This is the basis on which HRC (narrowly) lost the nomination, I believe, but I also believe she wouldn't want to have lost it any other way. So I still love Sebelius.

Biden... I could totally go for him, because when he opens his mouth, I just trust him. He seems so canny, so real, so unpretentiously knowledgable. And then I think back to the first GHW Bush administration, and I remember: you know who else used to strike me that way? Dick Cheney. Seriously. I know it sounds ridiculous, but there was a time eons ago when I felt like Dick Cheney was a moderating influence of wisdom and restraint. I'm not saying Biden is Cheney -- he most obviously is not. I'm just saying you can't judge books by their covers, even when you've read the first three chapters five or six times already.

So I come down:

Kaine

Sebelius

Biden

Bayh

And have had a great time considering your arguments. This transplanted southerner says: Nice to have you in the box, Mr. Schaller!

That's it. That's all. Light will illuminate the darkest corners, eventually.

Christ. It just really never stops, does it?

As a 40-year-old musician -- smack-dab in the middle of the demographic Mr. Hannaham is not so subtly maligning in this review -- allow me to retort. I don't know how old you are, Mr. H., or whether you ever played in a band, but I just have to respond to this:

"Central to the film is the fallacy that yesterday's headbangers had a crazier (and therefore cooler) lifestyle than today's young musicians, and that the music was, if not better, more extroverted and vital. "

That's because in some ways they did, and to a great extent it was. (And one could have said the same in 1987 to contrast the scene and the music then with that made fifteen or twenty years earlier.) The history of Western pop music over the last forty years is one of slow decline in nearly every respect.

IMHO.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

I love Rebecca Traister (as previously allowed in another post in which I lobbied for her to be Joan Walsh's successor, when and if). To penalize her for opining, as is every other journalist and blogger this week for lack of any concrete event to break the mounting tension of the Veepiness, is unfair and ignores the open and non-judgmental tone of this bit, as of all her work. I'd argue the value of that is quite high.

Mark me down as grateful that a woman can discuss the reasons why Obama may not, and perhaps cannot, pick a woman, without making the issue into part of an agenda.

Go Traister!

Traister for Editor-in-Chief. (At such time as Joan Walsh shall have stepped down for whatever reason.)

There's this crazy Irish dude, see, and he's just written this outrageous, if modest, proposal to solve the endemic hunger problem in Ireland by eating CHILDREN! OMGWTF???

Is he a MONSTER?

Is he a passive-aggressive goad?

Beats me. I just say, slice me up some toddler and pass the A1 sauce. :P

I'm hearting Campbell Brown right about now, too, even if she is married to Dan Senor. It's especially gratifying to see this woman, filled with righteous indignation at that ill-prepared mooseburger's undeserved yet meteoric rise, go about systematically and subversively breaking McPalin's ribs one by one. You want a more overt screed? Watch Olbermann or the Divine Ms. M(addow). Given her employer, Brown is going as far as she can, or needs to.

God, it's nice to see someone do surgical strikes instead of carpet-bombing for once. So civilized, as I think Mr. Swift would agree.