I saw that Joseph Biden is, apparently, #99 out of 100 in the Senate in Income.  I find this sort of astounding, considering how long he has been in the Senate and how he is second only to John McCain in forging the Washington media train face time — turn on the Sunday Morning Talk Shows and his face will most surely be somewhere.  But I guess he hasn’t cashed out.  He worships his face and image in the mirror moreso and voice than he worships the Benjamins.  (Incidentally, without even looking it up, I am pretty sure who #100 would be.  Jon Tester of Montana, who looks as though he fell out of a worm-hole and into the Senate.)

It is with anecdotes such as that that Joseph Biden is sort of claimed to be an “asset” to getting that “blue collar” “hard working white folk” “Industrial Heartland” “Rust Belt” vote.  Never mind the most immediate vote that comes to mind when I think Joseph Biden, and the role he played in shepherding it through, and here the Delaware Connection comes into focus, the credit card industry being to Delaware what Oil is to Alaska and Texas, the “Bankruptcy Reform Act” — an act which Paul Wellstone basically single-handedly killed in the late 1990s.  I will need to fish around to find this, but when asked about (or “called out”) by a citizen about the bill, Biden’s response was, basically, to paraphrase, “Quit Being A Dead-beat.”  Sensitive to the plight of the anguished, that Joseph Biden.  I guess this is that “straight talk” I hear Biden is supposed to be famous for, whatever the heck that person’s situation may or may not have been, we can just assume.

Well, I guess Biden saved us from Bork, if not Thomas.  But even here we get a rather depressing devolution in the way these nominating processes and the general “Consensus” framework skews us toward the acceptance of these Attila the Huns.  Okay.  He coined the epithet to Rudy Giuliani’s career: “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.” — that is worth something.

But a cynic is a person who sees the cost of everything and the value of nothing.  Biden is poised to be the second most powerful vice president in American history, behind — whatshisname?  I think it rhymes with “Baney”? — and the bottom is that great “meh” which greets much of this process.  A denotation that I’m a Democrat as a matter of a shrug. 

It occurs to me that this grouping of people who were complaining about a double standard in the “Monkey Department” — which is that when Obama is portrayed as a monkey it’s deemed racist, but but but…  Liberals have been portraying George W Bush as a monkey for the past eight years (there’s even a web-page devoted to comparisons between Bush and monkeys), now have a good out.  Now they get to photoshop Joseph Biden as a monkey.  So, go at it folks!

Of course, this would have worked for any vice presidential selection, and it’s still doubtful that Biden will be portrayed as a monkey, even as it is certain that the Obama – monkey shirt will remain selling in Confederate states.

Danged.  I was holding out for Chet Edwards.  The absuridty of these proceedings was shown in the fact that as names shuffled around in this empty Zeitgist, some names being the “Flavor of the Moment” and then lapsing, before landing on Joseph Biden, the name “Chet Edwards” popped up not once, but twice.  It might be interesting, but probably not terribly satisfying to diagram the manner names popped into being and hovered around and out, and back in — ala Chet Edwards.  For McCain, the diagram strikes me as fairly simple — this great triangle with Mitt Romney at top and “Attractive Controversial Unnamed” categories below it (“Pro-Choice”, “Woman”), and then the governor of Alaska and Joseph Lieberman.

I suspect that the significance of Chet Edwards’s return onto this list was that Barack Obama really really really wanted to nominate Evan Bayh, but found the Facebook Opposition fist too much to overcome, and thought Chet Edwards would fool this Mighty Facebook Fist.  There is just no other explanation.

Anyway, congratulations to everyone who signed up to be “the first to know”.  Not only does Obama now know where he can spam you, but I knew who Obama’s pick was before you received the call — hearing the top and middle of the hour ABC News items on Rachel Maddow on KPOJ report that “Secret Service” has descended on Joseph Biden.  Reporting the smoke, if not the fire.  But Obama is a Movement, I hear, and a Movement requires Spam Lists.

So Biden’s presidential prospects are more alive than they have been since his failed run in 1988.  History shows that there is a greater chance that vice presidents will not become president than become one, but history also shows that vice presidents have a better chance of becoming president than non-vice-presidents.  So it is Joseph Biden.  Barack Obama has picked the man who take over after his assassination.  The “Martin Van Buren” principle is at work — the “Charismatic” president and the “Grounded, Unassuming” vice-president.  Biden is Obama’s Van Buren.  Or is Biden Obama’s Nixon?

Policy and record wise, Biden is problematic, as is everyone else.  But no one really cares about policy in this game of theatrics that is electoral politics.  So the question is: Does Biden’s reference to Obama as “clean” and his reference to Delaware as a “Slave State” (in wooing Southerners) signal to the voting block made up of a sort of dolty mildly racist American that it is okay to vote for Barack Obama?  If that’s an absurd question, I ask if it’s any less valid than what FOXNEWSMSNBCCNN is bloviating at this moment.

One of the more annoying trends in business are those “sexpresso” places, coffee houses with female baristas dressed up (down?) in bikinis.  They sort of seeped along onto our cultural radar like a mildly annoying fungus.  I do not quite know what the meaning of these places are, and what they say about where we are at this precise moment in our culture.

I do know that I am glad I do not watch local news, as I understand that there has been some protesters at the newly opened place in this city, and by not watching the local news I am ensured of missing out on the rather easy ratings-grabbing “Up Next” spots, and the fill-in-the-blank formulaic standard on the coverage, which you just have to close your eyes and the story rolls right through a television screen in your mind.  I am forced to the issue and know that some protesters have set up shot via the Willamette Week, though.

There was a story in the news from one of those “sexpresso” places which passed by me — apparently there’s this pervert who has been harrassing some workers at one of the stores, and…

The first time he came to the window Feddock said he was wearing a white bra and white panties and touching himself inappropriately.

Then he came back a second time.

“He has underwear over his face, he’s wearing hot pink panties now and the underwear that he was wearing is over his face and there’s a little peephole so he can see,” Feddock said.

Feddock and another barista were working around 5 a.m. last Thursday when the incident happened. They tried to get a look at the man’s license plate, but that too was covered up with women’s underwear.

When the man came back a third time one of the baristas took a cup of scolding hot water and doused him with it.

“Kylie opened the door and threw boiling hot water and doused him with it.

Charge him and Prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law and publically shame this man, yes.  But I suspect that incidents like this are, kind of, Occupational Hazards, and there is probably something just a little sad about much of the clientele coming (reportedly older-middle-aged-men who are prone to handing out “stripper tips” to the baristas.)  Sex stores have largely cleaned themselves up, shuffling a bit away from the “Man in the Overcoat with nothing underneath it” demographic and to respectable corners of society and couples and women.  The creepy guy in the overcoat, with nowhere else to turn to, will gravitate toward a place like this.

I am a little puzzled why someone would so demand to be the “first” to hear who Obama would pick to be his running mate by signing up to get his campaign text-message.  That is an item of instant gratification that sort of fizzles.  I think I can wait.  I suppose there might be some sort of instant blogging commentary that’s supposed to occur as with…  hold on a minute… Cell phone ringing.

OMG!  He picked Sebelius!  Must be trying to shore up the remaining Clinton detractors.

Or… like that.  Which, I suppose would beat out my landmark 4:34 in the morning revelation that John Kerry picked John Edwards.  Pre-Drudge, as so happened.  I am happy to say such a feat is not going to happen this time out.

Though if it is Sebelius I will claim to have had fore-knowledge and use this post as my reference guide to yell “See?  See?”

I was thinking about something often said to suggest a lack of racism.  “I don’t care if they’re white, black, purple, or polka dot.”  I wonder, though.  Let’s say that a purple skinned person with giant green polka dots were running for president.  Do you think he (she?) would be doing very well in the polls?  And what hurdles would they have to clear to appear a “safe” kind of purple skinned green polka dotted people?

I think the original “Freakonomics”-esque study might have been that one which correlates women’s hem-lines with the economy.  This seems to me somewhat an accident of a revelatory moment as the 1920s flushed into the 1930s, though the sociology behind it — carefree during those wild and crazy partying days and then practical and earthly as you forge ahead with basic survival in mind– is probably apt enough.

I will note however, that we just had a three day spurt of 100 degree temperatures followed by a current spurt where the temperature has plunged down twenty-five or thirty degrees and a bleak gray cloud portends frequent rain.  The hem-line was just about as far up as it could go, and now has gone down to the floor.  This indicates one of two things.  Either the local economy just sky-rocketed and then plummeted, or, my theory, the length of hem-lines are better correlated to changes in the weather.  But that’s just a crazy theory of mine.

Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss weighs in on his Democratic challenger:

 “He’s a [U.S. Sen.] Chuck Schumer [D-N.Y.] hand-picked guy,” Chambliss told reporters at a morning press conference, just hours after voters picked Martin over DeKalb County CEO Vernon Jones as the Democratic Party nominee. “And there’s no more liberal member of the U.S. Senate than Chuck Schumer.”

Wait a minute.  According to the National Journal, there is no more liberal Senator than Barack Obama… just as in 2004 there was no more liberal a Senator than John Kerry… which suggests that if Obama were to lose this election and in four years the Democrats were to decide to nominate, say, Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson — generally considered the most conservative Democrat in the Senate–, Nelson would somehow magically become the Senate’s most Liberal member.

But if Saxby Chambliss were to cite Obama as “most liberal”, at least he would have a source of some kind.  For the life of me I don’t know where he plucks this “no more liberal a Senator than Charles Schumer” from out of.  Maybe this can be a sport… there is no more Liberal a Senator than — fill in the blank, whoever you happen to be mentioning at the time.

Anyway, for more items on this political race, I suppose you can go to www.bluegeorgia.com.  I don’t know if such a site exists, but I sort of assume every state has a representative web-blog put up by some Democrats where the word “blue” is attached to the name of the state and followed by the suffix “.com”.  Except for the “new” states, which I sort of assume the word “blue” is substituted for the word “new”, because the two words rhyme and it is thought to be clever.  If this is the case, it is a good way to take a gander at the down-ticket political races.  The Georgia Senate race is the current “sleeper race du jour” in the Democratic blogosphere, a title that is in constant shuffling, with races being quietly dropped away when subsequent poll numbers show the “on the cusp of” title running the other direction.  In this we are spared of Kansas Senator Jim Slattery, for instance, and don’t any longer have to amuse ourselves with Nebraska Senator Kleeb.  But for the moment “Senator Jim Martin” is all the rage, as Vernon Jones — who from all appearances appears to be a Republican, and there is some digging to do to figure out what a “Vernon Jones” is — lost that primary.

That Evangelical Leader hosts a forum and asks questions for McCain and Obama.  He asks Obama which Supreme Court Justices he would not have nominated.  Obama lists two Justices from the “Conservative Bloc” of the Court.  When he as at bat, McCain is asked who he would not have nominated.  McCain lists the four members of the “Liberal Bloc”.

This dramatic illustration of the obvious illuminates us… how?