Politico: MCCAIN VEEP ANNOUNCEMENT A WEEK FROM FRIDAY (unless he pulls a fast one on his staff): The senator plans to celebrate his 72nd birthday by naming his running mate at a huge rally in the battleground state of Ohio on Aug. 29 – the morning after the Obama stadium spectacular. The campaign has begun building a crowd of 10,000 for Dayton, Ohio, and McCain is scheduled to appear with his running mate at a large-scale event in Pennsylvania shortly thereafter (perhaps the next day).
McCain friends emphasized that he talks about the decision with almost no one, and could even change the announcement plans and go sooner. 'McCain views this as the one decision that he has total, utter, nonnegotiable control over,' one campaign official said. But the strategy calls for an early-morning announcement to try to suppress Obama's bounce coming out of his convention. 'You're going to own the weekend,' a McCain official said.
In other republican news, the respectable ones are getting angry at the wingnuts like Jerome Corsi:
Peter Wehner, a former White House aide who remains in President Bush's extended brain trust, uses a post on Commentary Magazine's blog to denounce what he called 'The Obama Smears' in Jerome Corsi's best seller 'The Obama Nation': 'Corsi's approach to politics is both destructive and self-destructive. If Senator Obama loses, he should lose on the merits: his record in public life and his political philosophy. And while it's legitimate to take into account Obama's past associations with people like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright–especially for someone like Obama, about whom relatively little is known–it wrong and reckless to throw out unsubstantiated charges and smears against Senator Obama.
