From left to right:

• The bag itself: Just a blue sack with Coke and AT&T logos. Probably made in China by armless children orphaned in the Georgian war.
• Brochure for something called “Joint Juice.”
• Hike/Bike map of Denver. Too bad bicycles aren’t allowed anywhere near Pepsi Center!
• Invite for Starz chill-out lounge, where you watch cable movies and cry.
• Can of “Joint Juice.” It’s liquid dope!
• Big-ass notebook made of recycled crap.
• Scary little emergency radio with earbuds, to let you know when Putin launches the nukes on Denver.
• Little plastic boxes of … mints? We can’t get them to open. Let’s say they’re mints.
• Logo pens, more brochures for various crap, “Dale Carnegie’s Golden Book,” which is just a tiny brochure of like two pages.
• Post-It notes. We have been leaving these all over with cryptic warnings about the space monster invasion.
• More goddamned “Joint Juice.” It is actually a way for old people to get a hip replacement.
• Piece of garbage you are supposed to plant in the dirt, to make a “garbage plant.”
• Water bottle made out of that poison plastic that makes babies grow beaks.
• Hand sanitizer with handy belt clip. Use after touching Democrat genitalia or hands.
• Little windmill lapel pin to prove you love windmills.
• Little bicycle lapel pin to prove you love bicycles.
• (There is no American Flag lapel pin, obvs.)
• Free AT&T ringtone card! (We got “Jack U Off.”)
• Flier for solar something or other.
• $10 coupon at Macy’s, to buy some more hand sanitizer.

The press area — or at least one of them, past all the fancy individual soundproofed rooms for the radio people — smells like popcorn. Here you will find strange white men shooting death rays at the stage with these kitschy 50s looking wireless robots. Why do they hate America?

Oh look here is some other Republican Villain sucking all the good energy out of the heads of some, uh, random news people.

Well, that was pretty boring! Let’s go back downstairs and enjoy the Ice Cream of the Future, Dippin’ Dots.

Your editor got half chocolate, half mint chocolate chip. In the future, ice cream will taste like mentholated ozone, with a soupçon of “I paid how much for this?”

After this difficult day’s work, your editors were forced to unwind with a hundred-dollar steak lunch, followed immediately by a photo op with these darling Peta protesters. “Stop global warming! Tax meat!”

“Yes,” we chuckled to ourselves. “It will be called the Flavor Tax.”

See that little picture, of Barack and Jack in the Middle East just cold travelin’? That’s from Obama’s Flickr set about his big trip abroad! In fact, Barack picked that very pic to ID the whole set, and you know you always pick the most important photo for that spot.

Chris–

Obama’s pick is Jack Reed. The Secret Service are began protection on Reed in the last 24 hours and have been crawling around Rhode Island since yesterday.

The Bayh, Biden, etc names are just a smokescreen. If you want to look like a genius, start mentioning Reed, since nobody else seems to have a clue right now. The decision was all but finalized after the Iraq trip and Reed’s voting record on Iraq/national security, and his war record fit perfectly.

And if nothing else, maybe you can buy some Jack Reed on Intrade.

It’s boring enough to be true, and Reed isn’t hounded by scandal he isn’t a look-at-me motor mouth like, say, Bill Richardson or Joe Biden. Here’s the relevant biographical stuff:

After graduating from West Point and receiving an active duty commission in the United States Army, Reed attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where he received a Masters of Public Policy. Reed, an Army Ranger and a paratrooper, served in the 82nd Airborne Division as an Infantry Platoon Leader, a Company Commander, and a Battalion Staff Officer. He returned to West Point in 1978 as an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences.

There you go. For this race — for these remaining 10 weeks of desperate fighting over the 5% of registered voters who still have no idea who they’re voting for, or who’s running, or what country they live in — it’s all about giving Obama a nice scandal-free military crutch to lean on when McCain’s people scream “POW” all day long every day.

Not only is Reed a war hero who managed to not crash, again, and get captured by village children, but Reed also grew up in a working class family where people actually worked. Reed’s dad was a World War II vet and school janitor. And instead of “graduating” at the bottom of his class because no teachers wanted to get fired for flunking Aristocrat McNasty, Reed was an excellent student and went on to be a professor at West Point.

Here’s what the Wall Street Journal’s Washington editor wrote about Reed just last month:

If you were to construct the ideal Democrat to engage Republicans in debate over Iraq, he might look something like this:

He would be a military veteran with real experience, maybe even a West Point man. He would have opposed the war against Iraq originally, and maybe even have cast a vote against the war to prove it. But since then, he would have devoted himself to making the exercise a success, becoming an expert on U.S. policy and what is happening on the ground.

Hey, wait. There is just such a Democrat out there. He is Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island. And he was at Sen. Barack Obama’s side Monday touring around Baghdad. All of which raises an intriguing question: Is there a chance he also could be at Sen. Obama’s side as vice-presidential running mate?

And here are more Jack Reed Military Hero in the Middle East pictures from the his Senate photo galleries.

So, like we said, what the hell? Nobody knows anything. But our mysterious tipster “Dan A.” will be the smartest guy around if his left-field prediction is true.

First, the shocking email from somebody who was in Hawaii last week:

From: Johnny Utah
To: tips@wonkette.com
Date: Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 6:01 PM
Subject: Obama’s Penis

While I was vacationing last week in Hawaii, me and my dad decided to go snorkeling in a Famous bay. Obama decided to snorkel that exact same day. I took this picture while Obama was about to enter the water, and if you look it looks like the black snorkel that he is holding is his penis. My friend loves your site and said that you would love to have this picture.

Sincerely,
Nick D.

Thank you, Nick and your friend. Thank you thank you.

Here’s what Goldfarb wrote on August 1 in response to a hilarious New York Times editorial board mid-afternoon blog freakout about how John McCain is an asshole:

But in their new role as bloggers, the paper’s editors seem to have all the intelligence and reason of the average Daily Kos diarist sitting at home in his mother’s basement and ranting into the ether between games of dungeons and dragons.

Again, this is a full-time blogger for the McCain campaign accusing part-time bloggers — editorial board members of a major American newspaper, no less — of being losers.

And a couple of days ago, Goldfarb wrote this in response to the Daily Kos-promoted rumor that John McCain stole his Cross In The Dirt story from dead Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman’s memory of war from the comfort of mom’s basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others.

TIME TO MAKE TEE SHIRTS.

“Amateurs,” the Paultards shout from a distance.

Smears The Left Can Fight For [McCain Report]
McCain’s blogger rips bloggers ’sitting in mother’s basement, ranting into the ether.’ [Think Progress]
Pro-Obama Dungeons and Dragons Crowd [Red Bubble]