Off the Rails: Sarah Palin's Very Bad Day. That's the lead-in title. The link headline is "The Palin Meltdown in Slo-Mo." I mostly wanted to use the picture, which unlike most quickie photoshop kluges does a nice job of capturing this story. Palin reminds me of randomocracy: the half-baked idea that we can eliminate the biases in the election system by simply picking someone at random. Compared to a political process that promotes safe picks like Joe Biden (or steathily sinister ones like Dick Cheney), Palin is almost a random American, at least within Republican white middle class female constraints -- what proves this is the ordinariness of her baggage. Even the corruption issues are normal reactions to the company she keeps: as Molly Ivins used to say, "lie down with dogs, get up with fleas."

Billmon: Ready, shoot, aim On the art and science of vetting vice presidential nominees. One point, which others have also made, bears repeating:

I'm glad to see Obama come out and warn his troops away from the really personal stuff. It's already clear that Palin offers an embarrassment of riches for the Obama campaign, and a wealth of embarrassments for McCain's. There's no need to get greedy -- or cruel and vindicative, which is the one thing that could cause this whole freeding frenzy to circle back and start munching on the Democrats. McCain's people wanted to toss the pregnancy story into Hurricane Gustav? Good. Let it be buried in the muck.

Except for one obvious point: When Sarah Palin praises her 17-year-old daughter for "choosing" to give birth to a baby conceived out of wedlock (and assures us that she is doing it of her own free will) it should never be forgotten that she (and her party) would, if they could, deny that same right of choice to every other American woman, without exception.

Michael Kinsley: No Experience Necessary. And what does the Palin pick tell us about McCain?

That's why the important point about Palin's lack of experience isn't about Palin. It's about McCain. And the question is not how his choice of Palin might complicate his ability to use the "experience" issue, or whether he will have to drop experience as an issue. It's not even about the proper role of experience as an issue. In fact, it's not about experience at all. It's about honesty. The question should be whether McCain -- and all the other Republicans who have been going on for months about Obama's dangerous lack of foreign-policy experience -- ever meant a word of it.

Matthew Yglesias: Alaska Independence. Not a good post, but I felt like adding a comment, not least because something obvious to me didn't occur to first 25 commenters:

The knock on Alaska's congressional representation shows a short memory. Sen. Ernest Gruening voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The only other senator to do so was Wayne Morse of Oregon. Sen. Mike Gravel read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. Of course, both were Democrats, and Alaska's congressional delegation has been solid Republican for decades now.

Gruening is long dead now, but Gravel ran for president this year. He was probably the most solidly antiwar candidate in the race, but didn't get any respect. Funny thing is that Palin seems to be about as far off in the Republican fringe as Gravel is relative to the Democrats. Had she run for president she wouldn't have fared any better. Yet here she is, a heartbeat and the small matter of an election away.

In the late 1960s I followed Congress real closely, and Gruening was something of a hero to me. He was well into his 80s at the time, having long been pre-statehood Alaska's most eminent statesman. Gravel was his protégé and successor.

One of the amusing things about the Palin nomination is that on matters like Iraq she seems to be closer to Ron Paul than she is to McCain -- although, as we'll see, she can go any way the party wind blows.

The folks at FiveThirtyEight have dropped their convention bounce compensation metric, which had narrowed Obama's edge to 0.2%, but kept various anti-trend hedge factors, so they're only showing Obama with a 2.4% margin right now. (The average of six nationwide polls today puts Obama ahead by 6.7%, with CNN +2% and everyone else +6-9%.) That was good enough to barely nudge Virginia and Ohio into Obama's column, but Nevada slipped out. It remains to be seen how much more bump Obama can get out of the Republican convention. It all depends on how many people are still gullible enough to believe anything from a gang who'd say anything to hang on to the pursestrings.