The veepstakes wait is driving ABC's Jake Tapper mad:

Does it mean anything that the wife of one of Sen. Barack Obama's veep finalists, Susan Bayh, just got her hair and nails done?

Or that she has also told neighbors that she's sorry about the media pack about to descend upon her Washington, DC, neighborhood?

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The political blogosphere roared back to life Monday after a week of relative quiet, with some rampant speculation about whether Barack Obama plans to pick Joe Biden, the Delaware senator, as his running mate.

Adding fuel to the fire, Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times report this evening that Obama has "all but settled on" his veep choice, and that it's most likely either Biden, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, or Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine.

Biden, who traveled to Georgia this weekend at the behest of President Mikheil Saakashvili, would be seen by many as a solid choice for Obama on foreign policy. He hasn't hesitated to launch sharp attacks on John McCain, and he has a record of making prescient comments about Pakistan, among other issues.

Still, I wonder what people will say about Biden's ideas about Iraq, and what kind of influence they would have on Obama's position. The Biden-Gelb plan, described here by George Packer, took a lot of heat from respected Iraq experts such as Joost Hilterman of the International Crisis Group and was widely panned by Iraqis. It was rejected by the Iraq Study Group and the Bush administration as unworkable. Has Biden talked about it lately? Given how much the surge exceeded everyone's expectations, I doubt it. But I'm curious to know what the senator thinks about it these days.

While we're bashing Dick Morris, I recently saw this book on sale for $5.99 at Barnes and Noble:

Here's what State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos had to say about the fast developing conflict in South Ossetia:

We support Georgia's territorial integrity and call for an immediate cease-fire. We urge all parties, including Georgians, South Ossetians and Russians to de-escalate and avoid conflict."

Barack Obama said basically the same thing:

Georgia's territorial integrity must be respected. All sides should enter into direct talks on behalf of stability in Georgia, and the United States, the United Nations Security Council, and the international community should fully support a peaceful resolution to this crisis."

The problem with these statements is that they seem to ignore the fact that it was Georgia that started shooting yesterday, not Russia. There isn't a direct contradiction between supporting Georgia's territorial integrity and demanding an end to the fighting but in the context of this situation it's pretty close.

Not surprisingly, John McCain was more directly critical of Russia:

Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations, withdraw all forces from the sovereign territory of Georgia," McCain told reporters in Iowa. "The U.S should immediately convene an emergency session of the U.N. security council to call on Russia to reverse course."

Of course, there's a strong argument to be made that Russia has been trying to push Georgia into this war, but McCain seems to be either unaware of Mikheil Saakashvili's own role in escalating the conflict or deliberately downplaying it.

There's no doubt that the United States' close relationship with Saakashvili puts it in an awkward spot here and it will be interesting to see what form the American response eventually takes.

Update: Same line from the White House:

I want to reiterate on [President Bush's] behalf that the United States supports Georgia's territorial integrity and we call for an immediate ceasefire," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said in a statement in Beijing where Bush was attending the Olympics.

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Steve Clemons gives the Barack Obama campaign a good thrashing from the left today for the candidate's willingness to accept the resignation of his Muslim outreach coordinator, Mazen Asbahi. The Wall Street Journal reports that Asbahi, a Chicago lawyer, resigned because of questions about his ties to an Illinois-based Imam named Jamal Said who has been accused (though not indicted) of fundraising for Hamas. The two served together for a few weeks on the board of an Islamic investment fund back in 2000. Predictable smug outrage has followed on right-wing blogs.

According to the Journal, the tenuous connection between Asbahi and Said was first noted by the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report, a subscription-only Web site that tracks the international activity of that Islamic party and its supporters. The WSJ says the Report is published by a "Washington think tank," but there doesn't seem to be any author or organizational affiliation mentioned on the site, and a Whois lookup yields no clues.

The Report employs a fairly loose definition of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates that includes fairly mainstream organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Amusingly, recent FP contributors Graham Fuller and Marc Lynch are also described as Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers. As Passport readers know, Lynch has indeed met with senior Brotherhood leaders in Cairo, but they hardly see eye to eye. Fuller's supposed ties are of the six-degrees-of-Mahdi Akef variety.

By the standards of this site, you are not only a fellow traveler of the Muslim Brotherhood if you have defended them or recommended dialogue with them, you need only have been loosely associated with people who held those views. By this standard, there probably isn't one prominent Muslim-American in the country that Obama could hire for the campaign. Anyone he could find who has never participated in an event that includes people with sympathies Obama might not agree with is probably not actually influential enough to win him any votes.

Even in a campaign full of trumped-up outrage and guilt by association, the Asbahi affair is pretty absurd. This is roughly the equivalent of Obama throwing Chris Rock under the bus because he once appeared in a movie with the anti-semitic Mel Gibson. If nothing else, it's an indication of how rattled the Obama campaign is by all the Muslim rumors.

Update: ABC's Jake Tapper has much more:

As long as we're playing the guilt by association game, we should note that Karen Hughes, back when she worked for the State Department, spoke before an ISNA conference and was honored with an ISNA dinner, and both former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have met with ISNA leadership.

Also check out the comments on this post for some more investigation into the mysterious Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report website.

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Last month, the Obama campaign announced a $5 million advertising buy during NBC's coverage of the Beijing Olympics, which was the largest by any presidential candidate on network television in the last 16 years. Not to be outdone, John McCain has made a last-minute ad buy of $6 million for the Olympics, which begin Friday.

The move was savvy beyond the symbolic political gamesmanship, notes Evan Tracey, chief operating officer of the Campaign Media Analysis Group at TNS Media Intelligence, in AdAge:

Tracey speculated that the McCain campaign, which is accepting federal funds for the general campaign, made the last-minute buy to use up money it raised for the primary season. That money can't be spent after the Republican National Convention, which is being held the first week in September.

Sure, both McCain and Obama said they'd boycott the opening ceremonies if they were president, but must-see TV is too good to pass up.

Looks like there's one more "Obamacon" to add to the list. Boris Johnson, London's always-entertaining Tory mayor, told the Guardian that an Obama win would "have a beneficial influence on the self-image of some of London's black male youth":

I think [Republican candidate] John McCain has many, many wonderful qualities... but I think a Barack Obama victory would do fantastic things for the confidence and the feelings of black people around the world - that they can win."

Asked if he endorsed Obama, he said: "Yes."

I'm so glad we have Johnson to tell us about the feelings and aspirations of black people everywhere.

Obama also hit it off last week with Conservative Party leader David Cameron (who also fancies himself a candidate for change), but probably shouldn't expect an explicit endorsement.

In other Boris-related news, the mayor swallowed a bug during a live radio interview this morning.

Newsday blogger John Riley slams John McCain's (stupid) new ad, which rips Barack Obama as a "celebrity" à la Britney Spears and Paris Hilton:

Anyone with even a vague sense of pop culture knows that Britney and Paris are yesterday's news. Here's a link to Forbes' Celebrity 100. Paris and Britney don't even make the list any more.

Instead, the top 10, in order: Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Angelina Jolie, Beyonce Knowles, David Beckham, Johnny Depp, Jay-Z, The Police, JK Rowling, Brad Pitt.

So, um, The Police are today's news? Somehow, I don't quite picture Sting being an effective tool with which to mock Barack.

New York's John Heilemann glosses Walter Russell Mead:

What the Middle East portion of Obama's trip highlighted is that on Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Israel, his positions all fit quite comfortably into what the Council on Foreign Relation's Walter Russell Mead calls "a loose bipartisan consensus" now emerging on policy toward the region — a consensus, Mead argues, that's "closer to Bush's views than to those of the antiwar activists who propelled [Obama] to [his party's] nomination." A painful thought for some on the left, to be sure. But a fact that robs McCain of a potentially powerful point of contrast.

Comments? 

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This should be easy fodder for the anti-globalization crowd. A lobbyist for oil giant Chevron, which is embroiled in a potentially costly lawsuit with Ecuador over the dumping of toxic oil waste in the Ecuadorian Amazon, is complaining of mistreatment at the hands of the big bad South American nation:

"The ultimate issue here is Ecuador has mistreated a U.S. company," said one Chevron lobbyist who asked not to be identified talking about the firm's arguments to U.S. officials. "We can't let little countries screw around with big companies like this—companies that have made big investments around the world."

Chevron is playing hardball, asking the Bush administration to revoke special trade preferences with Ecuador if the case isn't dismissed. But the plaintiffs have the backing of Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, a Hugo Chávez ally, and two years ago secured the support of one Barack Obama, who wrote a letter arguing that the Ecuadorian peasants pressing the case should have "their day in court."

If the Bush administration doesn't act, and Obama wins in November, I wouldn't bet on Chevron in this rumble in the jungle.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy comes perilously close to endorsing Barack Obama in his comments to Le Figaro and CNN.

Ben Smith:

Obama? He's my pal," the president told Le Figaro. "Unlike my diplomatic advisers, I never believed in Hillary Clinton's chances. I always said that Obama would be nominated."

Sarkozy added that an Obama victory "would validate" his strategy of reconcilation with the United States.

(Le Figaro does note that Sarkozy is careful not to predict the winner.) And in a separate item from Smith:

Barack Obama's adventure is an adventure that rings true in the hearts and minds of Americans and Europeans," Sarkozy said, per CNN's interpretation. He also recalled his meeting with Obama in 2006.

"One [of the two men] became president, so it's up to the other person to do the same thing," he said.

Well, sort of. The seemingly ubiquitous presidential candidate has shelled out $5 million to join McDonalds and Anheuser-Busch as major advertiser during NBC's coverage of next month's Olympics.

The ad buy is the largest by any presidential candidate on network television in the last 16 years, AdAge reports:

While Rudy Giuliani's campaign did a tiny buy to air political ads on "Fox News Sunday" in consecutive weeks, the Obama campaign's spending on the high-rated and expensive Olympics top anything that has been done on network TV by presidential candidates in years.

Traditionally, campaigns target cheaper cable ads in crucial swing states. The last candidate to buck the trend was Bob Dole in 1996. Flush with youthful exuberance and record-breaking cash on hand, the Obama team thinks its campaign will meet a different fate than Dole's.

Drudge posts Barack's Obama's prepared remarks. Some of the rhetoric may sound familiar to those of you who have seen the Illinois senator's stump speech, but this is the European touch:

I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen -- a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

SEBASTIAN WILLNOW/AFP/Getty Images

The scuttlebutt on Barack Obama's speech in Berlin, due to hit in less than an hour now, is that he's going to use the occassion to demand more of Europe, particularly when it comes to boots on the ground in Aghanistan.

Coming from the lips of George W. Bush of John McCain, it's the kind of appeal that would go mostly unnoticed. But coming from Obama, it's going to seem to many like a "Sister Souljah moment" -- the act of telling a friendly audience what it needs, but doesn't necessarily want to hear. With Obama seen in many quarters as too Europhilic, (gently) criticizing Europe is savvy campaigning.

Politics aside, it's doubtful Europe can rise to the challenge. German officials and politicians have been fretting for days that Obama would ask them to send more troops, and Chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to resist the Illinois senator's entreaties. Germany is already planning to send an additional 1,000 soldiers to Afghanistan in the fall, and that was hard enough politically for Ms. Merkel to pull off. Nicolas Sarkozy has talked tough, but is in the midst of downsizing the French military. Britain may be able to redirect some of the forces it is planning to withdraw from Iraq, but British officers are already complaining loudly of being overstretched.

It'll be interesting to see if Obama comes up with any creative workarounds, such as an appeal to newer NATO powers to step up. But given that he isn't visiting anywhere east of Berlin, that would be an odd move to make.

UPDATE: Der Speigel reports that "tens of thousands of people" are making their way to the speech site.

Marc Ambinder reports, you decide:

With less than six months to go before he would be sworn in as the nation's 44th president, Sen. Barack Obama has directed his aides to begin planning for the transition.

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John McCain has been tying himself in knots lately trying to explain what he meant when he told CBS's Katie Couric that the "Anbar Awakening" was made possible by the "surge." Chronologically speaking, that's dubious -- but McCain later said that he conceives of the surge as the broader counterinsurgency strategy that the U.S. military began putting in place in the fall of 2006, not solely in terms of the five additional combat brigades that began arriving in the spring of 2007.

McCain's getting lots of criticism for his chronology, but his broader point is not obviously wrong. Gen. David Petraeus testifed earlier this year that the Awakening "started before the surge, but then was very much enabled by the surge." And let's remember that General Petraeus was put in charge in part because he advocated more troops, whereas Generals Casey and Abizaid objected while the change in strategy was under consideration.

That said, it's still highly debateable whether injecting more troops was the decisive factor, and moreover, the additional troops mostly went to Baghdad, not Anbar province (though 4,000 went there). The "surge" announced in January 2007 was really Petraeus's Baghdad security plan, and the key was a shift toward protecting Iraqis and working with local forces rather than strictly going after the bad guys.

One thing nobody is talking about, however, is Basra. Nancy Youssef of McClatchy explains the Iraqi view of the surge:

When you ask the Iraqis here, they say that the added U.S. forces were a part of it, but what really turned things around was the Sahwa movement [of former insurgents switching sides], Moqtada's ceasefires, and in their minds, Basra. Basra was the first Iraqi-led success story, and it really changed the momentum. So, the Iraqis that we talk to see it as a complex equation with the U.S. troop surge as just one factor. And frankly, the situation on the ground suggests that they're right, because the surge troops have left, and the security situation remains better.

Sure, Barack Obama is quite popular in Europe and has received his fair share of endorsements from unusual areas, but the Arab media has had some other things to say.

Courtesy of the Anti-Defamation League, a sampling of political cartoons from Middle Eastern media sources:

Although the ADL lists the collection under the banner of "Anti-Semitism in the Arab/Muslim World," you might want to take this with a grain of salt. Some of these cartoons are undoubtedly offensive (including some toward Obama's race), but others simply echo familiar claims and criticisms regarding the close U.S.-Israel relationship. Personally, I've seen similar cartoons in the Western media as well.

If anything, these cartoons just reinforce the Walt-Mearsheimer argument about the wellspring of anti-Americanism in many parts of the Arab world: "It's Israel, Stupid!"

The McCain campaign has taken to mocking the press corps left behind to cover the Arizona senator while Barack Obama is overseas, Hotline reports. Here are the luggage tags McCain staffers jokingly put on reporters' bags yesterday:

Chuck Todd and company at MSNBC's First Read comment, "Why does McCain think belittling his own press corps is a good idea?" Good question.

This was a good line on the size of Obama's entourage from McCain spokesman Brian Rogers:

Who does he think he is?" Rogers asked of Obama. "Clay Aiken?"

On the other side, why does Cindy McCain need two assistants when she travels?

Here's what Barack Obama wrote in the guestbook at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial. You have to admit, the man has a way with words:

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