Since John McCain sewed up the Republican nomination, it's been obvious that Joe Lieberman - his constant campaign traveling companion and one of his closest personal friends and political allies - would address the G.O.P. convention. What wasn't so obvious was which Joe would show up.

The answer hinged on the outcome of McCain's vice-presidential search. Probably from the beginning, McCain was inclined to tap Lieberman - and as the end of the process approached, it became clear that that's where his heart was.

If McCain had followed through on that instinct, then Lieberman would have shown up in St. Paul ready to spew red meat.  read more »

The Democrats are supposed to own the issue of energy, if only because they've mastered the art of tarring Republicans as the party of Big Oil. It's a caricature that the G.O.P., with its mocking scorn for conservation, addiction to corporate tax cuts and unkickable habit of nominating oil men for national office, has done nothing to refute.

Of course, the Democrats are also (supposedly) the masters of the blown political save, experts at devising new and ever more elaborate means of snatching electoral defeat from the jaws of victory. So it's only fitting that now, just as energy assumes unprecedented prominence in a presidential campaign, they've gone and adopted a maddeningly incomprehensible message that threatens to forfeit the powerful emotional advantage they've enjoyed on the subject for decades.  read more »

Mayor and national policy activist Michael Bloomberg will participate at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, organized by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

At the August 19 event, Bloomberg will deliver a keynote speech around 3 p.m., and former President Bill Clinton will deliver closing remarks about two hours later.

And, according to his office, the mayor will make a stop on the way to the event in order to attend a re-election fund-raiser for Republican congressman Mark Kirk, who helped push Bloomberg’s anti-illegal gun message in Congress.

Ordinarily, the “most endangered incumbent” label applies to an office holder who is standing for reelection. In 2008, however, the most endangered member of the U.S. Senate’s Democratic Caucus won’t be on any ballots. It’s Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman just won his fourth six-year term in 2006, but no member of the Senate majority – with the possible exception of Mary Landrieu, the lone Democratic senator facing a tricky reelection fight this year – stands to lose more this November than Connecticut’s junior senator.

Since the ’06 elections, Lieberman’s supposed role as the Senate’s ultimate power broker has been touted endlessly. Rejected by the party that once nominated him for vice president in the August ’06 primary, he nonetheless won reelection in the fall as a self-described “independent Democrat,” promising to caucus with Democrats and to side with them for organizing purposes in the Senate.  read more »

It seems odd that Harry Reid, whose generally dispassionate manner probably strikes the casual listener as plain and boring, now enjoys a reputation as a hothead.

Of course, it’s not the way he talks, but the words that occasionally slip from his mouth that have fed the right’s bid to caricature him as an unstable fringe figure: the erratic, America-hating lefty who called President Bush a loser and a liar and who said the war in Iraq is lost.  read more »

The Millennium UN Plaza Hotel in midtown, Senate Democratic leaders made a public plea for President Bush not to veto a $124 billion war spending measure that would order troops to begin leaving Iraq by October.

"We call on the president to look into his heart, give it one more thought and sign the bill that the American people want," Chuck Schumer said.

The inevitability of the veto made the Democratic overture little more than a publicity exercise designed to convey the message that they had done all they could.

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid indicated that there was a point to it all, and that there was a possibility of reaching some kind of post-veto accord.

"If you look at his statements over the last few days, I think they have been promising," Reid said, citing what he called “buzz words” by the administration. "The president's changed his tune."

He added, "We understand that legislation is the art of compromise."  read more »

To say that Harry Reid’s pronouncement that the war in Iraq is “lost” stirred a media frenzy last week is an understatement.  read more »

Chuck Todd thinks John McCain will save the GOP.

Kos wants to know what readers think about the leadership job being done by Howard Dean, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Rahm Emanuel.

An anonymous blogger wants to keep track of Eliot Spitzer's Day One plans for changing Albany.

The AP has more on our item about Emily Pataki and the bar exam, rightly noting that both John F. Kennedy Jr. and Dennis Vacco failed on their first attempts too.

And pictured above is Newsday'sDan Janison with a bottle of ale.