The GOP VeepStakes is in high gear, but Marc Ambinder points something out that hadn't really occurred to me until just now: whoever gets the nomination will have to pick a Democratic VP candidate very, very fast. Is that bad? They can put some lists together now, but what about the very probable overlap ruining any sort of secrecy?

Looks like changes to FHA and some serious policy alterations to stem the tide of foreclosures are in the works.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has some earth-shattering news: the US could possibly be headed for a recession. Thanks, Ben! I thought everything was cool!

Rest easy, citizens. John McCain is really taking this whole thing very seriously, and he's got a list of 20 names for possible running mates. We can only assume he's checking it twice.

Howard Dean told Florida Democrats that, although the plan has to bee worked out and agreed upon by the two campaigns, the DNC will be doing everything it can to get the Florida delegation seated in Denver.

For those of you that follow international politics, you might have been expecting to Robert Mugabe to win yet another term as Zimbabwe's president, and to win handily by a fixed margin of 15 points or so due to election hijinx. However, Mugabe lost by a scant few tenths of a percent to Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of opposition party Movement for Democratic Change.

Today I received a new email from the Lone Star Project. In it, Matt Angle points to a new article on Alternet concerning the investigations by the Texas Attorney General's office of alleged voter fraud. The peg?

State's Attorney General has prosecuted Democrats who help seniors vote by mail while ignoring documented Republican ballot box stuffing.

Get the whole story here.

The New York Times and other outlets report that the Congressional Budget Office has some bad forecasts amid a torrent of bad economic news. The CBO projects that food stamps will be used by some 28 million Americans this year. That number is an all-time high and prompted the UK's Independent to declare that these levels of food stamp use indicate the United States is headed for or currently in a new Great Depression.

Reader ST writes:

George, After reading your comments about the Treasury Secretary's new proposal, I thought you might want to read this article by Paul Krugman. He is a full Professor of Economics at Princeton.

Links added for reference. The aforementioned article is essentially an indictment of Treasury Secretary Paulson's — and by extension, the Bush administration's — new financial regulatory strategy as little more than a new org chart one might see in a Dilbert strip. I think Krugman's right.

Spend more - Produce less - Burma Shave:

The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average. In addition, none of the systems that the GAO looked at had met all of the standards for best management practices during their development stages.