On the timing of the Biden announcement:

I'm thinking that the Obama folks might have made the announcement on Saturday morning, traditionally a slow time for news, in order to get all of the junk out of the media's system now before anyone's really paying attention. Rush Limbaugh noted a couple days ago that he had 20 years worth of audio clips stored up about Biden, and I'm sure the rest of the media has been stockpiling Biden's Neil Kinnock plagiarism, 7-11 comment, etc. I watched Joe Scarborough this morning playing a lot of it. My bet is that on a Saturday in the summer, most people will note that Biden is the VP nominee and then not pay much attention until the convention. The media, with nothing else to talk about, will get a lot of the bad stuff out of their system now, allowing Obama to roll out Biden on their own terms during the convention.