Made conscious by that last item of the need to bring normblog readers some actual news, I report this tantalizing straw in the wind (assuming a straw - and in the wind, even - can tantalize): Barack Obama's running mate is probably going to be a man. Yesterday he said:
I won't hand over my energy policy to my vice-president without knowing necessarily what he's doing. I won't have my vice-president engineering my foreign policy for me... My vice-president also, by the way, will be a member of the executive branch; he won't be one of these fourth branches of the government where he thinks he's above the law.
Usually, I gather, he would say 'he or she' in this context. If you don't follow these things yourself, let me just tell you that you would not believe how fine-grained coverage of the speech output of the relevant parties in the US presidential race can get.