BRENDAN LOY ON Obama’s 3. a.m. text message:

It’s 3:00 AM, and your children are safe and asleep…

…but there’s a cell phone in the other room, and it’s ringing. Must be one of your a**hole friends drunk-dialing you, or perhaps a wrong number from a different time zone. Wait, no: it’s Barack Obama!

Plus, scripting the McCain ad. “It’s like Obama just drunk texted you because you’re special and he was up late and just got back from the traveling, and he’s got to head to Springfield tomorrow, but if you’re awake maybe he could just come over, and maybe bring his friend Joe, you up for that?”

GREG FORSTER: Schools are not social service centers.

ABC NEWS: Obama Decries Lobbyist Cash; Biden Has Reaped It In. Well, the Biden pick has people talking. But . . .

“Maybe it’s a death wish.”

Plus, “Awesomely awesome.”

IT’S PHOTOWALK DAY. I think that Brendan Loy is going, but I won’t be able to make it.

TALKLEFT: “I think that given Obama’s stubborn and wrongheaded unwillingness to pick Hillary Clinton and put a lock on the election, Biden was the best choice politically that Obama was willing to make (imagine the political disaster if he had picked Sebelius). But the rollout of Biden was disastrously bad, unless the idea is to make sure as few people know as possible.”

TOM MAGUIRE: “It’s interesting how far off the table the war in Iraq has fallen as an issue for the Democrats – Biden voted for the fateful resolution in 2002 (isn’t this all about judgment?) and has not been much of a proponent of willy-nilly withdrawal, and yet here he is.” Much more background, plus this upside: “The inevitable gaffes from Biden should distract nicely from the inevitable gaffes from Obama.”

FLASHBACK: Biden sneers at gun owner.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg: “This isn’t going to help him with the bitter gun clingers.”

IS THE FDA getting too cautious in drug approvals? If it is, people will die who shouldn’t. But it’s less likely to get blamed.

The problem has been magnified in recent years as the number of new drug approvals has fallen dramatically. The FDA approved just 16 new drugs last year, and is on pace to approve only 18 this year. That’s down from a high of 53 in 1996 and 39 in 1997.

After a few high-profile drug scares, such as the 2004 withdrawal of Vioxx from the market, FDA officials have become gun-shy about approving new products. After all, the agency receives scathing criticism from Congress and the press when an approved drug turns out to be more risky than expected — but rarely for keeping beneficial ones off the market.

Last year alone, the FDA rejected five new cancer drugs, including a breakthrough treatment for prostate cancer called Provenge. A panel of cancer experts that advises the FDA on new drug approvals unanimously agreed that Provenge was safe, and voted 13-4 that it was effective enough. But the FDA demanded still more testing that may delay approval for three years.

In three years, a lot of people will die who might otherwise be saved; quite likely more than would die from even a “dangerous” drug given today’s standards. But the politics are different.

IN PREPARATION FOR THE DNC, the Obama Drinking Game: “The rules are, every time Obama says the word ‘change,’ you take a shot. And every time he says the word ‘hope,’ you take a double shot.”

Sounds like fun, but I’ve only got one liver. And I’m still using it.

JOE BIDEN’S “REFRESHING” racial remarks. So that’s the line?

THE CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES is up!

3 A.M.: A “juvenile jab at Hillary?”

BECAUSE PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING IS ONLINE NOW: The rare Webb Wilder Human Cannonball video. Arty! Althouse will no doubt have something to say about the Freudian imagery of Webb in the cannon barrel. Now blast off. I said, blast off!

MICHAEL SILENCE: If my pick were Biden… …I’d wait until late Friday night to leak it, too.

Plus, “Looks like the Obama Campaign laid an egg.” More or less literally . . . .

UPDATE: A.P.: Biden Pick Shows Lack of Confidence. “The candidate of change went with the status quo.”

IN THE MAIL: From Mark Rippetoe (author of Starting Strength, which many readers praised when I mentioned it a while back) Strong Enough? Thoughts from Thirty Years of Barbell Training.

HMM: University to release Obama records. Of course, some will say that the delay was just so that the files could be vacuumed of any embarrassing information.

SUE JOHN EDWARDS FOR LYING TO CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTORS? Warren Buffett thinks it’s a good idea, but Mickey Kaus responds: “Maybe businesses have to live with this sort of uncertain class-action threat when they dissemble. Politicians will never stand for it.” Yeah, it would threaten their whole business model.

SHOULD AMERICA BE more like China?

OBAMA PICKS BIDEN: So Much for Change? That’s unfair. He’s at least as fresh a face as Madeleine Albright.

Plus, an epic text message failure? Micah Sifry: “From a tech point of view, the mass txt message seems to have failed.” On the other hand, while people who signed up may not have gotten their text messages, Obama got their names for his mailing list.

UPDATE: Not winning over Katie Granju: “‘I’m not excited by Obama’s choice of Biden. He’s got a long record of aggressively supporting the consumer debt machines that have created so much of the subprime lending mess we find ourselves in today.And in a campaign that has succeeded in large part on the idea of change and progress, he’s simply a throwback.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Richard Miniter: “Biden is almost a ‘neocon’ in his foreign policy views. He voted for the Iraq War in 2002. . . . Does his elevation by Obama signal that that the Obama campaign is backing away from its timetable to withdraw from Iraq? Does Biden’s position differ significantly from McCain’s? Isn’t he, in fact, closer to McCain’s view on Iraq than Obama is?”

Meanwhile, since it’s bound to come up, here my defense of Biden over the plagiarism thing, from The Appearance of Impropriety.

MORE: The Senator from MBNA? “Barack Obama’s choice of Joseph Biden as his running mate is likely to bring up lots of old stories about the long-time senator from Delaware. In 1998, someone called me to talk about the sale of Biden’s house, which had been a minor issue in his re-election campaign two years earlier. But when I traveled to Delaware, I found there was more to it than met the eye, and it was just part of Biden’s close, intertwined relationship with MBNA, the giant credit-card company based in his home state.” The lousy bankruptcy “reform” bill, which MBNA and many of its “friends” pushed hard, was very unpopular on both the left and right sides of the blogosphere. I wonder how the leftosphere will respond on this issue now? On the other hand, I don’t think McCain was any better.

HELLO, MARY LOU: See, my first exposure to the song was the Creedence Clearwater Revival cover.

Meanwhile, some background on my favorite Ricky Nelson song.

IN THE U.K., class, envy, and the Olympics.

GOOD QUESTION: “Why has longevity become a source of dismay?”

BRIAN WANG ROUNDS UP REPORTS on progress with pebble-bed and thorium reactors.

READER DAVE PARMLY asks what I think about the shooting at Central High School in Knoxville. I don’t really have much to say. It wasn’t a “school shooting,” but a shooting at a school — the shooter had a particular victim in mind, and killed him, and then left without shooting anyone else. (Police have ruled out race or gangs as a motive, but the motive appears to have been something personal). That being the case, I don’t think that armed teachers would have helped much, as they might have in a classic mass shooting. This sort of thing will happen, and it will sometimes happen at schools — the News-Sentinel print edition called it a shooting in a “haven,” but high schools aren’t really “havens,” but, rather, pretty unpleasant places. I don’t really think, though, that “because teenage boys are stupid” is much of an explanation. Are they that much stupider than they were 50 years ago, when guns were more plentiful in high schools, but shootings were much less so? Or is it something in the culture or in the media?

UPDATE: Cassy Fiano comments: “Saying that teenage boys who are polite, decent, courteous, kind, and caring people are abnormal and weird is rude and wrong.”