Poor John McCain can't seem to catch a break. He had planned to counter Barack Obama's historic Berlin speech on Thursday with a visit to a Louisiana oil rig to highlight his support of offshore drilling.

As Jonathan Martin at the Politico had reported:

While Barack Obama is speaking about international affairs in Germany before thousands of fans tomorrow, John McCain will be talking about a pressing domestic issue with an equally striking if very different backdrop.

Weather permitting, McCain will helicopter from Louisiana to an oil rig in the Gulf Coast to make the case for expanded off-shore drilling, says a McCain aide.

Now, Drudge is reporting that his oil rig photo op has been canceled due to weather....and it's been confirmed by MSNBC. McCain will travel to Ohio instead.

But wait...could this have something to do with it?

The U.S. Coast Guard has closed 29 miles of the Mississippi River from New Orleans southward after a tanker and a barge collided, spilling more than 400,000 gallons of fuel oil into the river. Tugboats hold up pieces of a barge after it collided with a tanker Wednesday in the Mississippi River in New Orleans. The river, a major shipping route between the Midwest and Gulf of Mexico, could be closed for days during the cleanup, the Coast Guard said Wednesday.

More than 30 ships already are queued up along the river, waiting to pass through the closed zone, Coast Guard Petty Officer Jaclyn Young said. The Coast Guard has deployed 45,000 feet of inflatable booms to contain the spill and is lining up another 29,000 feet, but it could be days before the river is reopened, she said. The accident left a sheen over 90 percent of the area, she said.

Could this really be true?

Sources close to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign are suggesting he will reveal the name of his vice presidential selection this week while Sen. Barack Obama is getting the headlines on his foreign trip. The name of McCain's running mate has not been disclosed, but Mitt Romney has led the speculation recently.

Sure, naming a VP this early could steal focus from Obama's world tour, but that seems like a short term advantage vs. giving Obama more time to make his pick.

On the other hand, if McCain's VP process has led him to one clear choice - possibly Romney - it might make sense to get the VP out there ASAP, especially given McCain's flailing performance thus far.

With Barack Obama set to announce his vice presidential pick within weeks (and maybe just a couple weeks), it's worth considering the faces we've seen representing the Senator in public. After all, a VP candidate should be tried and tested in the media spotlight, right? In particular, you'd expect potential candidates who hadn't spent much time in the national spotlight to have a "test run" on at least one Sunday show, and at least a few weekday cable news show appearances.

Evan Bayh, Tim Kaine, Joe Biden, and Claire McCaskill have all taken leading roles as surrogates. Bayh is particular has cropped up all over the place just as his name has risen in the "Veepstakes."

Who haven't we seen? Kathleen Sebelius. Despite being a prominent name on almost every list, I can't think of a lengthy appearance Sebelius has done for Obama.

Sam Nunn. Nunn was always a questionable choice IMO, but he's also been absent for the most part on the cable shows.

Add to this list of no-shows (for the most part) VP longshots Sherrod Brown, Brian Schwietzer, and Janet Napolitano.

Of course, Clinton or Edwards arguably wouldn't need this kind of media vetting.

Uh oh:

This week's New Yorker cover features an image of Michelle and Barack Obama that combines every smeary right-wing stereotype imaginable: An image of Obama in a turban and robes fist-bumping his be-afro'd wife, dressed in the military fatigues of a revolutionary and packing a machine gun and some serious ammo. Oh yes, this quaint little scene takes place in the Oval Office, under a picture of Osama bin Laden above a roaring fireplace, in which burns an American flag. All that's missing is a token sprig of arugula.

So, apparently, it's "satire." Trouble is, we can count on the media not to play it that way. They will probably raise a big fuss over it, and the net effect will simply be a further spreading of the rumors the cover is pretending to "debunk." Apparently, the satirists at the New Yorker weren't prescient enough to see that it would play out that way, or didn't care.

Sam Stein reports that Obama's fundraising may be slowing a bit:

Major donors to Barack Obama's campaign were told Wednesday evening that fundraising efforts were "a little slow" and that they should help retire Hillary Clinton's campaign debt so that the New York Democrat's supporters would, in turn, give to Obama.

"There was no negativity about Hillary," said one Democrat. "In fact the opposite. Fundraising is a little slow and it is very important to ramp it up. Hillary donors are a major source of donor dollars. The message to the troops was 'Get your five checks for Hillary in so that you can ask her donors to give to Barack.'"

This while McCain reports that he and the RNC have a combined total of nearly $100 million in the bank, and expect to raise twice that amount before the convention.

On the face of it, this would seem like a strange month for Obama's fundraising to slow. Normally, the month after securing the nomination is the best month for a nominee of either party.

However, I did start to wonder about the nature of Obama's small donor funding network. While I may be proven wrong, it seems to me that the most compelling time to give, for small donors especially, would be right in the middle of a hard fought campaign with lots of media coverage. And in fact, it was during the toughest months of the primary that Obama raked in the most cash.

The problem with the general election is that it offers no such incentives, in the form of make-or-break primaries, to spur donations. Hence, Obama has to go to the network of big donors, which may be why June's numbers may not meet expectations.

And if they don't, expect a flurry of media stories over whether Obama's decision to opt out of public financing was the right one.

Maybe it's part of his anti-tax, slash-the-budget message, but John McCain apparently feels no obligation to pay taxes in the community where he owns a beach-front home:

Newsweek is set to publish a highly embarrassing report on Sen. John McCain, revealing that the McCains have failed to pay taxes on their beach-front home in La Jolla, California, for the last four years and are currently in default, The Huffington Post has learned.

Under California law, once a residential property is in default for five years, it can be sold at a tax sale to recover the unpaid taxes for the taxpayers.

The McCains own at least seven homes through a variety of trusts and corporations controlled by Cindy McCain.

I have no idea how big a story this is, but it certainly looks likely to cause at least a few days of embarassment for the McCain campaign. Between this and the more than $100,000 in credit card debt, McCain certainly doesn't have a stellar record staying on top of his finances.

Then again, with that many houses, it's quite possible the McCains simply forgot about their tax obligations.

The Obama campaign indicated today it will push an issue that was the subject of a Countdown report last week, the so-called "Enron Loophole" and it's ties to top McCain adviser, Phil Gramm. According to The Politico, the Obama campaign accused McCain campaign co-chair and economic adviser Phil Gramm of pushing the deregulations that have allowed speculators to game the system and drive up the price of oil.

The Texas Observer has a great write-up on what happened:

In the early evening of Friday, December 15, 2000, with Christmas break only hours away, the U.S. Senate rushed to pass an essential, 11,000-page government reauthorization bill. In what one legal textbook would later call "a stunning departure from normal legislative practice," the Senate tacked on a complex, 262-page amendment at the urging of Texas Sen. Phil Gramm.

There was little debate on the floor. According to the Congressional Record, Gramm promised that the amendment--also known as the Commodity Futures Modernization Act--along with other landmark legislation he had authored, would usher in a new era for the U.S. financial services industry.

"The work of this Congress will be seen as a watershed where we turned away from an outmoded Depression-era approach to financial regulation and adopted a framework that will position our financial services industry to be world leaders into the new century," Gramm said.

Watershed indeed. With the U.S. economy now battered by a tsunami of mortgage foreclosures, the $30-billion Bear Stearns Companies bailout and spiking food and energy prices, many congressional leaders and Wall Street analysts are questioning the wisdom of the radical deregulation launched by Gramm's legislative package. Financial wizard Warren Buffett has labeled the risky new investment instruments Gramm unleashed "financial weapons of mass destruction." They have fed the subprime mortgage crisis like an accelerant. While his distracted peers probably finalized their Christmas gift lists, Gramm created what Wall Street analysts now refer to as the "shadow banking system," an industry that operates outside any government oversight, but, as witnessed by the Bear Stearns debacle, requiring rescue by taxpayers to avert a national economic catastrophe.

While the nation's investment bankers are paying a heavy price for their unbridled greed (in billions of dollars of write-offs), Gramm has fared quite nicely. He currently serves as a vice president at UBS AG, a colossal, Swiss-owned investment bank, the post, no doubt, a thank you for assiduously looking out for Wall Street interests during his 23 years in public office. Now, with the aid of his longtime friend Arizona Sen. John McCain, Gramm may be looking at a quantum leap in power and influence.

But even more damning are Gramm's intimate ties, through his wife, Wendy, to Enron, whose mainpulation of the markets was made possible by Gramm's bill:

In an apparent response to a 1992 plea from Enron, Dr. Wendy Gramm, then chair of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, moved to exempt the company's energy-swap operation from government oversight. By then, the Houston-based Enron was a major contributor to Senator Gramm's campaign.

A few days after she got the ball rolling on the exemption, Wendy Gramm resigned from the commission. Enron soon appointed her to its board of directors, where she served on the audit committee, which oversees the inner financial workings of the corporation. For this, the company paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in stocks and dividends, as much as $50,000 in annual salary, and $176,000 in attendance fees, according to a report by Public Citizen, a group that has relentlessly tracked Enron, which in turn has called the report unfair.

Meanwhile Enron had become Phil Gramm's largest corporate contributor--and according to Public Citizen, the largest across-the board donor in its industry. Between 1989 and 2001, the company tossed Gramm just under $100,000.

In 1998, Wendy Gramm cashed in her Enron stock for $276,912.

Gramm serves as co-chair of the McCain 2008 presidential campaign. As one of the candidate's chief economic advisers, he is mentioned as a possible secretary of the treasury in a McCain administration.

Gramm and McCain became friends when they worked together to defeat the original Clinton health care effort. Gramm was instrumental in helping bail out McCain when his campaign went bankrupt last July. Fortune magazine calls him McCain's "econ brain." And now, he will apparently hold huge sway on economic policy in a McCain administration.

With Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigning together for the first time next week, the press will focus on the party coming together. The endorsements of Carter and Gore, while largely expected, were also important in terms of legitimizing Obama as the party standard bearer. But it's notable that there have been no signals as of yet that the last Democratic actually elected as president, Bill Clinton, plans to explicitly endorse or campaign with Obama.

Bill's endorsement, in many ways, would symbolize a full laying down of arms between the Obama and Clinton camps. In the primary race, Bill Clinton, along with Penn, was viewed as advocating a harsher line against Obama, and was responsible for some of the most aggresive statements coming out of the Clinton camp, starting with his characterization of Obama as a "roll of the dice" in December. Even in the final days of the primary, when it was clear that it would require a small miracle for Hillary to win, Bill made his disgust with the ways things had turned out apparent, launching a parting shot at Obama for leaving his church.

So will Bill explicitly endorse Obama in the coming weeks and months, or will his endorsement be implicit in his wife's endorsement? Will that be good enough, considering he's one of the leaders of the party in his own right? Will a speech at the convention do the trick? What do you think?