Fred Thompson has gone from being an unofficial candidate for the Republican primary nomination to being a semi-official candidate. He says he's waiting for July 4th to make the whole thing official.

This makes me wonder yet again why it is that the only people from the entertainment industry who run for office seem to be Republicans. I wrote about this subject last October, which has a full list from both sides (as full as I'm aware, let me know if I missed anyone).

But my real question at this point is: will the chronic attention deficit disorder (also known as: having the attention span of a hummingbird) so prevalent in the mainstream media mean that they will accept four candidates in the "top tier" of Republicans, or will they drop someone to remain at three? Romney's the obvious candidate for them to start ignoring, but then he does have a whopping big pile of money, so it may be hard for the media to write him off completely this early in the race.

On the Democratic side, the same problem will occur if Gore jumps in the race, but the media has already started marginalizing Edwards, so it won't be as big a problem for them. Case in point: the New York Times just published an article about how Edwards may benefit from sunken treasure (no, I'm not kidding). As many have pointed out, if the media did this much digging into all the candidates' finances (especially Romney, who has a few financial skeletons in his closet) it would be a fair piece, but as it stands it's one more example of: "We don't want to take Edwards on about the issues, so we better ridicule him."

Looks like a long campaign season is guaranteed for all....