With only two weeks remaining before the start of early voting and a little over one month until the election, the News Sentinel has apparently learned that Mike McwWerter is running for Governor.

Except for a Sunday online article from the Tennessean proclaiming Haslam the winner and an article on Friday about all the prominent Democrats supporting him, there hasn't been much in the paper about the Knoxville Mayor's campaign for governor over the past few days.

It appears mercy rules are in effect.

The Sentinel's coverage of the McWherter campaign had been mostly confined to Nashville correspondent Tom Humphrey's blog, but a few articles have started making their way to print.

We're not sure it's helping.

Today, the Sentinel reported on McWherter's job creation tax incentives proposal, the details of which the candidate had kept secret until now. The Haslam campaign response that McWherter "continues to wander around lost in the policy wilderness" is punctuated with an oblique reference to a state income tax.

Yesterday, the Sentinel reported on a McWherter press conference last week in which the candidate connected the dots from Haslam to Pilot to Luxembourg to Germany to Iran, suggesting that Haslam is "hiding something and nobody knows what it is." The article concluded with a TNGOP statement about the wheels coming off McWherter's campaign and the results of a poll showing McWherter down 31 points.

So the Sentinel is finally covering McWherter's third and long campaign, but the candidate is throwing interceptions and Team Haslam is running them back for easy touchdowns. And the band plays on...