Columnist.
When Joe Biden was selected by Barack Obama to be his Vice Presidential running mate I was thrilled. I thought "If Obama wins, Biden's propensity to trip over his own tongue will provide enough material to write two columns a week." I would only have to earn the third column. For the most part, darn it, Biden has behaved himself and hasn't been the loose-lipped fool he has been since he was first elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware when he was 29 years old.
For a campaign that has been up-and-running since just about January 21, 2009, the Obama crowd did not have a good "official" first week. Last weekend, Barack Obama officially launched his campaign for re-election at a rally on the campus of Ohio State University. A couple of things were wrong with the event. About 14,000 people showed up, but the arena holds many more and the traveling press made much of the empty seats. That's not Obama's fault. It's the fault of the advance team and the campaign, but there you are.
I have no idea whether that translates to "Throw the Rascals Out" but that's what happened around Europe in elections held yesterday. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy got beaten in his re-election try by Socialist François Hollande. According to the International Herald Tribune (the global edition of the New York Times) Hollande is "seen as a challenge to the German-dominated policy of economic austerity in the Euro Zone, which is suffering from recession and record unemployment."
Sometimes even the best intentioned deals turn out badly. The continuing saga of Chen Guangcheng appears it might be one of them. For those who have been busy getting the kids to do their homework, Chen Guangcheng is a blind Chinese activist who was under house arrest for about 18 months until he escaped a couple of weeks ago.
President Barack Obama made a trip to Afghanistan to put an exclamation point on the anniversary of the attack which resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. Air Force One costs about $180,000 per hour to operate. Just the travel from Joint Base Andrews just outside Washington, DC to Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan was about 26 hours round trip.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple (neé Apple Computer) "is the most valuable company" in the world. On the heels of its quarterly report last week, stock in Apple reached nearly $620 per share before settling back to end the week at $602. The WSJ reported that Apple "posted a 94% profit jump to $11.6 billion and a 58.9% revenue increase to $39.2 billion." This is not a stock picking column, and that is about everything I know about the stock market, but I wanted to tell you that so that what follows made more sense.
The reason I came to Ghana was to help publicize the introduction of two vaccines to the Ghanaian heath care system a rotaviral vaccine and a pneumococcal vaccine for newborns. These vaccines will help stave off infant diarrhea and pneumonia which kill more children under the age of five than malaria and tuberculosis combined.
Anyone who has every travelled overseas will tell you the hardest thing to do is to keep up with events back in the U.S. of A. It's hard to follow the Nationals, especially when they're on the west coast of the U.S. and I'm on the east coast of Africa. It's impossible to follow the Capitals (in fact we had generally agreed here that the 7th game of the Stanley Cup playoff match with the Boston Bruins was going to have been played last night), and it wasn't until just before dinner last night when I realized it was Five Primary Night for Mitt Romney.
According to two pieces I read over the weekend, the world is coming to an end but I am going to be out-of-town for it. I am at JFK awaiting a flight to Accra, Ghana to whence I will be traveling on behalf of the ONE Campaign. Ghana is introducing two new vaccines to its medical system and I'll be there to watch (and write about) the roll-out. However. While I'm gone I would appreciated it if you would take some steps to straighten up the national garage. It's a mess and it would be a good thing if we started tossing out the junk and putting the good stuff in its proper place.
The Secret Service Hookers-in-Columbia scandal will go on for weeks. It will spread to the military -- not so much the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) -- but to the guys who handle the dogs and like that. It will also spread to the political staff. I don't know that any civilian Federal employees or volunteers hired hookers to come to their hotel rooms, but I'm pretty sure someone on Capitol Hill will suggest the Director of White House Advance come up and discuss the matter.
Let me start by saying that I like Hillary Rosen. She's not a friend of mine, but she is an acquaintance and we have worked together on various projects over the years. Let me continue by saying, what she said about Ann Romney was just plain dumb. When the story about what she'd said on CNN broke I Tweeted that she made the rookie mistake of thinking she could repeat what she'd said in the Green Room at CNN on the air at CNN.
I have no idea what happened, or didn't happen, in Cartagena last week when at least 11 Secret Service Agents were suddenly sent home and replaced by a different team. You've read the headlines: "Agents Procure Prostitutes While Waiting for Obama" or words to a like effect. A hundred years ago I did a few advance trips for Vice President Quayle. You can argue, and successfully, that the whole notion of putting about 100 people in place up to two weeks ahead of a visit by a President isn't so much presidential as it is as it is imperial, but that's a discussion for another day.
Now that we're deep into the general election campaign -- about 72 hours into it -- let's review the rules. No matter how many times you've hear it, it bears repeating that an election for President in the United States are not national event. It is a collection of 51 separate elections. The number of electoral votes each state gets equals the number of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives plus its two Senators. Thus California gets 55 electoral votes (53 Congressional Districts plus two Senators) while Wyoming (a single Member state) gets three.
Rick Santorum called it a day yesterday afternoon. In one of those weird campaign events, Santorum's folks tried to keep what the event was to be under wraps until about 2 pm Eastern. But, the staff got buffaloed into giving up the fact that Santorum would be "suspending" his campaign so, by the time the event started at about 2:20, every person on the planet with a Twitter account was writing about it. Santorum's withdrawal from the campaign was a paradox: He had done too well to stay in any longer.
I didn't pay much attention to the Masters golf tournament this weekend. On the religious front, the Mullings Director of Standards & Practices and I drove to Long Island Friday for the first night of Passover at my aunt and uncle's home; then, after a night in New York City, drove down to New Jersey for the second night at my younger brother's house. We got home after midnight Saturday night and I slept in on Sunday.
On Wednesday I was invited by the former national political reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Dick Polman, who is now the "Writer-in-Residence" at the University of Pennsylvania which is the best title in the history of titles. Now that I know that the title "Writer-in-Residence" actually exists in academe I am going to petition Marietta College Marietta, Ohio 45750 to appoint me "Writer-in-Residence" so long as the "Residence" in question is a bar I tend to frequent when I visit there, and not some stuffy classroom filled with teenagers who think modern music is ... music.
President Barack Obama does not like the U.S. Supreme Court. Ok, that's an overstatement. This one is closer to the truth: President Barack Obama does not like the U.S. Supreme Court as led by Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts. Remember a couple of years ago during his State of the Union address when he wagged a rhetorical finger in the face of the Justices sitting about 20 feet from him because he didn't like their ruling in the Citizens United case which has had the effect of establishing Super PACs?
The GOP Primary Campaign Parade marches through Wisconsin, the District of Columbia and Maryland tomorrow night. If projections turn out to be correct will mark the end of the end of the process. As of last night, according to RealClearPolitics.com, Mitt Romney had 566 delegates, Rick Santorum had 263, Newt Gingrich - 140, and Ron Paul – 67. The magic number, as everyone has known since Iowa's caucuses on January 3, is 1,144 meaning Romney is 578 delegates short.
Health care and Energy were the big stories this week in Washington, DC. The three-days of arguments at the Supreme Court of the United States (which we, in the Twitter-verse, refer to as SCOTUS) appeared to have reversed the conventional wisdom of how the Court would rule. Prior to the oral arguments the media cognoscenti were pretty sure the Court would uphold the Constitutionality of the individual mandate and thus the entirety of the Affordable Care Act.
Everything I know about Constitutional law I learned in one three-hour class at Marietta College, Marietta, Ohio 45750 taught by Dr. Robert Hill. It turns out I learned a lot. In fact, had I known you could learn that much in college by actually going to class, I would have spent much more time on campus and much less time ... recovering (if you know what I mean and I think you do).
