Busy day for the president: he got up early and proved he was an American; then he wished Mayor Daley well, and listened to the mayor’s spiel about beehives; then he talked to Oprah; and then it was off to New York for fundraisers.
"I’m skeptical he’s going to be taking a lot of time off,” Obama said, noting that Daley talked about everything from how to get rid of rats to how to start bee hives and get children bicycles.
I think in five years he’s just going to get bored and run for mayor of Wilmette or Crystal Lake or something. (Starting beehives—actually not that hard. And a good thing about Chicago, I’m told by a trusted source.)
The other big DC news story of the day was that Ben Bernanke kicked off the Fed’s new series of press conferences, a big step for the famously opaque bureaucracy. With the eyes of the world on the president versus the birthers, the Fed chair took the opportunity to stealthily announce that the Fed wasn’t really going to do anything different. Paul Krugman explains.
Regarding the whole birtherism thing, I shrugged it off as a not-particularly-insidious form of boilerplate paranoia. Baratunde Thurston, digital director for the Onion, has me thinking differently:
At the very least, the Trump Tower is going to make me blanch for awhile.
Antidote: Tina Fey.
Photograph: Cassi G (CC by 2.0)