Enotes

His name really was Mudd. Today is the 179th birthday of the most vilified doctor this side of Mike Myers' Dr. Evil. Samuel Mudd was born on December 20, 1833. Before his 32nd birthday, he was a convicted felon. With the rebirth of Abraham Lincoln in our social consciousness (they even made a movie where Abe isn't a vampire hunter ), now is a good time to remember Dr. Mudd, who was convicted along with several others for conspiring to kill the president in 1865. Justice moved a lot quicker in those days, for good and for bad. The president was assassinated on April 14, 1865 (he died in the wee hours of the 15th). Less than a month later, Mudd and his co-defendants were on trial. By the end of June, Mudd was convicted along with the others. It was Mudd's prior acquaintance with assassin John Wilkes Booth that planted the seeds of conspiracy. Mudd first met Booth, history says, in November 1864 in a church in Bryantown, MD. Booth used a guise of a real estate hun...

OK, so you're Barack Obama. You woke up Wednesday morning having been re-elected as President of the United States. But over 57 million people voted for the other guy---almost half the electorate. It's a sobering thought, or should be, as Mr. Obama starts Term II. This was among the most bitter, divisive and nasty presidential campaigns in recent memory. Maybe ever. You can blame Social Media for that. But more about that in a second. Obama is president of everyone, of course (not just 47 percent), but knowing that about half the people don't want you in the Oval Office certainly should have a bearing on how you govern, no matter if you feel that your agenda and ideology are right, and theirs isn't. But it's also a great time for compromise and reaching across the aisle, because no longer can Obama's detractors in Washington rally around their flag of making him a one term president. That ship has sailed, though not necessarily with breakneck speed, ...

Was George McGovern the worst presidential candidate to come from the two major parties, in history? You could make a case for it.  Not that any Democrat would have defeated Dick Nixon in 1972, all of the president's dirty tricks notwithstanding.  Yet somehow McGovern, the senator from South Dakota who passed away last week, became the Democrat nominee in '72, when there were better and more appealing men available. It wasn't just that McGovern was more left than a freeway's fast lane shoulder. The times were kinda, sorta, right for a left-winger such as McGovern to run for president. There was the Vietnam War, for one; McGovern was a famous opposer of the war.  But the Democrats didn't need to go so left of center to have a shot against Nixon, even with the war raging on.  Part of the blame could be laid at the feet of Lyndon Johnson. It was LBJ who shocked the nation by not seeking re-election in 1968, after pretty much trouncing the ha...

Leave it to an old Wayne State guy to cut to the chase. James Lipton, who's so much more than just the host of Bravo's "Inside the Actors Studio," was on Chris Matthews' MSNBC show last night. And the former Wayne State attendee (he received an honorary doctorate from WSU in 2002) boiled the presidential election down to this. "The choice is clear," Lipton said. "Do you want a president, or a boss?" Lipton was asked to give his impressions of the performances of Mitt Romney and President Obama at Tuesday's debate, from the perspective of someone who is very used to critiquing on-screen, on-stage bits. Lipton felt that Romney was every bit the CEO and Obama every bit the statesman. "Romney is that boss who tells bad jokes to his employees and waits for everyone to laugh," Lipton said. And, "He's very used to getting his way." Lipton thought that Romney was less-than-deferential to the president, particular...

The clothes had no emperor---or president. It was a vanishing act of the most extreme. Someone start rolling milk cartons off the presses with the president's mug on them. "Have you seen me?" Mitt Romney is a magician. He walked on stage at the University of Denver last night, opened his mouth, and made Barack Obama disappear. Obama, for his part, did some "Abracadabra" of his own---by making Romney's baggage go away, just like that. Someone check back stage for an albatross slithering away, freed from Romney's neck. Last night's presidential debate was made out to be Muhammad Ali vs. Chuck Wepner, redux. The challenger didn't have a chance to touch the champ, right? Obama was going to wipe the floor with the former Massachusetts governor. But unlike the Ali-Wepner bout, which featured the overmatched challenger Wepner hanging tough by showing he could take the pounding of a lifetime from champion Ali, it was the champ/president who e...

Familiarity breeds contempt. That's the saying, right? It would seem to fit Mitt Romney like a glove. For the second political race in a row, voters are drifting away from the Republican presidential candidate the more they get to know him, or at least see him in action. It happened in the GOP primary, where Romney had difficulty putting away Rick Santorum, who was as far right of a candidate as has run in recent memory. Polls indicated that the more primary voters got to know Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, the less enamored they were with him. The same thing is happening now, in Romney's race against President Obama. Romney suffered a double whammy in the past two weeks: the Democratic convention with its stirring speeches, and his big mouth in the wake of the Libyan crisis. The former provided Obama with an expected (though maybe larger than expected) bounce, and the latter gave the country a sneak peek into what kind of man might occupy the Oval ...

In the history of the U.S. Presidency since 1865, on seven occasions the sitting president was unable to finish his term. All but one of those were due to death (Richard Nixon's 1974 resignation). And it should be pointed out that another of those seven, Franklin Roosevelt, died in office but in the beginning of his fourth term, which is a Constitutional impossibility these days. So it's not all that common, of course, when the vice president has to step in and assume the reins of the Commander-in-Chief, mid-term. Yet there is a fascination with the choice of presidential running mates every four years. The vice presidency is a funny thing. You're, as they say, a "heartbeat away" from becoming the most powerful man in the world, yet while you're waiting for that to happen, you're as relevant as, well the vice president. The job is, as former VP John Nance Garner once famously said, "not worth a bucket of warm piss" (yes, he said piss---no...

It's not rocket science to declare that, when running as a presidential incumbent, it's better to run on a campaign of "Look what I did", instead of "Just give me a little more time," i.e. four years. It's looking like President Obama has been opting for the latter option. It's said that people vote for president from the inside out, meaning that they assess their own personal situation first, before they consider any state, national or international consequences. Makes sense. Taking care of Number 1 isn't necessarily a selfish, arrogant thing to do. Who else is going to do it? The latest jobs numbers came out , and for Obama, less than four months away from Election Day, they could be better. Just 80,000 jobs added in June. Unemployment rate stubbornly remaining at 8.2%. Economic experts suggesting that the brief recovery may have already petered out. It's the economy, stupid. Isn't it? It hardly matters that the president,...

It's often used in the world of sports, the notion of "doesn't anybody want to win this thing?" Typically, scribes and observers will say that about a baseball pennant race or some other competition in which the players or teams involved appear to be more insistent on losing and screwing up than actually winning. The Michigan GOP Primary is nearing, and the two front-runners are stumbling over themselves to crow how they would NOT have authorized a bailout of the Big 3 automakers if they were president. This on the heels of news that GM just announced a 2011 profit of $7.6 billion . Profit sharing checks are upwards of $7,000 for giddy GM employees. Yet here are Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum sweeping into the state, trying to out shout the other about how against the bailout they still are. It's a rather strange strategy, to say the least. Usually politicos are wont to crow their "I told you so" stance. It's a tried and true method of making yours...

So Sarah Palin says she has the "fire in my belly" to make a run for president in 2012. That's funny, because I also get a sensation in my belly at the thought of Palin as president, though I somehow doubt it's the same as hers. Actually, bring it, Sarah; a Palin campaign would be a carnival like few we've seen in recent presidential election years. How fun it would be to hear what she says next. There'd be thrills and chills and spills. You wouldn't be able to look away, while the "Palin for President" show tours the country, the star speaking to us from the back of its caboose. At least a snake oil salesman has snake oil to cure whatever ails you. Palin is all talk and no solutions. Her snake oil seems to be nothing more than placebo. She says she wants to "preserve what is good for America." If that doesn't sound like the usual "I'm more American than you" blather that the folks on the right incessantly spout, then...

Imagine, a kid from Livonia, my hometown, growing up to be president! No, not talking about me. My political aspirations don't even extend to school board. I'm talking about Thad McCotter, the Republican House member who is, according to reports, putting together exploratory committees and other things that would-be presidential candidates do about eight months before the primaries. McCotter plays electric guitar, quotes from Led Zeppelin lyrics, and is in his fifth two-year Congressional term. He would be the first president born after me, which should either make me feel old or wise. McCotter plans to formally make his announcement in two weeks, according to POLITICO. Never mind that Thad would be a virtual unknown, because if there ever was a time to enter the fray as an unknown Republican, it's now. Clinton had his sax, and McCotter might take his licks, too In a race where "No, not him" and "No, not HER" are the two leading GOP candidates, the Repub...

OK, so who's the bozo who authorized a low altitude flyover of New York? One person has come forward as being the bozo. But the president, no less, has ordered an internal review to determine who really is the bozo. Bozo, by the way, once outed, should have his (or her) big red nose and orange hair and big floppy shoes removed, forever. Be sure to blast him (or her) in the eye with a squirting daisy and deliver a jolt from a joy buzzer while you're at it. You've probably heard: military planes, including one sometimes used to transport President Obama, circled the Statue of Liberty and zoomed near the World Trade Center site on Monday. Jittery New Yorkers -- and can you blame them? -- panicked as nearby office buildings were evacuated. Why, you couldn't have picked a more foolish -- and worse, insensitive -- thing to do, unless you baked cookies in the shapes of Jewish concentration campers in an oven. Obama, according to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, was ...