The President's New Best Friend

I've said before that I'm intrigued when Republican writers/bloggers/pundits criticize Republican politicians. In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy we're seeing the flipside of that coin: New Jersey's Republican governor, Chris Christie, keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention and top Romney surrogate, is now heaping praise on President Obama for his handling of the storm.

On the Today Show: "The President has been outstanding in this."

On CNN: "I spoke to the President three times yesterday. He has been incredibly supportive and helpful to this state and not once did he bring up the election."

On Twitter: "I want to thank the President personally for all his assistance as we recover from this storm."

Yowza. What's Christie up to? Salon's Steve Kornacki has some thoughts.

Update: I'm not the only one who's finding this entertaining.  Maureen Dowd, Jeffrey Goldberg and Reuters are all trying to get inside the Gov's head.

Stocking Up For The Storm

Or, as I almost titled this post, "Too little, too late."  I never know what, exactly, will send me back to the blog to vent my spleen; this morning it's a more-than-usually-inane segment I watched on Good Morning, America.  All the morning shows, of course, were in full-on Apocalypse mode covering the big storm that hit New York and other East Coast cities, and that's okay. Even if they occasionally go overboard with the melodrama (heard during b-roll of a hospital evacuation:  "it's an infant...") the storm is in fact big news.  The  segment that caused me to roll my eyes and take to my keyboard had to do with how to manage for the next few days if your power is out. The information was sensible, if not too original (canned goods, manual can opener, bottled water, use your outdoor grill if you have one...) but I was struck by two things. First, the storm went through last night and the affected cities are basically shut down. If you didn't stock up on canned tuna and bottled water in advance, now's not the time for a quick jaunt to Walmart. Secondly, and maybe more annoying - the audience for whom this advice is meant, i.e., the people without power, can't watch television, because they don't have power. The fact that GMA says they need a gallon of bottled water per person, per day, for at least three days, isn't going to help.

Binders Full of Women? Really??

The blogosphere's having a lot of fun with Mitt's "binders full of women" story in last night's debate, but the real news is that the story as he told it isn't true. There were indeed binders with information about qualified professional women, but they weren't put together at the request of Mitt Romney. As outlined by Boston political reporter David S. Bernstein, non-partisan groups were gathering information about qualified women before the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial election even took place. The binders were presented to Mittens shortly after he was elected.