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But there's another Leap Day tradition in America, from a suburban Chicago city. Aurora, Illinois used to be famous for its Leap Day fun, when the unmarried women took over the town and arrested all the unmarried men for the "crime" of being a bachelor. Yes, you read that right.
"When the going gets weird," Hunter S. Thompson famously said, "the weird turn pro."
While this may -- as a direct result of a very successful mythmaking campaign -- be almost universally true today, it was not when the flesh-and-blood man (not the myth) held office as the new nation's first "Chief Magistrate" (as it was referred to back then). Yes, even Washington had his media critics.
In other news, the Obama White House had rather a bad week... but again, we'll get to that in a moment.
Mainstream American churches have, in the past, used Biblical passages to advocate the rightness of slavery. Mainstream American churches have also refused to allow blacks to join their congregations with the same status as white worshippers. Mainstream American churches have used the Bible to justify wife-beating, and corporal punishment for children. That is all fine and good (well, it's not, really; but it's legally all fine and good) -- the Constitution does not permit government to have any sort of sway over a church's beliefs in any way (except possibly if the church were mounting armed resistance to the government and calling it religion).
Mitt Romney, frontrunner for the Republican nomination, announced he wasn't too worried about poor people. Maybe it would be fun to see Romney debate Joe Biden, just because nobody would know what to expect from either of them. Heh.
Two hundred and thirty-six years ago this week, a pamphlet was published in Philadelphia. There is some disagreement among historians over the exact date (variously given as January 9th or 10th), and the pamphlet's title page itself only lists the year, 1776. Whatever the actual date, though, Thomas Paine's Common Sense hit the American consciousness like a bombshell -- one which would reverberate for years to come.
I have to say, while the Republicans have been having their three-ring primary circus, President Obama has been looking better and better. Both in comparison to the Republican field (of nightmares, so to speak), and also because Obama's been making progress on his own.
When we were all kids, "recess" was one of the happiest words in the English language, because it meant escaping the schoolroom for a while, and (on nice days) getting outside and running around and playing with our friends. The bell would ring, and we would all cry "Recess!" and run outside.
President Obama is looking a lot stronger these days. Today, especially, the president emerges as the big winner in the showdown with John Boehner and the House Republicans. But Obama's been looking better and better all month, so Boehner caving should be seen as just the icing on the cake for Obama.