Senator Rand Paul announced today (to absolutely nobody's surprise) that he is running for the Republican presidential nomination for 2016. He joins only one other official candidate, Senator Ted Cruz, who made his own announcement a few weeks ago. On the Democratic side, nobody has officially thrown their hat in the ring. Such announcements are happening much later this presidential cycle, due to quirky financial advantages of our crazy campaign finance legal system (if it can even be called that, anymore, after the Supreme Court's evisceration). But I'm getting distracted, and veering off the topic at hand, which is paying proper attention to those candidates who actually are declared candidates. Since nobody else has officially stepped up to the podium yet, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul deserve at least a moment in the spotlight.

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Not since the line "Let them eat cake!" was supposedly uttered have delicious baked goods been so central to a political upheaval. Yes, we have entered what might be called the political era of "Cake Wars," it seems. Now, I don't mean to trivialize an important civil rights issue by relegating it to the dessert cart (as it were). But with all the political frenzy about both religious freedom and discrimination, the pundits always seem to come back to the same classic case: a baker contemplating whether to bake a cake for a gay wedding. It reduces the moral and legal arguments to a case that is both easy to understand and downright ordinary. What strikes me, though, while listening to the argument rage, is that most people on both sides of this argument haven't really come to grips with the larger implications of what they're advocating. To stretch the metaphor one last time, things could get a lot messier, as when a mischievous spouse mashes a slice of cake into their newly-wedded loved one's face at the reception (an admittedly bizarre ritual some couples feel honor-bound to perform, for the entertainment of their guests). That's right, folks -- the Cake Wars haven't actually gotten sticky enough, yet.

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President Barack Obama is finally earning his Nobel Peace Prize, it seems. A few months back, he announced a major shift in U.S. policy towards Cuba, ending a half-century of frostiness, and this week the outlines of a deal to avoid a war with Iran were unveiled, thawing a relationship that froze over back in 1979. Both of these foreign policy accomplishments go a long way towards deserving the Nobel Peace Prize Obama was prematurely awarded in 2009. At the time, many (this column included) joked that the Nobel committee was really awarding the prize to Obama for the sole achievement of "not being George W. Bush." But it seems now that by the time he ends his term in office, Barack Obama will indeed have earned the world's foremost peacemaker's prize. Since this is Good Friday, perhaps a Bible quotation is in order: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God."

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Barack Obama's job approval poll numbers slipped a bit in March, ending a streak of good news in polling for the president which reaches back to last September. But while the numbers turned slightly negative, the overall outlook for Obama was looking up by the end of the month. This means Obama has a better than even chance of gaining ground again in April. But before we get to predicting the future, let's first take a look at the chart of the recent past.

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OK, here we go with part two of my travels in Ireland. When I first sat down to write this, my thought was to do one more travel column, and then essentially just pack it in until I got back home. However, when I had finished writing, I found the gift of the gab which had descended upon me many years ago at Blarney Castle (meself upside-down, kissing the Blarney Stone, at the time) had not failed me, and that indeed I had created enough for two solid columns. So, today, the first of these; then tomorrow, the conclusion of the trip. From that point on, I cannot promise new columns, at least until the first of next month. But I can, at the very least, promise a new column tomorrow, so there's that.

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For the uninformed, Pi Day is a yearly celebration of a date on the calendar, for its numerical significance. It ranks up there among geeky holidays with the fourth of May ("Star Wars Day," since you can go around wishing everyone "May the Fourth be with you!"). The significance is it will be "3/14" (at least in the United States, as Europeans write their dates differently). These are the first three digits in the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, or "pi."

But this year's Pi Day will be the best one for the next 100 years, because a whole bunch of digits will come into play. Pi's value is, to 10 digits: 3.141592653. This year's Pi Day will be 3/14/15. Taking it a step further, just before 9:30 AM tomorrow morning, the date and time will read: 3/14/15 -- 9:26:53. Woo hoo! Best Pi Day of the century!

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Forty-seven Republicans in the United States Senate caused an uproar this week when they sent an "open letter" to the people running Iran's government. This action was roundly condemned, both here and abroad, for being (at the very least) undiplomatic in the extreme. The Iranian foreign minister dismissed it as a cheap attempt at propaganda, which is to date possibly the most poignant description of the letter. After a few days, even some Republican senators who signed the letter were beginning to admit that it probably hadn't been a good idea.

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Marijuana legal reform has made great strides over the past few years. Four states are now allowing their citizens to freely use recreational marijuana. Washington D.C. -- the seat of the federal government itself -- has joined Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington state in fully legalizing marijuana. Almost half the states (23 of them) have legalized medical use of marijuana, and an additional dozen have allowed for heavily-restricted medical use of some form of the plant or another. That adds up to over seventy percent of America. Yet the federal laws have not budged an inch, and remain Draconian in their condemnation of any use of marijuana.

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I guess the easiest way to begin this column is with the most probable presidential headline for next year: "Clinton Versus Bush." Which is really somewhat of a cheap trick, since (to be fair) the 1990s were two Bushes and one Clinton ago, really. Still, if this is the way the next election pans out, it will indeed have somewhat of a time-machine flavor to it. It's technically not "back to the future," but instead the flip side: "forward to the past."

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Hillary Clinton, by some accounts, wanted the luxury of waiting as long as possible before officially becoming a 2016 candidate for president. There were good reasons for her to wait, the most prominent being that she could pick and choose which day-to-day political issues to address, and which she could safely ignore for the time being. So the extent of her campaigning, so far, has largely been an occasional Twitter message. It seems, however, that this luxury is about to come to an end. Hillary's soon going to have to give the public more than 140 characters, whether she officially tosses her hat in the ring or not.

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