I waited to write this until after President Obama held his second prime-time press conference, so I could give my reactions. President Obama did his usual job of unflappably answering questions in an intelligent and adult manner. This will come as less and less of a shock to the media and the public as time goes on (as the memory of what preceded him fades).

Obama himself didn't make much news. There were a few memorable lines, such as "I'm not going to lie to you" -- again, the shock of hearing such things will wear off with time, I'm sure. About the only newsworthy thing Obama came up with was a challenge to congressional Republicans to put up or shut up on the budget. He made this point several times, essentially saying: "Where's your budget, guys?" But for the most part, Obama was content to restate his case for his budget plan and for fixing the economy. And, almost as an afterthought, on his final question the president hit a thematic high point on the subject of "persistence" -- making his point (persistently, one has to say) that this is exactly what the American people should expect from him on all sorts of issues -- the persistence to follow through on them and get something done.

But while Obama's performance can be summed up in a paragraph, that would make for a very short column. And we can't have that.

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It may already be too late to even suggest this, but I think we need a better term than "toxic assets" (or "toxic mortgages" or "toxic" anything else) if we're trying to convince people to buy them. I mean, has any marketing campaign in the history of advertising been successful using the word "toxic"? Even actual poison (bug spray, for instance) largely avoids this word, unless in some reassurance that the product is "non-toxic to pets."

To be fair, this term has largely come from the media. Which means it already may be too late to re-frame the issue. Because, like a pit bull on a juicy bone, the media gets attached to some terms and refuses to ever give them up. But for anyone trying to sell the Obama/Geithner plan to clean up our financial system, it really would be a good idea to come up with another snappy term to replace "toxic" with.

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The 19th of March is a date which I will now celebrate every year, because it is the day I became a naturalized citizen of the United States of America. I have to admit, I was surprised at my own emotions and feelings during the swearing-in ceremony. I got caught up in the excitement and joy, along with 450 other participants (who represented a total of 67 different countries). When prompted, we stood up -- one by one, and in groups -- when our country of origin was called. When we were all standing together, we swore the Oath of Allegiance to our new country. After this, we were now "from" one country -- we were all fellow American citizens. I was filled with civic pride, as I realized I can now vote and make a difference as an active citizen in my adopted country.

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For all the ink spilled over President Barack Obama's appearance on Jay Leno's Tonight Show, I have to wonder... does anyone remember Richard Nixon's ground-breaking appearance on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In?

I have to admit, I'm too young to have personal memories of it, but during the 1968 presidential race, Dick Nixon appeared on the most popular comedy show of the day (akin to Saturday Night Live with the original cast, in the 1970s) and he memorably uttered the show's catch-phrase: "Sock it to me."

Thanks to the miracle of the internet, you can now view this for yourself, should you so desire. But I refuse to get into a debate over what "Sock it to me" meant, except to note that the Volkswagen Beetle I was being driven around in at this point in time had a bumper sticker on it with the same phrase prominently displayed. You'll have to ask my parents what it meant, in other words.

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There will be no column today.

This is due to having spent all day dealing with the federal government in a way I and my wife never have before.

Because Mrs. Chris Weigant was sworn in today as a citizen of the United States of America.

I am trying to make up for today's lack of column by convincing her to write a guest column about the experience, which I will post here over the weekend. Please join me in congratulating her on her newly-acquired citizenship, and add your voices to mine to convince her that people would like to hear her thoughts on the matter.

Thanks, and my apologies for the interruption of service. Rest assured, this sort of thing doesn't exactly happen every day!

-- Chris Weigant

[Updated, see below for additional information from Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com.]

It really is a bit early to focus on President Obama's approval ratings in the polls, I know. But, rather than looking at the overall picture of how he's doing, I have been noticing something interesting which I don't believe others have picked up on -- Obama's numbers dramatically improve depending on the sample used by the pollsters. When "likely voters" (LV) are polled, the numbers they give are different from when either "registered voters" (RV) or "all adults" (A) are polled. Obama's LV approval rating is about five points lower than the RV/A numbers. The difference is more pronounced in the disapproval ratings, where LV numbers are fully ten points higher than RV/A numbers.

Is this significant? I have to admit, I don't know enough about polling to come to any conclusions I can be confident of. Perhaps I should send this column to Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight.com to see what he thinks. Like many people, I did a lot of poll watching over the course of the presidential election, and even wrote a series of articles with graphs to track what I thought was going on. But I am strictly an amateur at this stuff, I fully admit.

Which is why I truly don't know the explanation of this phenomenon. But I know enough to identify it, at the very least.

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First off, Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig!

For our non-Gaelic-speaking readers, Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

For the record -- and no surprise to anyone who has made it to the end of one of my 10,000-word columns -- yes, I have kissed the Blarney Stone. It's at the top of Blarney Castle, which is lots of fun to wander around, and to kiss it you have to lean backwards over a death-defying drop of something like ten stories. An old Irishman will hold your legs for you, so you don't fall to certain death, and you better believe I tipped him well for the service! Then, while leaning backwards, you kiss the magic stone (and try not to think about the rumors you've heard of mischievous Irish lads sneaking up there and urinating on it at night).

But kiss the stone I have, and have hence been rewarded with "the gift of gab." So if you're looking for someone (or something) to blame, while endlessly scrolling through my usual blarney, blame the stone. As the Irish say: That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!

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It's easy to get outraged at the announcement that AIG will be paying over one hundred and fifty million dollars out as bonuses, after taxpayers have pumped over one hundred and fifty billion dollars into the failing company. But the populist outrage this has sparked off needs to get a little more focused. Because we're about to get lost in a thicket of legalese about "compensation" and "bonuses" and "deferred stock options" and all the rest of it, which only serves to detract from a very basic truth -- which should be the real point of discussion here. This truth is that whatever you call it, and whatever little box it gets entered into on the tax forms, these people make an obscene amount of money. And nobody is even saying (because nobody in the media is even asking) exactly how much money they make. This should be the real target here, because it has much broader implications. Also, because it is a lot easier to fix than just getting back some bonuses.

Glenn Greenwald is one of the few who have drawn what is, to me, an obvious parallel here. When the automakers came, cap in hand, to Congress asking for some bailout money, there was great outrage at those "greedy" union workers. Union salaries and benefits of line workers (all of which were also covered by "employment contracts" now being held as sacred by AIG) were discussed on the floors of Congress, with a few Republicans taking the lead in demanding we renegotiate their contracts before they got the money.

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In today's main event we will discuss the idiocy of the most recent Republican talking point -- "Obama's trying to do too much, too fast" (which is weak, to be sure, but then they had to kind of scramble after their last talking point "Obama is killing the stock market" became inoperative due to a rally). But before we get to that, we have some housecleaning to do. Call it "old business" -- a few new developments in things that I've commented on previously.

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I usually do these "talking points" sorts of things on Friday, but I have been simply stunned this week at the way the media has been covering the passage of the 2009 omnibus budget bill, and of President Obama's signing the bill into law. If I knew nothing about the subject but what I've seen on network news shows (not even cable, mind you, just the "respected" nightly news shows), then I would believe the following about the 2009 budget: (1) most of it -- say a good 70 to 80 percent -- was earmarks, (2) those dastardly Democrats put all the earmarks in, and Republicans fought and fought for fiscal responsibility, but couldn't remove them in the end, because (3) there was no bipartisanship at all in passing this bill, (4) passing this bill in the midst of the flood of other important legislation was really no big deal, happens all the time, and (5) President Obama broke a big campaign pledge he made to veto every earmark and signed the bill anyway, thus disappointing the American public by breaking his word.

None of these things, I must point out, is even remotely true. But that's the spin that I get from Brian Williams and Katie Couric on a nightly basis. I can just imagine what the hotheads over on the cable channels are saying about it.

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