Let me get this straight. Some goofball from California:
- Decides to leave his home in a suburb of San Francisco, which the LA Times describes as "the wealthy Marin County enclave of San Anselmo, in a neighborhood that features a mix of 60-year-old cottages and houses such as the new 3,000-square-foot trilevel where he and his family lived;"
- Converts from Catholicism to Islam;
- Goes to Pakistan to join the Tablighi Jamaat, whose most famous member is Yusuf Islam, formerly known as the artist Cat Stevens;
- Changes his name from John Walker to Abdul Hamid;
- Moves from Pakistan to Afghanistan joining the Taliban;
- Gets himself a real nice AK-47 which, we assume, he fires at American allies if not at American soldiers;
- Finds himself arrested in the roundup of Taliban by the Northern Alliance;
- Gets caught in the middle of the prison uprising;
- Catches a round in the leg;
- Becomes the subject of a bunch of legal experts arguing over what to do with him.
Mullings, as usual, has the answer:
- Bring him back to the US and sentence him to community service.
At the NYFD Ladder #3 firehouse in Southern Manhattan. Firefighter Mike Moran's company.
The AP's Ron Fournier broke the story last night that former Montana Governor Marc Racicot - pronounced "RAHS-coh" will take over the Republican National Committee as its chairman in January.
Racicot, you will remember, was one of the GOP's most effective spokespeople during the recount in Florida. One year ago yesterday, just to review the bidding, Judge N. Sanders Sauls ruled against the the David Bois-led Gore legal team saying, "the court finds that the plaintiffs [the Gore folks] have failed to carry the requisite burden of proof and judgment shall be and hereby is entered that plaintiffs shall take nothing by this action and the defendants may go hence without delay."
How much water has flowed under the causeway since that happened?
Anyway, this guy from Montana showed up in Florida and became a steadying hand on the Bush public relations tiller while the Bush legal team was doing its thing. Racicot, who was not very well known to anyone, quickly impressed everyone.
The outgoing chairman of the RNC, Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, was one of those ideas which looked great on paper, but just didn't work out in real life.
The Governor of Virginia is not permitted to succeed himself. One term. Out. That means that, on inauguration day, everyone on the incoming Governor's staff - including the incoming Governor - begins the process of figuring out what they can do in the next four years which will guarantee them gainful employment following the NEXT election.
Last January, Jim Gilmore's term had a year to go. But the relative proximity of Richmond, Virginia to Washington, DC made it seem that it would possible for him to conclude his term as Governor while serving as Republican National Committee chairman, and he was picked by the White House for the job.
However, the demands of being a Governor in a period of shrinking tax revenues left Gilmore in a public, pitched battle with a GOP-controlled State Senate over next year's state budget.
While that was going on, the only two races for Governor, the one in Virginia to choose Gilmore's successor and the one in New Jersey to choose the successor to EPA head Christine Todd Whitman did not go well.
That would qualify as a modest understatement. The GOP lost them both.
Because of the budget fights in Richmond, Gilmore didn't have the time he needed to soothe the worried brows of the RNC members - a National Committee woman and a National Committee man from each state plus the GOP State Chairman - many of whom had voiced concerns about the management of the RNC even prior to this November's elections.
So, in January, at their annual meeting, a new Chairman will be chosen for the Republican National Committee and it will be Marc Racicot.
As a former National Co-chair of the RNC, Maureen Reagan, once said: Politics ain't beanbag.
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