Welcome to Washington Mr. President

It snowed a little bit yesterday. Today it was a little icy. So of course, the school systems in Montgomery and Fairfax counties called off school for both days. I was watching the news this evening, and there was Barack, sitting at a table before a meeting, complaining about how his girls didn't have school today. He said something along the lines of, "We're from Chicago. We go to school when it snows." He said one of his daughters even reminded him that not only do they go to school on snowy days, they go outside to play at recess.

I could see the total look of bafflement on Barack's face as he tried to wrap his mind around this new concept of snow days and school.

I grew up in Connecticut and then lived in Manhattan for 10 years. When it snows there, you go to school and you go to work unless it's a blizzard and the drifts are above your waist. That's not official policy, I'm just saying how it seemed to me at the time.

Here (we used to joke about this when we still lived in Silver Spring) if there's an icy patch somewhere in Germantown, there's a snow day.

So, all I could think, watching Barack puzzle over this was, oh my friend, you have many, many more days of complete and utter bafflement ahead of you whenever there's even just a flake of snow in the sky.

Welcome to Washington . . .

Can we bring back tar and feathering?

I've got the perfect candidate -- John Thain, who used to run Bank of America and was fired yesterday for accelerating annual bonuses to his people so they'd get them before the auditors found out how much in the hole BOA was, AND, who spent lavishly redecorating his office while the company was going down the tubes. As someone in the financial world said to me yesterday, "You give people bonuses to keep them from being tempted to find a better job at a competing firm. But where is there to move to on Wall Street at this point? People are just hanging on to the jobs they have hoping they're not going to be laid off like everyone else."

At Last . . .

I dare you not to cry while you watch this.

Chia Pets for Obama

Not available until April!

From the Plantation to the Inauguration

I've done a lot of historical research on plantation life in the United States and the Caribbean during the colonial era and, consumerist culture aside, this T-shirt being sold on the Mall today says something true and deep (let's just get over the fact that Barack is not descended from slaves, because it's bigger than that). The trade in cotton, sugar, rice, and indigo -- which made so many white people in England, the Netherlands, and the American colonies rich -- would not have been possible without the gross inequities and horrors of plantation slave labor. After emancipation, the market for all of these commodities was unsustainable with paid labor. Our country was built on the backs of slave laborers. So -- respect.

The Potomac River is frozen

Taken from one of the scenic lookouts on the George Washington Parkway.

Obama Official Presidential Portrait by Pete Souza