Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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They're All Showing Up!

Monday, January 8, 2001

The Census Bureau reported recently that there are 281,421,906 people living in the United States. Continuing on the recent election results, the Presidential Inaugural Committee has now received requests from almost exactly half of them: 140,710,952 people who want to attend the inauguration of George W. Bush.

Apparently, one person is going to be out of the country or didn't have our phone number.

Moreover, half of that half of the population, about 70 million people, want to sit in the front row at the swearing in. The other half have asked to hold the Bible.

As one of the 863 Seaters-in-Chief here at PIC, I have done the following calculations.

Each chair in the audience takes up 20 inches so the front row will have to be 22,206 miles long.

The latitude of Your Nation's Capitol Building is 38�53'28" which means the circumference of Your Planet is about 19,795 miles starting from the front lawn and running east and west.

If the front row starts at the Capitol, then the row would go around the entire planet, and wrap around itself such that the last 2,400 or so miles of chairs in the SECOND first row would actually be behind those in the FIRST first row.

Hey, wait! If we twist the chairs say, where they cross the Great Wall of China so they face in the opposite direction, then we will have created the first Global Moebius Strip. Christo. Hah!

Happily, the front row is oriented north-and-south (facing the West Front of the Capitol) so we CAN get everyone into the front row. It's just that some of the people on the edges - 12,500 miles away - might not have that good a view.

I now have an Official Inaugural Headache.

Bill Clinton has been very, very busy doing last minute President stuff: Issuing Executive Orders, signing treaties, pardoning people, buying mansions - all the things he WOULD have had time to do over the previous four years had all those pesky fund raising events not been on his schedule.

Some people will think this is swell, some won't: Ron Brownstein's piece in yesterday's LA Times takes a look at the Bush governing strategy which is to make a strong statement for what you want to get done, then work to get as much of it as possible.

Quoting an unnamed Bush advisor, Brownstein writes, "You lay out what your agenda is, then you see what points of agreement you can find. . . . Otherwise you are signaling that what you say doesn't matter."

But, then quoting a Texas legislator: "At the end of the day, [Bush] knows what can pass and what can't pass," said Texas Rep. Sadler. "He will try to get as close to his proposal as he can, but in the end he will cut the best deal available."

Works for me.

The Postal Service has increased the cost of a first class letter from 33 to 34 cents citing, according to the Associated Press: "rising costs and falling revenues."

Ok. So, according to the Postal Service raising the cost of using their product, mailing stuff - which people already are using less mainly because of the internet and because the services they do provide continue to deteriorate - will somehow fix this.

I have a suggestion for some freshman Member of Congress: Introduce legislation to privatize the Postal Service. Or, as an opening bid, make it illegal for the Postal Service to ever use the terms "first class" and "mail" in the same press release.

On a completely different subject, Barron's financial newspaper reported on Sunday that a third of all publicly traded internet firms will run out of cash by the end of 2001.

You know, you'd think these oh-so-brilliant, new-economy, mega-millionaires would understand this by now: You're doing it wrong. The secret to success is to become a government mandated monopoly. When you think you're running out of money - raise rates. Why is this so hard for them to understand?

One of the companies mentioned in the Barron's report is: Stamps.com.

Ironic, huh?

By the way, The Streak is over. The Mistake-less Mullings streak for 2001 ended at � one. In the second Mullings of the year, I suggested that all 100 Senators took the oath of office at the beginning of the new Congress.

Many, many, many of you just couldn't make your little fingers press the keys fast enough to send me an e-mail pointing out that only those Senators elected, or re-elected had last November to take the oath.

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