Ohio: Obama

Boehner, a West Chester Republican, posted his suggestion a little more than a week ago: that the Obama administration support a requirement that all bills in Congress be made public for review for at least 72 hours before a floor vote. As of Friday morning, it was the clear leader in the "making government operations more open" category, with 784 votes in favor and 103 against.

"If the administration chose to support such a review and follow through on its own promise to allow for five days of public comment on all bills before signing, it would represent a good first step toward greater transparency and accountability in government spending," Boehner wrote.

Marshall made her name in the Clinton administration after graduating from Case Western Reserve
University law school, and then worked for the Senate and presidential campaigns of Hillary
Clinton.

The State Department Web site describes the post this way: "Whether rolling out the red carpet
for a king visiting the president at the White House, hosting a prime minister at the president's
guesthouse, traveling overseas with the president, credentialing a new foreign ambassador, or
planning events for the secretary of state, the duties of the Office of the Chief of Protocol are
many and varied."

Presidents wake up every day wondering whether terrorists will attack Americans and whether they will be judged to have failed to protect the homeland if that happens.

Presidents make decisions.

Members of Congress make speeches.

Is that unfair? Perhaps a little. Presidents can hem and haw and speechify with the best of them, and lawmakers sometimes take courageous, politically unpopular stands and cast votes that could cost them their jobs come the next election.

But being president has to be, no contest, the loneliest job in the world -- just look at the way they age (see the before and after photos of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as recent examples) during their time in the White House.

At issue are comments made by an Armenian-American congressional candidate during the 2008 campaign. A Republican congresswoman from Cincinnati, Jean Schmidt, claims her opponent violated election law when he accused her of being a puppet of Turkish efforts to deny that the mass killings of Armenians during World War I constituted genocide.

The commission found probable cause yesterday that David Krikorian's statements violated election law, voting unanimously to bring the case to a full hearing.

The 94-year-old killings in Turkey are an unlikely topic for a congressional campaign in America's heartland, where Schmidt's staunchly conservative values find favor among a large portion of her constituents.