Weekend Digest: The Presidential Stat Tracker

For our weekend political readers:

STAT TRACKER FOR THE PRESIDENT
In baseball there is a stat for everything, except for perhaps how many times a guy goes to the bathroom during a game.  Well in politics there’s a guy who does just that according to the Washingtonian but his stats are on everything about President Obama.  His name is Mark Knoller and he is a reporter for CBS.  He also is “the unofficial records keeper of the presidency, the statistics savant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Nearly every day, he logs every movement, act, and utterance of the commander in chief in an obsessively detailed archive of text files and spreadsheets.
 
Ask Knoller the most obscure or mundane point of presidential trivia and he’ll have an answer in seconds. You could start with the easy stuff, like public appearances. As of my meeting with Knoller, Obama had made 1,818 speeches, remarks, and public comments as President, using a Teleprompter 689 times.

Knoller has been doing this since the Clinton Presidency.
 
How many times has Obama flown on Marine One, the Presidential helicopter, or how many date nights has he had with his wife Michelle?  Knoller knows.  He knows a lot more and some of it is hard to believe.

Do you think he knows Bo, the president’s dog?  Click here to find out.

THAT’S PRETTY LOW
How low do you think the rating for Congress is?  According to a poll in the Wall Street Journal, Americans give such things as cockroaches, colonoscopies, and root canals a higher rating than Congress.

But Congress does beat out some in the poll.

Who does Congress beat out? Well, it squeaks by actress Lindsay Lohan (45%-41%) and playground bullies (43%-38%), and has more comfortable margins over Cuba’s Fidel Castro (54%-32%) and the reality-television Kardashians (49%-36%). And Congress trounced communism (57%-23%).

That’s good to know. For the complete results jump to this link.

NRA MEMBERSHIP ZOOMS AFTER SANDY HOOK SHOOTING
Since the horrible massacre in Sandy Hook, the NRA’s membership has grown by more then 100,000 reports Politico.  That brings the NRA’s membership now to 4.2 million.

“Our goal is to get to 5 million before this debate is over,” the NRA told POLITICO’s Mike Allen.

How much does it cost to join the NRA, and why is the membership booming in the wake of the shooting?  Find out more here.

FORMER ARKANSAS GOVERNOR SLAMS OBAMA’S CABINET CHOICES
Republican Mike Huckabee says the President’s new cabinet choices are not diverse enough, and the former Arkansas governor says the president is “waging a war on women” by not appointing more women, according to AOL.

“Now a lot of those females who supported Barack Obama are scratching their heads, and they’re saying, ‘Whoa! How come there is so much testosterone in the Obama Cabinet and so little estrogen?'” the former Arkansas governor and one-time Republican presidential candidate said during his radio show. “Because if you look around, all of these high-powered appointments that he is making are all white guys.”

According to the NY Times “About 43 percent of Obama’s appointees have been women — more women than George W. Bush appointed, but about the same ratio as Bill Clinton.”

But those facts didn’t stop Huckabee’s stinging criticism.

According to Huckabee, Obama used charges of a Republican “war on women” and promises of “contraceptives and free abortions” to get women to vote for him, but “never promised women would have seats of significance at the table of power.”

You can read the whole AOL story at this link.

I’LL DRINK TO THAT
What whisky comes from only one country but sells around the globe?  The answer is scotch, and the BBC poses some very interesting questions.

How did Scotch go from cottage industry to global phenomenon and how does it benefit its country of origin?

And what does the Scotch Whisky Association plan for the sipping of its product in emerging markets?

A double-shot of answers are at this link.