In Bush Is a Book Lover at the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove chronicles his three-year-long Great American Reading Race with President Bush. He maintains that in the fiercest year of the competition, 2006, he defeated Bush, 110 books to 95.
“The president,” Rove writes, “lamely insisted he’d lost because he’d been busy as Leader of the Free World.” Full story »
Get it? No, okay. A samovar is the traditional Russian contraption for making tea. Very few Russians actually use one anymore because the electric kettle has made them obsolete.* Tula was the famed home of Russia’s best samovars. Ergo, it’s rather stupid to bring a samovar on a trip to Tula. Or, don’t take what you don’t need. There’s a lesson here for President Elect Obama and the American people. The Tsar is about as contemporary as the samovar, whichs begs the question: why does Obama seem intent on turning Washington D.C. into a second Tula? That city is already full of people who think themselves all powerful, yet tsars are proliferating like rabbits in springtime.