Bush Revisiting

George W. is coming back to the area today, this time to Wilkes-Barre for a by-invitation-only presentation. Last time the traffic situation worked to my advantage: I was able to get on Interstate 81, but many of the exits between Nanticoke and the place where I work were closed to traffic entering and exiting the highway. The net result was that I had the road mostly to myself; there were a few other cars but - and this is the important part - absolutely no tractor-trailers.

Wilkes-Barre is a lot closer to me than the place where Bush last spoke. I wouldn't be surprised if I can't get onto the highway today. Since most of the alternate routes I know involve going through Wilkes-Barre, we'll see how screwed I am.

There's a hell of a lot of security for Bush, far more than there ever was during Clinton's visit in the aftermath of the 1996 floods. Maybe it's because people hate Bush a lot more than they ever hated Clinton. During Bush's last visit, a comment was made about the relative differences between security for John Edwards' visit a week or so earlier and Bush's visit: all the candidates get some security measures, but the President gets "everything". (Interestingly, this same article referred to Bush by the meaningless honorific "the leader of the free world." Do the people of the free world get to pick their own leader? If not, how free are they? If so, when did they decide that Bush was it?)

Here's what Mike McGlynn has to say about today's visit.

UPDATE: No traffic problems. A lot of state and local police on every exit and overpass between Wilkes-Barre and the airport. There were three unmarked white vans pulled off on the side of the road together, and they wouldn't have attracted my attention if it hadn't been for the red-and-blue flashers surreptitiously mounted behind their grills and not-so-surreptitiously strobing like mad.

One other odd thing: as I approached the airport a plane was coming in for a landing, and I slowed a bit, hoping to see Air Force One. (Yes, even I get a little star-struck.) But it wasn't. It was a small jet, a Lear Jet I think, angling its way down towards the airport. Now, I can't imagine there were any private or commercial aircraft allowed in that airspace at that time. So was this some sort of lead plane?