The Week Ahead

This morning, I managed to get on the Monday morning conference call held every week by the Obama campaign for "friendly" journalists. After listening to the items covered, here is what is going to happen in the week ahead.

1) The big event of the week from the standpoint of the campaign is the release of the employment figures for May. Based upon what was said, the likely results are that there will be an increase of 5,000 jobs in the economy for May and the unemployment rate will decline from 8.1% to 5.7%. The decline in the rate will come as a result of just over 4.1 million people leaving the workforce.

2) An independent analysis paid for by the campaign will announce that Obama is the "Education President" for three reasons: a)for the first time ever, the total amount of student loans outstanding has declined during a president's term. This is because all loans issued during Obama's term but under legislation passed during the term of an earlier president will be charged against that president rather than Obama. b)High School graduation rates will climb to 100% for Obama as a result of the new method for computing this rate. During the Obama term, highschool dropouts will now be considered people who are no longer looking for an education so they will no longer be counted. c)The health insurance costs for teachers and university professors during the Obama term will be higher than ever before.

3) The Obama team will tout the great success achieved by the president with regard to Iran by pointing out that so far during Obama's term in office, Iran has not exploded a single nuclear weapon.

4) Events in Syria are to be recharacterized as "classified", so the media will drop all further coverage.

5) In order to show a commitment to increased domestic energy production, Obama will announce an auction of drilling rights on certain federal lands. These will include Acadia National Park in Maine, federal land in Vermont, Connecticut and Rhode Island, and a large area outside of Seattle. Geological surveys show that there is no oil or gas on these lands, but when there are no bidders, Obama will point out the lack of interest to the public and explain that this shows that the Republicans are working with big oil to keep prices high by not drilling.

I cannot wait to see what happens the following week (if they let me back on the call).