You Had Me At Kamchatka

In Newark, The Mayor's Crusade Gets Personal - Corey Booker always seemed like a nice guy, but As Good As News had reservations. He's from New Jersey - that wasn't an insult, so am I, use the MySpace link to play the clip "So...New Jersey". He played football, but at least he was a lineman, not a wide receiver, and apparently he didn't have too many unreported concussions -Pac 10 All Academic at Stanford. As a student in England (OK, so he was a Rhodes Scholar - big deal, we already said he was a football player ), he went far above and beyond the call of duty in aiding another American student, a neighbor Booker didn't know really well, whose life had been suddenly and seriously disrupted by a debilitating back problem in the middle of a move. Booker graduated from law school, Yale law school, but nobody is perfect. He learned Yiddish. As a new mayor, Booker took on two students as mentees because they were busted for painting "Kill Booker" in a school hallway, and a third because he just tagged along to the first meeting. Best of all, Mayor Booker didn't use his mentees to grab some good PR, even when he was victimized by a vicious whispering campaign in the African-American community within Newark. He fights crime, creates jobs, looks for ways to make education work - he's Super Corey. All well and good, but As Good As News was only moderately impressed and still a little suspicious that Booker was too good to be true. Until today that is, when we discovered that Mayor Booker plays Risk. He probably even knows that if you control three strategic points, Kamchatka, North Africa and Iceland you can eventually hold North and South America while preventing anyone else from holding every continent except Australia. Newark is taking the first steps on a long climb, but Mayor Booker looks like he might hang in there. Let's think ahead to 2016, if we can just hold California, Florida and New York it will be nearly impossible for anyone else to grab the Presidency.