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...Stand for a few big things. Obama rode to his party's nomination as the anti-Clinton and won the general election as the anti-Bush without ever having to define his political persona. Reagan's policies didn't always live up to his mantra (lower taxes, stronger defense, family values), but he was able to fit most of his major initiatives and high-profile events under that simple tripartite rubric...
Although Obama has a history of using big speeches to spark or recalibrate his fortunes (the Democratic National Convention keynote in Boston in 2004, his Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Dinner speech in 2007, his oration on race in 2008, which was prompted by the controversy surrounding Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright), no realistic appraiser of Obama's looming State of the Union believes he can turn everything around with one prime-time address. (See the State of the Union Address in 3 Minutes...
...big is the audience? If fewer Americans than usual tune in to the address on TV, it will suggest that the country has tuned out the President. The West Wing has to hope that the nation is still interested in what its (relatively) new leader has to say. (See Barack Obama's top 10 sound bites...
...reports, the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) last summer held two National Bed Bug Symposiums in Newark, N.J., and Seattle, in hopes of educating hotel operators about the pests. The Environmental Protection Agency also held its first bedbug summit last year in Washington. The bugs are most common in big cities, including New York, San Francisco and Toronto, but the number of infestations is sharply on the rise around the world, in part because of the increase in international travel. Bedbugs don't crawl in themselves; they're carried in by visitors. (See 50 authentic American experiences...
...bedbug problem is "miniscule," according to Joe McInerney, president and CEO of the AHLA, if one takes into account the fact that there are 4.4 million rooms in the country. "The only people that are making a big deal of it are the media," he says. McInerney says hotel operators exterminate rooms regularly, not just for bed bugs, but for all kinds of pests. An AHLA bedbug fact sheet recommends that hotels prevent infestations by inspecting rooms daily for evidence of bedbugs in bedding and furniture. Rooms found to have bedbug activity should be put out of service until...