Romney: It worked! Break out the watermelon!

 Watching Mitt Romney speak to/at/over the NAACP audience in his typically kinetic way,   I must tell you that I was distracted by wondering what he was quietly thinking about.

Borrowing loosely from Camelot, was his brain humming, "I wonder what my Swiss are doing tonight'?

Naw. His people are in touch 24 hours a day to tell him what his Swiss are doing, down to the last million or two.

Was he thinking about how he might disguise Seamus, his Irish setter,  the next time he straps it to the roof of his car to keep the Humane Society and Gail Collins from whining about it?

Naw.  He won't be driving to Canada or wherever  until after the election anyway.

Was he thinking about saying how much he loved African-Americans because they are the right height, particularly the ones in the NBA, where a couple of team owners are his good  friends?

Naw.  There probably weren't any 6-foot-10 ladies in the audience to appreciate the loving reference.

Was he thinking about how he was wasting his time speaking to a group in which 25 pct. might  be denied voting by ID laws or were on food stamps?

Naw.  They had sat courteously throughout his remarks so there was no reason to make the natives restless at this point.

But he did want to make a point about his muscular  opposition to...um..Obamacare.. That would prove his courage  to the Tea Partiers and white racists who think he is a wus.

 He could only hope that his plan to be loudly booed  would work while he stood defiantly before the  mob with a tight-lipped smile like Leonidas at Thermopylae.

It worked flawlessly! (In a tightly- guarded room off the hall, his campaign staff was so joyous that it broke out the prize watermelon.) Mitt could even claim on Fox News that 'black leaders' told him privately afterward that they supported him.  These were the surrogates his campaign flew in to the Houston conference to declare their fealty to the Republican contender.

Epilogue:   The heady   businessman who constantly reminds us of his unique ability to do things then confidently flew off to Hamilton, Montana,  near the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness,  for a fund-raiser to boast about his own mission accomplished. He told the friendly  group that if some handout-minded folks "want more stuff from the government, tell them to vote for the other guy."

That was a another campaign moment when he wasn't thinking at all.

Outrage: It's all the rage in America today

OUTRAGE HAS become a defining moment in the nation's psyche, not only from the Tea Partyers, but also from a lot of other people who cannot sit still on a hot summer evening and get a therapeutic laugh from Seinfeld. ( You might already see the extent of my TV diversions.). So where to begin to make my case?

Thanks to the fact that we have an African-American president, slavery is making it back in the hot discussion of America's values. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, full of rage, lashed Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert for morphing LeBron James into a "runaway slave" - which was kind of shocking inasmuch as runaway slaves never left town as a zillionaire with expectations of starring on a NBA championship team. Gilbert, of course, had lit the fuse with a clinically isolated example of searing outrage aimed at Mr. James - who lived through the experience without a single hint of anger about his new digs.

It reached a point in that exchange of outrage that some others took umbrage that Zydrunas Ilgouskas, the Cavaliers Eiffel Tower center (and equally immobile) did not produce the same outrage from the fans when he joined his itinerant teammate in Miami. Once again, the connective tissue was outrage, which never seems to tire sports fans.

And wouldn't you know that Rep. Michele Bachmann, the loony Republican from Minnesota, again expressed her outrage that President Obama was, in her words, channeling us into a "nation of slaves." Some Republicans are outraged daily by Michael Steele, the party's national chairman. The latest outburst was produced by Steele's accusation that Afghanistan was first conceived by Obama. My only conclusion is that the GOP hawks do not want to be denied the honor of calling it their war.

The NAACP slammed the Tea Partyers with a resolution charging them with racism - a charge that was heatedly denied by the TP upper classmen who have yet to explain why there are so many racist placards at some of their outings.

Glenn Beck, who markets outrage between commercials, is doubtless at sixes and sevens now that surveys have shown that he has lost half of his audience. Rep. Joe Barton, the Texas Republican, was outraged by the Administration's demand that BP set up a fund to pay off people stricken by the oil spill. He meekly apologized to BP, calling Obama's effort a $20 billion "shakedown."

It looks like NASA's prediction that 2010 will be the hottest on record will be realized - not all of it by global warming.