Our former governor, now Secretary of HHS, Tommy Thompson, is doing a press conference at my conference center tomorrow. So today, a two-man SS detail showed up to scope the place out.
It was very perfunctory, simply looking over the site and identifying routes of access and egress. If the Pres or Veep were coming, there would have been bomb-sniffing dogs, snipers on the roof, background checks of all the employees who work in the area, etc. Cabinet secretaries apparently get two guys and a rental car.
I wonder about these guys. I’m sure they signed up wanting to protect the President, but they’re probably not good enough for the “varsity”. Instead, their job is to take a bullet for Tommy Thompson, a considerable letdown in anyone’s book. Of course, their real job, ideally, is to prevent the bullet from being fired, but they sure aren’t given much in the way of resources to do so.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure nobody cares enough about Thompson to take a shot at him. Or so I hope, at least for tomorrow.
I gotta call from the Secret Service once… I used to manage a magic shop. We sold trick coins - Coins that were hollowed out but appear normal most of the time. One wound up in a bank (Someone spent a 50 cent piece that retails for 21 dollars!)
The back reported it as counterfit. Apparently one of the Secret Services duties is to follow up on counterfit reports…
The First Lady came to visit the hospital I used to work at, and I can’t say I noticed anything like roof snipers - I guess that they might have been doing their job if I didn’t notice them. I just thought it was odd that they weren’t even doing extra precautions like checking IDs of workers/visitor passes of patient visitors who were going in and out of the hospital.
My family had a “rather important political figure” at the house a few years ago. A fundraiser for a local politician.
The visit lasted just a couple hours, but we were subjected to the whole “SS” (never noticed the initials are the same as that other organization) thing - background checks, scan of the house a few days before and during, and…guys with guns on the roof of the garage during the event.
The whole thing was quite bizarre, and the guys that stayed close to their “target” (or whatever they call the person they’re protecting) were like human walls, but FAST. Quite impressive, actually.
The time I saw snipers on the roof was while working at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the mid 80s, which at the time was next door to the Soviet Embassy. Gorbachov visited, the 16th street between (K&L?)was blocked off for the week and used as a limo parking, and there were snipers on the roof of our building, and daily sweeps by sniffer dogs. They actually lifted the dogs into the engine compartments of cars to give them a thorough check.
I saw Raisa, and the back of Gorbachev’s head (I think).
