Yet Friday night, the Celtic rock ensemble plays at the city Irish Festival at Canton Waterfront Park. On Sunday afternoon, it's a "Halfway to St. Patrick's Day Celebration" at Bourbon Street Live (what used to be known as Hammerjacks), near City Hall.
Halfway to St. Patrick's Day? What's that all about?
"As Governor," O'Malley writes on the band Web site, "I am unable to raise funds during the Legislative Session, which includes the month of March."
The halfway event is a $50-a-head fundraiser for O'Malley. So he's focused on politics after all.
'Maryland' is my Maryland
Lobbyist and former Del. Don Murphy scored quite the GOP convention souvenir: the triangular post identifying the Maryland delegation on the convention floor, signed by members of the delegation.
The thing is 10 inches on each side and 31/2 feet high. How'd Murphy, chairman of the Maryland delegation, get it home to Catonsville?
"The overhead compartment," he said matter-of-factly, as if the friendly skies have a surplus of bin space.
Stowing it was no problem from Minneapolis to Atlanta; flight attendants even asked to have their pictures taken with it. Atlanta to Baltimore was a different story.
"One flight attendant with obvious liberal tendencies said, 'That's going to have to go underneath,'" Murphy recalled. "I said, 'It's staying with me.'"
Connect the dots
In other late-leaking GOP convention news: Michael "Drill, Baby , Drill" Steele was the guest of honor at a state delegation breakfast. The state wasn't Maryland. It was Iowa. Is Steele thinking really big? "Obviously, when people come through the Iowa delegation, there's always speculation about whether this person is going to be running for president," said Dave Roederer, chairman of McCain's Iowa campaign. He said Steele - "a very, very impressive speaker" - was one of several McCain surrogates to address the breakfasters. Others were John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and Roberta McCain, the candidate's mom. ... That Abe Lincoln impersonator TV cameras kept showing in the convention crowd during Sarah Palin's speech? NOT John Leopold, the Anne Arundel County exec's spokesman assured me. He left his costume at home. ... Leopold recalls that as a state lawmaker in Hawaii in the 1970s, his district included the apartment where Barack Obama and his mother lived. "He thinks it's pretty likely that he knocked on her door," spokesman David Abrams said. ... In other Leopoldlian news: He bumped into country singer Trace Adkins at the convention, not to mention two members of the Eastern Media Elite: Tom Brokaw and Andrea Mitchell. Leopold said Brokaw and Mitchell remembered him from the 1980 convention in Detroit. All these years later? How come? Again, the Lincoln outfit was not a factor. "I wanted to have the platform debated on the convention floor, something that hadn't happened in decades," Leopold told The Baltimore Sun's Nicole Fuller. "I had a number of planks in that platform about environmental protection and the Equal Rights Amendment."
