Opinion: Joe Biden update: Working from home again today

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A little change of pace today for the second most important vice president in American history this year.

After a weekend of no public appearances at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, Vice President Joe Biden will spend a workday of no public appearances in the same place.

According to his official White House schedule, at precisely 1 p.m. today Eastern time Biden will lead a transcontinental conference call ‘with mayors from across the country to discuss implementation’ of the Obama Spends a Gazillion Dollars to Create and/or Save Thousands of Jobs Maybe More But the Unemployment Rate Is Still 10 Percent Act, sometimes called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Biden has been kind of in charge of that while the multi-tasking president was wheeling his beloved healthcare bill into intensive care and commuting to Scandinavia this fall.

Because Obama promised his would be the most transparent White House administration in history, Biden’s mayoral conference call is closed to everyone except the unidentified mayors, including especially those in the annoying, unelected media.

Following the phone call that could consume 25 maybe 30 of the VP’s monthly minutes, ‘The Vice President will spend the remainder of the day meeting with senior staff.’

They’ve no doubt simply packed into Wilmington, despite the federal government’s snow day. Or maybe Biden has a home bunker for video-conferencing.

We won’t really know because, like the rest of Biden’s officially opaque workday, those meetings with unnamed people on unspecified subjects for unannounced durations are closed to any outsiders, too.

Remember how unacceptably secretive bordering on evil that was when Dick ‘The Most Dangerous VP in American History’ Cheney used to do the very same thing?

Also, in case you were in your own closed senior staff meetings yesterday at a shopping mall or in front of a televised football game, you should know that for the second time in five months Biden published an op-ed article for a non-tabloid New York newspaper with a similar name to one in Los Angeles.

The Democratic vice president came out four-square in favor of the Democratic president’s healthcare legislation.

Biden even went so far as to say that if he was still a senator -- which he was, you know, from the time Obama was a sixth grader until weeks after the ex-youngster was elected president -- Biden would, in fact, vote to pass the Reid-written measure.

That’s how for-it Joe Biden is.

(UPDATE: 2:14 p.m. Well, maybe that phone call didn’t last 30 minutes after all. This afternoon the White House released this complete list of all the mayors who participated in the conference chat with JB: Chris Coleman of St. Paul, Michael Moncrief of Ft. Worth, Joseph Riley of Charleston and A.C. Wharton Jr. of Memphis.)

-- Andrew Malcolm

Speaking of taking time off, pause in your day’s work to click here for Twitter alerts of each new Ticket item. Or follow us @latimestot. We’re also over here on Facebook, though the list is fast filling up. And our new Facebook fan page is here.

In case you’ve forgotten what JB looks like, here’s a 2008 video of one of his appearances in Florida where the campaign volunteer confused the Delaware senator with the Arizona senator. All those old Republicans look alike anyway.