Friday November 21 2008
Hillary Clinton
The New York Times is now reporting that Hillary Clinton has decided to accept Obama's offer of the secretary of state job
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Al Franken is steadily gaining in the Minnesota recount:
With about 46 percent of the 2.9 million ballots counted by Thursday evening, the gap between Republican incumbent Norm Coleman and DFL challenger Al Franken continued to close. Coleman was leading by only 136 votes, a drop from his unofficial lead of 215 that was confirmed Tuesday by the state Canvassing Board.
If you do the math, that isn't quite enough to take the lead. But Josh Marshall says there are also a few hundred disputed ballots to be counted. I'd love to see Al win the thing by one vote! Whatever brings the reptilian Coleman the maximum amount of pain.
Question: Do we think George Bush is, you know, working anymore? There's no visible sense that he's doing anything beyond the ceremonial stuff, welcoming this or that pimply teenage assemblage to investigative the White House Christmas trimmings. It appears he's mostly dreaming of the day he can get down to Texas and start swinging that driver again.
Can we take two more months of this? The DJIA keeps losing 3% (or more) a day! The bailout money is being misspent and no one from the administration has been cracking the whip on the banks.
It's almost enough to make one suspect sabotage -- just let things get as crappy as possible for the black guy. It's all got some folks I know wondering if the inauguration can be moved up so that people who will actually try something will be in charge. The answer is no, incidentally. But you'd think there would be some element of self-interest at work here for Bush, or maybe he just doesn't give a f#*@ anymore.
Thursday November 20 2008
Today is Joe the Biden's 66th birthday. According to the Obama press office, Barack Obama yesterday "surprised him with cupcakes" after their weekly lunch, then gave the vice-president elect a Chicago White Sox cap, Chicago bears hat and "a bucket of Garrett's popcorn" as gifts.
Biden lives in Delaware and was born in Pennsylvania. I doubt he's a fan of either the Sox or the Bears. Thanks a lot Barack.
If I were Biden, here is what I would want for my birthday.
Wednesday November 19 2008
The loss vindicates Republican senators who yesterday delayed a decision on whether to punish Stevens for his felony conviction.
Continue reading...Congressman Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the arm of the Democratic party tasked with electing Dems to the US House. He was enormously successful this year, with the Democrats gaining 22 seats in the body, with votes still being counted in two elections. The Democrats gained 31 seats in 2006, and Van Hollen said 2008 was the first time a party gained more than 20 seats in two consecutive elections.
In a breakfast meeting with reporters today, Van Hollen said the party aims to hold onto the gains, defending vulnerable seats again a Republican resurgence.
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So Ayman al-Zawahri says in his new video of the president-elect, according to the AP:
The message appeared chiefly aimed at persuading Muslims and Arabs that Obama does not represent a change in U.S. policies. Ayman al-Zawahri said in the message, which appeared on militant Web sites, that Obama is "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X, the 1960s African-American rights leader.
In al-Qaida's first response to Obama's victory, al-Zawahri also called the president-elect — along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — "house negroes."
Speaking in Arabic, al-Zawahri uses the term "abeed al-beit," which literally translates as "house slaves." But al-Qaida supplied English subtitles of his speech that included the translation as "house negroes."
The message also includes old footage of speeches by Malcolm X in which he explains the term, saying black slaves who worked in their white masters' house were more servile than those who worked in the fields. Malcolm X used the term to criticize black leaders he accused of not standing up to whites.
It doesn't exactly harm Barack Obama politically in the United States to have al-Qaida's number two man say "Barack, you're no Malcolm X." So one wonders what this is all about.
Clearly, though, the al-Q boys are pretty panicked not to have a president of the United States the rest of the world despises. Bush was their hole card. Now there's a president who might render them marginal.
By the way: I think I forgot to blog on this, but on a related note, I trust you noticed shortly after the election that Ralph Nader used the phrase "Uncle Tom" on national TV (OK, Fox) when speaking of Obama? That man has zero credibility left. What a megalomaniac, off playing these silly and utterly irrelevant games of his. He could have stayed relevant if he'd wanted to, but he just wants to run for president and get almost no votes because he loves the spotlight and every so often, they let him go on TV so he can make an ass of himself. Retire already.
The one minority group the R's could always count on, of course, are the Cubans of Miami.
Sure enough, McCain won the Cuban vote handily, about 65 to 35 in Miami-Dade County. But interestingly, McCain won big among Cuban-American voters 65 or older, while among Cuban voters 29 or younger, Obama won 55%.
In other words, as the original anti-Castro generation dies off, Cuban-Americans will become more like other Latino groups, which are heavily Democratic. And on top of that, Cubans aren't even the majority of Latinos in Florida any more, and so Obama became the first Democrat to win the overall Latino vote in Florida since they started keep track of such things in the 1980s.
The GOP base is shrinking. What a pity!
I shouldn't overlook this important LA Times op-ed piece, even though it ran yesterday. Civil War historian Matthew Pinsker writes that Lincoln's famous Team of Rivals, a phrase already beaten into the ground, maybe isn't such a great model for Obama and maybe Doris Goodwin airbrushed her history a little:
Consider this inconvenient truth: Out of the four leading vote-getters for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination whom Lincoln placed on his original team, three left during his first term -- one in disgrace, one in defiance and one in disgust...
...Over the years, it has become easy to forget that hard edge and the once bad times that nearly destroyed a president. Lincoln's Cabinet was no team. His rivals proved to be uneven as subordinates. Some were capable despite their personal disloyalty, yet others were simply disastrous.
Lincoln was a political genius, but his model for Cabinet-building should stand more as a cautionary tale than as a leadership manual.
Worth pondering, all right. I'm still just not very persuaded this ToR thing is such a grand idea.
Tuesday November 18 2008
Comedians have complained that Obama's election brings the death of presidential humour, a mainstay of political satire since the founding of our great republic. "Barack Obama's election victory may have been good for the country, but it's been awful for comedians," writes the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson. Obama's too clean, too nice, and also comedians fear that any jokes they make on him will be perceived as racist. (See Don Rickles' basketball joke on David Letterman, which Robinson describes).
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A marginal conservative politician whom Obama walloped in the 2004 Illinois senate race sues to force Obama to prove his citizenship.
Continue reading...Newsweek's Michael Isikoff says that Barack Obama has chosen Eric Holder, a former justice department official under Bill Clinton, to be his attorney general
Continue reading...This morning Barack Obama delivered a video-taped address to the Bi-Partisan Governors Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles. The message reiterates the environmental policy ideas he outlined during the campaign, and repeats his "one president at a time" theme.
Attending the two-day event, which is hosted by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, are Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, Florida's Charlie Crist, Jim Doyle of Wisconsin, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and "representatives of approximately 22 other states; government officials from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, the UK and others."
The summit is intended to make some headway on climate issues before the UN conference in Poland next month.
Script after the jump...
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Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is set to campaign in Georgia for Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss, whom a Democratic challenger forced into a run-off election. Romney also donated $5,000 from his political action committee, Free and Strong America PAC, to Chambliss' effort.
Let the 2012 jockeying begin! The Republican party is putting a lot of energy into this race, and Romney hopes to earn some good will among the national party for pitching in.
"This is a critical election whose outcome will be important to maintaining a balance of power in the Senate," Romney said in a press release. "It is critical that Republicans safely retain the ability to filibuster in order to prevent the worst abuses of single party rule."
Chambliss faces Democratic former state representative Jim Martin in a December 2 run-off election, because neither candidate won a majority of the vote this month. He is a top target among Democrats still angry at his use in 2002 of an advertisement juxtaposing Vietnam veteran Max Cleland with Osama bin Laden's face. Cleland lost three limbs in Vietnam.
The race is drawing heavy hitters from both parties. Bill Clinton is expected to hold a rally in Atlanta tomorrow for Martin, and the Democrats are hoping that the rank and file who turned out in droves for Obama's effort will stay energised. Obama himself is not expected to campaign for Martin -- he would probably prefer not to risk precious political capital should Martin lose.
In addition to the Georgia race, senate contests in Minnesota and Alaska remain unresolved.
Full press release from Romney after the jump...
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First he kissed George W Bush, symbolising their synchronicity on the Iraq war. Then he lost his own Democratic Senate nomination to a little-known businessman -- and decided to leave the party that wanted to make him vice-president. Then he sweetly endorsed John McCain before the Republican faithful three months ago.
Now it all comes down to numbers for Joe Lieberman, whose status in Congress hangs in the balance ahead of today's secret vote by 50 Democratic senators.
