You brought me to tears with this. I am so in awe of what he does, how he communicates.
I was a die-hard Hillary supporter to the bitter end, but President-elect Obama just... just... blows me away. I NEVER would have thought I would feel this way.
I am SO happy for my country!
It is mighty refreshing to hear a President who speaks to us as though we're adults instead of not-particularly-bright children. You'll have to excuse me, though, if it takes a bit longer for Obama to earn my trust.
I voted for him without hesitation, in the primary and the general, but I'm not so certain it's a wise idea to trust any politician. Even -- maybe especially -- if he's one I like and admire.
I'm sorry to see Napalitano leave Arizona, too, especially since it means we'll be stuck with Jan Brewer as Governor for at least a few years.
Even back when Brewer was only a city council member in my town, it was clear that the interests of the Republican party were always, ALWAYS, going to be her top, and usually her only, priority.
The next few years are not going to be much fun in Arizona.
I'm not the least bit happy about HRHHRC at the SecState.... however, I see that it does take her out of the health care and other domestic issues which I'm happy as hell about. Bonus: keeps her and bill on the short leash and if she attempts any take over, well she won't even be in the senate when she fucks that secstate up. BUT maybe she won't and she'll adjust to her puppet strings...... I hope. Glad to see he's got that ever observant Samantha Powers back on his team for the transition at least.
Also, I totally agree with you on the Janet bummer. It is a biiiiig one. She fought to protect education in last years budget crisis. The state legislature pubs just wanted to lop off tons of ed and infrastucture spending and she fended their stupidity off. She's quite adept at that. BUT now with Brewer in there.... omg, we're going to be in such trouble. She'll probably make sure and just lop off all of northern Arizona .... the blue parts anyway. feh. Not good. Not good at all.
I think Obama is being very smart getting people to sign on.... some of whom probably didn't vote for him even.... then get them to enact his agenda... which I believe will be slightly left of center. (That's the old center, btw, NOT the "center" as defined by the flat earthers).
I'm imagining gates as an intelectually parched man in the middle of a baren desert being handed a tall glass of water in the form of a normal conversation with Obama. I'm sure he's quite glad of that.
Let's hope the clintons assimilate to the "new mind set" here and understand it's not about them.... at all. Looks like he's requiring us to get a new mind set as well. Hmmmmmm... should be interesting at least 
From a purely Machiavellian standpoint, nominating Clinton as SecState was a masterstroke. What better way to silence what could be one of your critics than to make them part of your Administration, subject to your instructions? Clinton will have to follow Obama's line or risk destroying her credibility as a team player as well as risking scotching her chances of making VP in Obama's second term (yes, I'm galloping ahead of the field on this, but it feels right). So Clinton may feel at times that she's a bit on probation.
Gates as SecDef. Yes, it gives the appearance of continuity, although the mission will soon be changing. It's a safe choice to make and will allay the fears of the chain of command that the incoming Obama Administration will be ideology-driven. ADM Mullen's meeting with Obama has already eased his concerns and that of the other Chiefs; his nomination of GEN Jones as National Security Advisor will help in that regard as well.
AG-nominee Holder will have a hard row to hoe trying to dig out the Bush appointees that are burrowed into the Department of Justice like so many noisome wood ticks. But it'll be nice to have a DOJ that isn't being driven by politics.
Rice is an excellent choice for UN Ambassador and Obama re-raising the position to Cabinet-level is necessary. If the Global Trends 2025 report is anywhere near accurate we can expect that our influence as a major player (while still present) will decrease, so we have to learn to get along.
It's also a relief to be able to use the title President without having to use scare quotes.
Here's my retort to "President" Bush touting his legacy on ABC last night. It ain't for the faint of heart.
She'll probably make sure and just lop off all of northern Arizona .... the blue parts anyway.
Well, we've got a North Dakota and a North Carolina. If Brewer wants to cut us loose, I'm all for it. 
It s good to see others are startign to see he guy that I ahve seen for a while now....it amazes me that there are nwo complaints comeign from verious places on hte net abotu obama being somehow difrent in the primaires then he is now...he has so far doen every thign he said he would. If his curent actions haven't lived up to your past expectatuions...perhapse you where not lisitening.
I don't trust Hillary Clinton
I don't trust Bill Clinton.
I am glad that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State serves at the pleasure of the President.
She can either do a good job in her position (subject to confirmation), rehabilitating her reputation, or she can attempt to undermine the Obama Administration and have President Obama fire her.
I like Susan Rice as UN Ambassador.
I like Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland Security.
"I'm imagining gates as an intelectually parched man in the middle of a baren desert being handed a tall glass of water in the form of a normal conversation with Obama. I'm sure he's quite glad of that."
Myrtle June, this is dead on. We have no idea how many in the military are just waiting to do the right thing, and giving Gates the chance to do so will go a long way to rehabilitate the relationship between the DOD and the Presidency.
~
"...but then, he is a hawk..."
That is arrant nonsense.
Here's his speech, delivered on October 2nd, 2002:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ba...a'
s_Iraq_Speech
It was made 8 days before Clinton climbed on the bushCo war-wagon.
If Obama had been a hawk, he would have been on it with her. He was not. He spoke out against the war regularly, at the same time she was pimping it for all she was worth.
In point of fact, she only ate that vote late in the primary contest, when the progressive community which she so readily threw under the bus to go haring off after rightwing support, had already LED the derailing of the triangulation express, and when she was looking at losing a nomination which she had practically had in her hand, at the beginning.
Obama's victory was crafted, in large measure, by the progressive orginizations such as MoveOn.Org and The National Organization for Women who, much to their credit, turned their backs on Clinton, and endorsed Barack.
It is, at once, disheartening and amusing to watch some bloggers flay the hide off Joe Lieberman (deserved) while screaming "misognyist!" at anyone who had the temerity to insist on pointing out that included in Hillary's sucking up to the right, was supporting Lieberman against Ned Lamont, in the Connecticut primary.
Just like Lieberman, she has:
"Property of AIPAC, Inc." tattoed on her butt.
And that, alone (forget her praising McCain in the primaries, and Bill doing the same for McCain AND Palin, in the general election) should have kept Obama from letting her within a mile of his foreign policy.
Once she and Bill and their vestigial PUMA's root in at the state department, it will all be about Hillary.
I don't know why he approved this.
He owed her nothing.
She could not have hurt him. She's a junior senator, with no committee chairmanship. All she could do is hold pressers and criticize him, and about the second time she did that, the same dem leadership that dogpiled on her to get her out of the race so she couldn't ruin us in Denver, would have yanked on her leash and reminded her that that comfy majority they AND SHE will be enjoying, was courtesy of Barack Obama's coattails. If she continued, she would have been even farther out of the leadership loop than she was before Obama did rehab on she and Bill.
Will they be grateful enough to toe the line on his foreign policy, when, for example, the realities of getting us out of Iraq, begin to kick in? And, will she keep a low media profile and allow him to set the tone for his administration, instead of competing for media-time?
As I've said elsewhere, I've got twenty bucks that says to anyone who believes that:
"You're not from around here, are you?"
What is going to be wonderful to behold, is, when Hillary, from Foggy Bottom Castle, begins to crank out the press releases and make speeches about foreign policy, the bloggers for whom she simply can do no wrong, will be excoriating the press for "focusing on Hillary".
Sadly, not just for republicans, but for some democrats, Orwellian double-think is alive and well.
I think he'll have to can her, before the mid-terms.
tanbark Im willing to trust Obama on this one....hillary is now defanged, he now personaly holds the leash and dson't have to rely on the same folks who gave liberman a pass..he also gets one mroe senetor that ows him for personaly for their job.
Moon, thanks for the click.
Hillary was defanged when the dem leadership got together late in the primary season and told her how the hog ate the cabbage; that being, that she was in process of doing irreparable damage to the party and that if she didn't stop, she would be put so far back in the political shithouse that the Senate pages would be feeding her with a slingshot.
From then on, she and Bill were reduced to gnashing their teeth and seething, and before anyone praises she/them for going to bat for Obama...somewhatly...in the general,
(Here's Bill, on September 22, at a time when McCain had gained some momentum. He calls McCain a "great man" and is effusive about Palin, telling the voters that she wouldn't REALLY inflict her flat-earth views on us...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4...h?v=4-
KWVGP1e0M )
...we need to remember that Hillary had NO options; not if she wanted to hang onto what little cred and political power she had left. After the Rove campaign that she ran against Obama, if she had done anything BUT make the minimum obeisance, and we had lost, a bit more than half of the democratic party would NEVER have forgiven her.
We also need to keep in mind, at all times, that it was NOT conservatives who did this to her; it was the progressive wing of the democratic party. (After voting twice for Bill, and rejoicing at her winning a senate seat, I proudly did everything I could, to assist in the process. :o) )
Now, as future Secretary of State, she is anything BUT defanged. In fact, as Obama is going to find out, she has just been RE-fanged.
Which, incidentally, is why Rush Limbaugh and so many conservative asshats are pissing themselves with joy at the idea of Hillary as SecState:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
20...i_n_147413.html
They know what is coming. The only power Obama has over her is to can her, and he has picked up, in a chess sense, a poisoned pawn, and the game is now "touch-move"; No putting her down...at least not without paying, now, a BIG political price.
For progressives, the deal-breaker against her should have been that, again, just like Lieberman, she has been AIPAC's handmaiden par excellence. And there is one country in the mid-east, which really, really, does NOT want to see us out of Iraq.
That country is Israel.
Obama can pump up the economy. It is, after all, inflatable...but with every day that passes, what used to be Iraq is that much further toward
real independence, with no gratitude to the U.S. for it. Nor should there be any. We have committed a giant crime there. (With Clinton's rather persistent help)
We HAVE to leave. If we still have a hundred thousand troops there by the mid-terms (there are about 150,000 there now) most of the gains we made in congress will disappear.
If, by the next presidential election, We are still losing 10-15 troops a month and spending astronomical sums of money there, then Barack Obama will be a one term president, and he should be.
Precisely where Hillary Clinton will fit in is not known to an exactitude, but her track record, as a politician and as a person, is not up for grabs. She has a large ego, an even larger sense of entitlement to power, and, as we have repeatedly seen in the past few years, in servicing both of them, she is not much troubled by considerations of decency, truth, or responsibility for the bloody mayhem opera that she helped bush create in Iraq.
I understand the joy at Obama's and the democrats win, but the euphoria needs (NEEDED) to give way to some common sense. Obama has larded his administration with a number of people who, if they were not part of the problem, sure as hell had precious little to even point out that there WAS a problem, whether with the carnage-carnival in Iraq, or the economic crapshoot that we're now in.
Speaking for myself, if it takes the same progressives who, more than any other sector or our electorate, put him in office, to end the honeymoon and point out what he's going to have to be dealing with, down the road, AND that the people he needs to help him deal with it, are not the ones who created the shit, then so be it.
If we wait the nearly two months, it looks like we may be headed for something that is not substantially different from what we've looked at for 8 years, no matter how articulate and well-spoken is Obama.
When do we get our appointments?
More specifically, there were 21 democratic senators who, as Hillary Clinton (and Joe Biden) were quaffing the koolaid, had the smarts and the courage to vote against the invasion of Iraq.
He could have put those names in a hat, and come up with a thoroughly competent and utterly loyal Secretary of State. That, for some bizarre and perverse reason, he chose a senator who only abandoned the war and recanted her vote for it under pressure from her imploding campaign, is depressing, to say the least.
sweaterman - :D Yes, indeed ND and NC.... specially the NC is looking kinda attractive job wise these days. After they shut down the U and the town, well, I'll either be starting up Mytle June's Boarding House OR walking away depending on how low this thing goes and how far away I have to go to get work. January is the deadline for me... Feb tops. But yes, Ms. Brewer is going to take the state back in time like a slingshot... I'm sure of it.
LCforevah - Indeed! Obama is keeping gates but he's also going to be purging lowerlings which I suspect will hold true across the board. I think that's where the progressives will reside..... getting the job done. I don't think any of those appointments will stray far off the defined course or they will be goners. Be nice to have the DoD back under the President!
Good stuff Tanbark
Myrtle June, I believe I heard last night that about 400 positions under Gates will be purged and filled with Obama picks--great for when Obama has Gates gently leave. I hope he does the same for the DOJ, and gets rid of the Monica Goodling underlings--reason knows they're just poison pods waiting to explode and cause problems.
tanbark, please, let's have a little exercise of Occam's Razor. I think you're reading much too much into Clinton influence from either of them. Hillary will not be able to be insubordinate without looking like an ungrateful idiot. Bill will have to take a backseat in order to avoid the perception of conflict of interest.
The Clintons have had their day, and no one is forgetting the shambles in which they left the Democratic party during their exit. This leaves them short of allies--in fact, this is one of the factors for her loss of the nomination, in my personal opinion. She stuck with the DLC, and the DNC ran right over her.
Choosing Senator Clinton for SectState is a master stroke for Obama. She can't impede him in the Senate, and she can't run against him in 2012 without neglecting her duties.
Clinton has a large ego? Not any larger than Obama's--just more mismanaged.
Everyone appointed is a political animal who knows whom the alpha is. There may even be relief that this alpha is so much more competent than the last one and will be happily followed. In that atmosphere, let's hope that Clinton finds no one willing to be her ally in any kind of shenanigans.
~
As Obama said in a recent press conference: The last Democratic Presidency was the Clinton one. If he is to hire competent, experienced Democratic professionals (instead of Bush's Regency U misfits), he will be pulling from Clinton ranks. He said he was aiming for effectiveness, not ideology (he's never said anything but) and the fact is, he doesn't just get along well with a lot of Clinton alumni, he's more like them than he is different in any number of ways.
The only people who want him to distance himself from the Clinton years (which had huge successess as well as failure, and all in all was one of the best times this country has seen in my lifetime) are those who have a cob up their ass about the Clintons. A cob whose origins all too often starts with Republican talking points, and ends with some joke about pantsuits.
Where's the outrage about his choosing Rahm Emmanuel, who will have much more "Clintonesque" influence on the West Wing than Hillary could ever hope to muster?
The man has been handed a bucket of shit and he's hiring people who want to help clean it up according to his rules. They're not my choices, and they're not my rules, but I want him to have his 100 days of swift action before I accuse him of major screw-ups (which will be 99 more than Bill Clinton had).
tanbark : I guess I see less power in the apointed office of secretary of whatever then you do...I am much more conccerend with the state department staff that will actualy do the work under the clinton figurehead...I seriosuly doubt that the cabnit positions do much real work (outsdie of photo ops) and haven't for generations. SHe has been defanged...she can now either fallow the bosses orders or get canned wit hno fallback position.
"I just want him to distance himself from a candidate (and her husband...remember the dog-whistle racism?)..."
-I have not forgotten, and I never will; I don't care how many photo-ops the Clintons do.
Dang.... what happened here. I was reading just awhile ago and there was some comments regarding the coberists.... and now they're gone? Is this fdl with their comment stream modification antics or gnb? Hmmmmmm interesting.
And, of some relevance, now that the SOFA has been signed, no problemo, right?
Wrong:
http://apnews.myway.com//article.../
D94S3BB01.html
Maybe this is why he picked Hillary:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/0...&
pagewanted=all
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