I wish I could click my heels three times and get W. back to Crawford right now.

National

Do you favor or oppose President-elect Barack Obama appointing Senator Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state?

57% Favor
30% Oppose

(source - Gallup)

Even though this isn't a mental recession, the situation will be far more worse if people who have jobs panic and bring the consumer economy to screeching halt. Making the public works announcement I think will go a long way to help people believe that will times are bad, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Semi OT: The normally staunch and staid London Economist published this week a farewell to the President of the United States. The article's author is Ann Wroe, identified as the obituary writer for the magazine~~~

End of an aura
Nov 19th 2008
The Bush administration will come to an end on January 21st

With Jimmy Carter it was the teeth, big, straight and white as a set of country palings. With Richard Nixon it was the eyebrows, surely brooding on Hell. Abe Lincoln had the ears (and the beard, and the stove-pipe hat); Bill Clinton had a nose that glowed red, almost to luminousness, as his allergies assailed him. But George Bush’s most extraordinary feature was his nostrils, and they will be missed.

It is not just that they were large, and lent his face a certain simian charm. They were also uncontrollable. When the rest of the presidential body was encased in a sober suit, and the rest of the presidential face had assumed an expression appropriate to taking the oath of office, or rescuing banks, or declaring to terrorists that they could run but they couldn’t hide, the nostrils would suddenly flare and smirk, as if Mr Bush was about to burst out with something outrageous or obscene, or flash a high-five, or hail his deputy chief of staff as “Turd blossom”.

Occasionally, a real gaffe was about to emerge. Watched closely, the nostrils no doubt gave advance warning of the moment when, addressing the Pentagon’s top brass, Mr Bush said: “Our enemies...never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” More often, nothing exceptional was on the way to being said. But the nostrils ran ahead, twitching like a bull in a rodeo or a frisking wild horse, hinting at danger to come.

When he was debating with Al Gore in 2000, Mr Bush’s language was polite and the policy statements well coined, but the nostrils declared they couldn’t take the whole thing seriously. With hindsight, when the 2000 election became the closest ever, the Florida shenanigans seemed prefigured in that sniggering expression, which less became the 43rd president than Alfred E. Neuman of MAD magazine.

Being bigger and better than most people’s, the presidential nostrils were also more acute. They could sniff out WMD in Iraq as snappily as hot dogs at a football game, though it took the UN many years to come up with nothing. Yellow-cake uranium could be nosed as far away as Niger, and Saddam Hussein’s connections to al-Qaeda were as odorous as a Texas feedlot. The nostrils could smell victory, too, especially on that morning in May 2003 when, standing on an aircraft-carrier with “Mission Accomplished” fluttering on a banner behind him, Mr Bush breathed in the tang of the ocean and of power.

Much else alerted those nostrils when others were indifferent. Oil, for example, even when buried under hundreds of feet of environmentally protected Arctic tundra. Cheese, as eaten by the feckless French and other effete gastronomes of old Europe. Red meat, when demanded by the right-wing base which so often found this president disappointing, in the form of tax cuts and suspended regulations. And danger, as personified by suspicious individuals from faraway countries, whose proper place was to be in orange pyjamas at Guantánamo Bay, well out of reach of a lawyer.

An aroma of pork

Disloyalty, or the whiff of it, set off a particular quivering. When Paul O’Neill, Mr Bush’s ex-treasury secretary, revealed that Saddam had been targeted from day one of Mr Bush’s first term, and when Scott McClellan, his former press secretary, wrote that the Bush White House lacked both candour and competence, the nostrils assumed an air of outraged innocence: the same look, in fact, they had assumed on the worst day of Mr Bush’s presidency, when an aide leaned down to tell him of the attack on the twin towers and the president, busy reading “The Pet Goat” to a class of Florida children, could not for a moment engage either his brain or his mouth to take the news.

All the stranger, therefore, that the noble orifices had their shortcomings. They could not smell the putrid mud that covered the ninth ward of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina passed, or the stink of subprime mortgages leaching their poison into the financial system. They found nothing especially noisome about the presence of Dick Cheney and his oilman cronies in charge of the national energy task-force. Sensitive as they were, they were unimpressed by levels of arsenic in drinking water or particulates in the air. And though Mr Bush had sold himself as a lean-spending, small-government man, they could not resist the aroma of a trillion-dollar budget stuffed with choicest pork.

Most curiously, they failed to detect the poisonous atmosphere that swirled around him abroad. Granted, the most revolting protesters were kept away. But even so the nostrils, proudly set even when the eyes blinked and the mouth pursed and wavered, maintained an extraordinary belief in the wisdom of the president and the rightness of his cause. One day the rest of the world would wake up and be grateful. One day the Bush administration would come up smelling like a rose.

Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group
http://www.economist.com/theworldin/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12494723

Should the spasms of laughter allow, do read Gail Collins in todays NYT entitled "Time for Him to Go" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/opinion/22collins.html

Content aside (again), this was a much better presentation than the first one. I liked seeing Obama's hand gestures, he was more on center, and the flag was balanced by the brightness of the window, greenery and table lamp.

OTOH, his eyes were usually shifted to read from something just off to the side, which was a bit distracting. Also, his flag pin picked up some glare from the lighting - they should soap it.

So, when Senator Clinton resigns in order to become Secretary of State, that leaves a vacancy in New York. Does Governor Patterson get to appoint someone to take her seat until a special election?

If so, why not appoint Al Franken---if he loses the recount in Minnesota? For that matter, if Norm Coleman loses, Patterson could appoint Norm--who grew up in Brooklyn and still speaks with a noticeable native accent. Then everybody could be happy!

Still, I would really like to see RFK, Jr., in the Senate. Would he accept it if offered?

No real clear announcment yet on whether or not Hilary hs even been offered the job or accepted.

I think Bill is deep into the mix and he should be sitting at home with a sock in his mouth where he belongs!

The 1st initiative for Barack Obama is to end racism once and for all.

Since Obama, being black, holds the highest office in the land (world) and was elected with a 95% black vote, on Jan 20, 2009 he must call for the elimination of all black only organizations else they become racist.