Speechwars.com, says there are three words uttered yesterday that made their presidential inaugural address debut (h/t Marc Ambinder). See what they were after the jump.

1. Muslims

2. Nonbelievers

3. Data

The 1st two words I can understand.

The last is somewhat of a surprise to me.

So which words have presidents used most often? Check out this speechwars’ word cloud for the answer.

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I’m happy to report Cass Sustein, the co-author of the book above, has been selected by the President-Elect to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Click here to read why that’s a good thing, & here to read why conservatives should be pleased.

& click here to read my earlier Vote08 post (from June 23rd) when I said, “For the record I like this approach, & hope whoever’s eventually president will recognize the pragmatism inherent within it.”

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Above: October 6th, 1981. The last time all current & former presidents met at the White House.

Read a good account of this encounter here.

It’s happening again today with President Bush, the President-Elect, & the surviving presidents having a White House lunch.

Read more about that here.

& this reminds me of one of my favorite Presidential jokes:

Q: Which 4 U.S. presidents aren’t buried on U.S. soil?

A: The four that are currently alive.

(this joke changes to “5″ at 12pm, January 20th)

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“How did we transform from champions of human dignity and individual rights into a nation of armchair torturers? One word: fear.

Fear is blinding, hateful, and vengeful. It makes the end justify the means. And why not? If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what’s wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock?

The simple answer is the rule of law. Our Constitution defines the rules that guide our nation. It was drafted by those who looked around the world of the eighteenth century and saw persecution, torture, and other crimes against humanity and believed that America could be better than that. This new nation would recognize that every individual has an inherent right to personal dignity, to justice, to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.

We have preached these values to the world. We have made clear that there are certain lines Americans will not cross because we respect the dignity of every human being. That pledge was written into the oath of office given to every president, “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” It’s what is supposed to make our leaders different from every tyrant, dictator, or despot. We are sworn to govern by the rule of law, not by brute force.

We cannot simply suspend these beliefs in the name of national security. Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don’t. There is no middle ground.

We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.”

-Leon Panetta, the man chosen by Barack Obama to head the CIA, writing in Washington Monthly last year.

As someone put it today, “This is a good day for America’s soul.”

FURTHER READING: Marc Ambinder on Panetta’s greatest challenges.

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Read the report here (PDF file).

The gist:

WASHINGTON (AP) - An internal review prepared for President-elect Barack Obama says his incoming chief of staff had multiple conversations with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s office, but no one close to Obama suspected that the governor might be trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat as prosecutors allege.
The report was released Tuesday as an Obama transition official confirmed that Obama and two of his top aides, Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett, have been interviewed in connection with the federal investigation into Blagojevich.
Incoming White House attorney Greg Craig, who conducted the internal review at Obama’s request, found that the president-elect had no contact with Blagojevich or any of his staff about the Senate seat he vacated to take over the presidency.

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Above: a look at the Bible President Abraham Lincoln used in 1861, for the 1st time he was sworn in as President.

Barack Obama plans to become the 1st president since Lincoln to use it at an inauguration. Details here.

Sorry, couldn’t resist the headline. If you only knew how many conversations I had with NewsChannel9 callers about “whether he’d swear in using the Koran.”

To which I always said, paraphrasing Colin Powell, “he wouldn’t use a Koran, he’d use a Bible - but so what if he did?”

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From the New York Times Magazine, in a piece on Robert Gibbs, the new WH Press Secretary:

“Podium alums share a bipartisan kinship, signified by the ceremonial flak jacket that hangs in the closet of the press secretary’s West Wing office. It was placed there originally by Gerald Ford’s podium man, Ron Nessen. Outgoing press secretaries write notes of advice for their successors and leave them in one pocket. Every previous note remains there, neatly arranged and tied together in a ribbon. “You can’t see the jacket,” Perino told me when I visited her office a few days before Thanksgiving. It’s reserved for club members, apparently.”

The article also had this interesting nugget:

“Before hanging up I asked Obama about his favorite movie, “The Godfather” — specifically, which character Gibbs most reminded him of. Obama mentioned the Robert Duvall consigliere, Tom Hagen. “And I’ve seen a little bit of Sonny in him once in a while,” he added.”

Sheesh, let’s hope it’s the former & not the latter.

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Above: The President-elect announcing his energy & environment team, yesterday. (note: Al Gore’s in the mix, too.)

Read more about the team here, & about the looming challenges they face here. Read a positive review of Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu (Obama’s pick for Energy Secretary) here.

Read skepticism over a complete energy policy makeover here.

Obama announced his Health & Human Services Secretary in Saturday’s radio address, which you can watch here.

Also, later this week: he’s expected to name Arne Duncan as Education Secretary (background here). Click here for a piece on why he’d be a good addition & here for a piece on why he wouldn’t.

& Colorado Senator Ken Salazar (oh-oh! another Senate seat open!) as Interior Secretary later this week; read more about that here.

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On this, the anniversary of the release of ‘Gone with the Wind,’ Marc Ambinder points out the dearth of southerners in the incoming Obama cabinet.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Marc Ambinder:

“It’s quite unsettling to talk to members of Barack Obama’s transition teams these days, especially those who are helping with the economics portfolio. Without going into details, the sense I get from them is that they are very worried that the economy will get a lot worse before it gets better. Not just worse… a lot worse.

As in — double digit unemployment without the wiggle factors. Huge declines in aggregate demand. Significant, persistent deficits. That’s one reason why the Obama administration seems to be open to listening to every economist with an idea and is stocking the staff with the leading lights of the field. In one sense, the general level of concern among Obama advisers and transition staffers is reassuring; they get the magnitude of the problems, and they’re not going to assume that, just because the bottom has never dropped out before — certainly not in the lifetimes of most people doing policy these days, the bottom will never drop out.”

He goes on to worry about the foreign policy implications of this focussed-like-a-laser-beam mindset.

What do you think?

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Happy Birthday, loser!

Boy, what a creep this guy is, huh?

As it is another one of those days for me (doing 5 & 5:30), the posts will be on the light side today (sorry).

Read the movie-script-ish press release from the Justice Department on the Blagojevich arrest here.

A ‘greatest-hits’ summary (if you don’t have time to read the above link) can be found here, at Politico.

Read how a phone call from Obama several weeks ago may have been the domino that started it all here.

Get a roundup on what some in the blogosphere are saying here. Be sure to check out Ambinder’s day-after thoughts, too.

Get a humorous/snarky (& warning: very salty-language-filled) take on the indictment from Wonkette, here.

Just how corrupt is Chicago politics? Pretty darn corrupt, as you can read here.

& as always, feel free to register your thoughts about this scandal in the comments section!

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There’s a lot of ways to read into Obama’s recent choices for his cabinet; Marc Ambinder tries to find some commonalities, including this:

“Rulebreaking? Normally, you appoint at least one major donor to a prize cabinet spot. Obama hasn’t. Normally, you clear the decks and bring in a team you know will be loyal to you. Obama hasn’t done that. Normally, you don’t deliberately create two, equally robust centers of power and task them with sharing one portfolio; Obama egregiously violated this rule by appointing Tim Geithner to Treasury and asking Larry Summers to be National Economics Council director. (Can’t he have his cake and eat it too? This is like having his cake… and eating three more cakes at the same time.) There will be conflict between Geither and Summers, unless one of them suddenly loses their nerve. Obama seems to take pride seeding these conflicts, out of which he will grow consensus. Oh, and he doesn’t seem to be alarmed about dropping policy propsosals that no longer with fit with the times, including a winfdall profits tax on oil companies.

Post-partisan? Not that Obama has operated without partisanship. It’s that he doesn’t seem to believe that the partisan theatre of the past 15 years or so applies to his decision-making. He doesn’t seem to worry when analyts predict that Republicans will “salivate” at the opportunity to question such-and-such a nominee, or that the public will pronounce its negative judgment.”

‘Salivate’s’ still an apt term, though - here’s (conservative) Mona Charen:

Superstition almost forbids me to comment on President-elect Barack Obama’s appointments thus far. The news has been so shockingly welcome that I’m almost afraid to remark on it for fear of breaking the spell.

…

If the economic team is centrist, the foreign policy team (and I pinch myself as I say this) leans a little to the right. Did you notice that in introducing his choices, the president-elect used the term “defeat our enemies”? … And that, along with the other appointments, is enough to keep some of us smiling at a time when we were expecting to be in deep anguish.”

Apparently Ms. Charen, like apparently much of the country (laughably, for those of us who were paying close attention) had envisioned more of this from the President-elect:

Boy, partisanship sure can be blinding sometimes.

The Vote08 blog had Obama pegged as the making these kinds of choices during the transition all the way back in August (actually I had figured that out much, much earlier, but August 29th was the 1st time I put it in a post). Click here to read “He’s Not a Cookie Cutter Candidate,” in which, among other things, I said

“As one who’s read both of his memoirs, I have to say that this philosophy really gets to the core of what Obama’s approach to government is. The GOP & the right wing is eager to brand him as an ultra-liberal, which has been so effective for them in the past, but in many ways there will be disappointment from the left side of the Democratic party.”

You’re welcome.

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Kinda sad - but kinda funny - post at the Washington Note, written by a person, according to Steve Clemons, “who really does deserve a very top spot in Obama Land but is sitting pensively waiting for a call while trying to pretend he/she is not:”

“…I wait in a state of suspended ambition. I too have the dreams featuring, in no apparent order, Vice President Elect Joe Biden, Secretary of State-designate Hilary Clinton and, yes, even the man himself, President-Elect Obama.

Sometimes in these dreams they offer me a job, and sometimes they say they can’t offer me a job because they can’t find my resume amidst the other 300,000 on www.change.gov. I wake in a cold sweat.

…

A good day for me is when I resist the urge to e-mail the same 5 people I do know on the transition team again, congratulating them and offering to do anything I can to help.

…

Why aren’t we getting the call? Why did I do all of that volunteer work on the campaign? What did I do wrong? How can they treat me this way? Most importantly, don’t they know who I am? (Literally?)”

Awwwwww!!

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

It’s common to give to a presidential campaign; it’s far less common to give to a presidential transition.

Today the Obama Transition team released its list of 1776 donors on its website, & they include a pair of local folks:

Faulkner, Sarah K…Lookout Mountain, TN…$250.00

Huff, Keith…Signal Mountain, TN…$250.00

More from Change.gov:

The Obama-Biden Transition project only accepts contributions from individuals’ personal funds – we refuse all donations from corporations, labor unions, and PACs. Individuals may not donate more than $5,000. We also refuse all contributions from registered federal lobbyists and registered foreign agents.

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WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush says there could be more decisions like the government’s dramatic rescue of Citigroup if other institutions need help.
Bush also says he consulted with President-elect Barack Obama on the Citigroup rescue. Bush says “There is close cooperation” between his administration and the Obama camp.
Referring to the Citigroup rescue, Bush said “We have made these kind of decisions in the past. We made one last night and if need be we will make these kind of decisions to safeguard our financial system in the future.”
He spoke outside the Treasury Department after consulting with Secretary Henry Paulson.

Read more about the Citigroup bailout here.

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Well, it looks like after several days of waffling, Hillary Clinton has decided to accept President-Elect Obama’s offer to be Secretary of State:

Mrs. Clinton came to her decision after additional discussion with President-elect Barack Obama about the nature of her role and his plans for foreign policy, said one of the confidants, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the situation. Mr. Obama’s office told reporters Thursday that the nomination is “on track” but Clinton associates only confirmed Friday afternoon that she has decided.

The good news about this pick: it sends a great signal - & lesson - to world leaders who have rivals & factions & sects of their own. (see LBJ’s famous (& warning: salty) quote to understand the philosophy behind it)

She will be a good “face of the USA” around the world, there’s no question.

But in another respect, you should color me none-too-happy about this development.

Why?

I chose the picture above for a reason:

Click here to view the embedded video.

On St. Patrick’s Day of this year Hillary Clinton made what I consider one of her most stupid, unnecessary blunders of this campaign: claiming she as First Lady arrived in Bosnia in 1996 “under sniper fire,” assuming that the cameras she saw then weren’t rolling on any kind of videotape that could be preserved & replayed in the future.

Her husband Bill followed suit in the foot-in-mouth department in regards to this issue a couple of weeks later.

It was around then (perhaps before, but this incident really solidified it) that my opinion of Hillary Clinton took a severe nose-dive.

How could she have been so blind/stupid?

It was this incident I remembered as talk of her being Secretary of State surfaced late last week.

& don’t forget these other arguments that should cause concern.

As far as the grand scheme of things - staying on message, following Obama’s lead - I think she can do this & won’t be terrible. Certainly better than Rice or Christopher.

But ’sniper fire’ raises red flags for me when it comes to those casual, negotiating behind-closed-doors, seemingly-insignificant moments. It shows she thinks she can get away with peddling b.s., when she can’t. I’m really worried about that.

that & Bill. get the guy a muzzle.

I’ll be watching.

But feel free to disagree with me - what do you think of Clinton as Secretary of State.. or my worries about it?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

MSNBC reports this man is whom Obama will tap to become perhaps the most important cabinet positions of ‘em all.

…

Yeah, I didn’t know who he was either.

Read on to find out (somewhat) more about him.

That’s Tim Geithner (pronounced, I think, GATE-ner), who’s been the NY Fed President since 2003.

MSNBC says Geithner

“..actually had worked at the Treasury in three administrations under five Secretaries — going back to 1988.

Geithner has been a key player in the current economic crisis — helping Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and his team manage the wall street bailout.”

Wall Street certainly reacted positively to the news.

It’s also encouraging that this leak, unlike Rahm Emmanuel & Hillary Clinton, seemed to be specifically timed. That shows that at least by some measure the president-elect is in control of his own message.

His Wikipedia page is frustratingly slim. It shows he’s spent a lot of time living overseas.

For the record, I was rooting for Larry Summers.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Time Magazine’s Mark Thompson weighs the pros & cons of keeping Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary:

“Keeping Gates would make for a smoother transition amid two wars. (But that’s why the uniformed military leaders who are actually running the wars, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, don’t change when a new Administration takes over).

Keeping the Defense Secretary would continue his push to focus the military services on insurgencies of the type they’re facing in Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than on the hypothetical conventional wars for which they prefer to plan — and for which they continue to order up costly weapons. (But continuity would also keep Pentagon spending, already at World War II levels, climbing into the stratosphere on autopilot.)

Keeping Gates would allow Obama to demonstrate bipartisanship in national security, an area particularly dear to Republicans. (But it might also be taken as a sign that the Democratic bench on military matters is so weak the party has to rely on a holdover from a GOP administration.)

Keeping Gates in place would demonstrate Obama’s self-confidence in the presidency, entrusting a key post in his cabinet post to a GOP holdover. (But if Obama slows his planned pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, as some in the military want him to do, he could be seen as deferring to President Bush’s Defense Secretary.)”

For the record, I think Gates should stay. Gates has been a welcome breath of fresh air in the wake of Donald Rumsfeld. & I’ve seen evidence that he gets that ’soft power’ is just as important in U.S. foreign policy.

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Above: the most recent offering from Change.gov.

I put ‘behind the scenes’ in quotes because you had better believe that this is not the full picture of what’s really going on behind the scenes.

Still: it’s nice to see the attempt at transparency.

Also from the blog: Obama addresses the Global Climate Summit earlier this week:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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MSNBC runs through the early mistakes in the Clinton, Carter, & Kennedy administrations as lessons for Obama to learn. For Kennedy, it was the Bay of Pigs; for Carter, it was bringing in too many of his own people; for Clinton, it was pretty much everything.

We’ll have to wait on the Kennedy comparison. For Carter .. Obama seems to be hiring a lot of Washington experience (yes, counter to his message of change). For Clinton.. Clinton waited a month before he announced anything.

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His 1st post-election interview.

Watch it here.

Read the transcript here (part 1), here, (part 2), & here (part 3).

Some highlights:

“I’ve been spending a lot of time reading Lincoln. There is a wisdom there and a humility about his approach to government, even before he was president, that I just find very helpful. “

Kroft: Have you been reading anything about the Depression? Anything about FDR?

And whether it’s coming from FDR or it’s coming from Ronald Reagan, if the idea is right for the times then we’re gonna apply it. And things that don’t work we’re gonna get rid of.”

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From Change.gov.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08