Obama

Governors Have Eyes Only for Obama II

Following up on Matt’s nice post about the states tapping Obama for help with enormous budget shortfalls…
Few are saying it out loud, but the issue has a ring of class distinction surrounding it. That is, the White House has been quick to secure hundreds of billions of dollars for white-collar workers on Wall Street, but [...]

Secretary of State: A Woman’s Job, Huh?

My friend Megan Carpentier at Jezebel watches in horror as Carol Jenkins, president of the Women’s Media Center, reacts to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s pending arrival at Foggy Bottom by saying “Secretary of State has become the women’s spot — a safe expected place for women to be.” As Megan writes:

Governors Only Have Eyes For Obama

President-elect Barack Obama is often cautious to remind reporters that there is only one president at a time — and for the record, it’s still, sigh, President George W. Bush — but as far as the nation’s governors are concerned, Obama is the guy to talk to.
Obama is scheduled to attend a meeting of the [...]

Someone at CNN Should Really Be Punished for This

Faiz Shakir at ThinkProgress has a screencapture from CNN’s presentation of United Nations Ambassador-designate Susan Rice at the Obama national-security team rollout this morning.

Jones’ Problematic Energy-Policy Views

Via Matt Yglesias, ThinkProgress’s Brad Johnson takes a look at National Security Adviser-designate James Jones’s work on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s energy task force and finds it to be pretty disturbing stuff:

Obama Transition Team Releases Donors

The Obama-Biden transition team today released its first monthly list disclosing the names of donors to the transition and the size of their contributions. The list can be found here.
As of November 15, the transition has raised $1,170,937.44 from 1,776 donors, for an average donation of $659.31. The contributions range in size from $5 to [...]

The Rangel Question

Well, House Democrats managed to get through the whole John Dingell/Henry Waxman scrum without too much fallout (or so it appears). But questions linger over how party leaders will handle the Charlie Rangel mess.

Plenty of Praise for Eric Holder as new AG

Things are looking good for Eric Holder, Obama’s pick for attorney general, formally announced today.
In addition to the highly flattering portrait of Holder as a young man in today’s New York Times, he’s getting praise from some of the most serious critics of the Attorney Generals under George W. Bush.
U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), for [...]

NYT’s Mahler Misses the Mark

In the NY Times Week in Review on Sunday, Jonathan Mahler opens his piece about “How to Define Terror” with the story of Salim Hamdan, former driver for Osama bin Laden, who was shipped back to Yemen last week after being acquitted of most of the charges brought against him by the US military commissions [...]

Team of Rivals Shares a ‘Core Vision’

President-elect Barack Obama took a question on his “team of rivals” at a press conference in Chicago this morning, where, as Matt DeLong notes, Obama officially tapped Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Sec. of Defense Robert Gates to join his Cabinet.
As I noted in a piece this morning, many progressives have been critical of [...]