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Neal Gabler: "But there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon."
NYT: Tomorrow, Obama will make it official, announcing national security cabinet to include Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Robert Gates as defense secretary, James Jones as national security advisor, Susan Rice as cabinet-level ambassador to the UN, Eric Holder as attorney general, and Janet Napolitano as homeland security secretary.
Maximum City author Suketu Mehta: why they hate Mumbai. "Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia. Bollywood movies are the most popular form of entertainment across the subcontinent. Through them, every Pakistani and Bangladeshi is familiar with the wedding-cake architecture of the Taj and the arc of the Gateway of India, symbols of the city that gives the industry its name. It is no wonder that one of the first things the Taliban did upon entering Kabul was to shut down the Bollywood video rental stores. The Taliban also banned, wouldn’t you know it, the keeping of songbirds."
Steve Clemons recommends Obama put Dennis Ross at the helm of the US embassy in Tel Aviv.
This from a few weeks back, John Le Carre in the New Yorker on the madness of spies.
NYT: Ret. Gen. Barry McCaffrey's many undisclosed conflicts of interests with Defense Solutions, NBC, Pentagon, DynCorp parent Veritas, Petraeus. "General McCaffrey offers a case study of the benefits that can flow from favored access: an inside track to sensitive information about strategy and tactics; insight into the priorities of ground commanders; a private channel to officials who oversaw war spending, as the Defense Solutions example shows. In that case the company has yet to win the contract it hired General McCaffrey to champion. More broadly, though, his example reveals the myriad and often undisclosed connections between the business of war and the business of covering it." McCaffrey softened his criticism of Rumsfeld's prosecution of post-war Iraq, the piece notes, when he lost access to special Pentagon briefings, and learned how to deliver a message more suitable to Rumsfeld in order to keep his lucrative access.
Update: Wired notes that journalist Sharon Weinberger first reported many elements of the McCaffrey/Defense Solutions "iron triangle" relationship here, here and here.
WP/NYT/NYT: Virginia father, daughter, Brooklyn couple, among 150 people confirmed killed in Mumbai attacks.
EJ Dionne: "In electing Barack Obama, the country traded the foreign policy of the second President Bush for the foreign policy of the first President Bush. That is the meaning of Obama's apparent decision to keep Robert Gates on as defense secretary and also to select Hillary Clinton as secretary of state."
The art of interviewing the lieutenant to an Israeli crime boss:
...Hyman, who waited for me next to the bleach-blonde receptionist, led me into a nearby conference room. About 10 men sat around a long table, smoking. He signaled for me to sit down at the end. "This is a journalist?" one of them half-said, half-asked. Everyone turned to look at me.
"Nice to meet you, I'm Neri. What do we do now?" I asked.
"Now we sit and wait for Ya'akov," the guy said.
Everyone was silent. I tried to break the silence. "In the meantime, we can talk about something - maybe everyone can introduce themselves?" That was a mistake.
"Tell her to shut up," that same guy said, and all of a sudden I was sitting for four minutes straight, with 10 men staring at me. I remembered that I had children at home and that there was a limit to the risk I was prepared to take for an interview with Hyman, so I got up to leave. ...
Obama on Mumbai: "Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to the loved ones of the American citizens who lost their lives in the outrageous terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Our thoughts and prayers are with them, and with all who have been touched by this terrible tragedy. These terrorists who targeted innocent civilians will not defeat India's great democracy, nor shake the will of a global coalition to defeat them. The United States must stand with India and all nations and people who are committed to destroying terrorist networks, and defeating their hate-filled ideology. There is one president at a time. I will continue to closely monitor the situation on the ground in Mumbai, and am grateful for the cooperation of the Bush Administration in keeping me and my staff updated. We fully support the Bush Administration's efforts to protect American citizens and assist the government of India during this tragic time," said President-elect Obama."
NYT: "American intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Friday there is mounting evidence that a Pakistani militant group long focused on the conflict in Kashmir, most likely Lashkar- e-Taiba, is responsible for the deadly attacks in Mumbai."
Journalist Seth Hettena:
More here.Mitchell Wade, the man who bribed Randy “Duke” Cunningham and then did much to speed the congressman’s spectacular fall, is asking a judge to sentence him to a year of home detention for all the help he provided the government. Prosecutors don’t dispute that Wade was helpful, but they believe that four years in prison is more appropriate for $1.8 million in bribes.
Would Cunningham ultimately have been convicted without Wade? Probably, but Wade made it happen much, much faster. He was debriefed 23 times by government investigators and supplied them a searchable electronic database of 150,000 documents, including the infamous “bribe menu.” And Wade’s cooperation didn’t stop with Cunningham. He provided damaging evidence against several others, including his testimony at the bribery trial of his former boss, Brent Wilkes, who’s now serving time in prison.
A 42-page sentencing memo filed by Wade’s attorneys says he aided the government in its investigation “of at least five other members of Congress” who were under investigation for “corruption similar to that of Mr. Cunningham.” These no doubt include Virgil Goode and Katherine “Pink Sugar” Harris. Wade wanted to open facilities in their districts and made $78,000 in “straw” contributions to grease the wheels. Neither Harris nor Goode has been charged with wrongdoing.
Prosecutors drop tantalizing hints about an even bigger, ongoing investigation. Wade was debriefed in 2006 and provided “moderately useful” background information in another “large and important corruption investigation” that also has not yet resulted in any charges.
Gershom Gorenberg reports on what's at stake in the latest dispute with the settlers in Hebron. More discussion at Gershom's blog here.
Playing catch up after some reporting travel afar and now out of pocket over Thanksgiving holiday with limited Internet access. Apologies for neglect of the Indian terrorist attacks and other news, still trying to get up to speed.
A colleague who arrived in Bombay/Mumbai today, asked who did it, says "We still know almost nothing 24 hours after the attacks began." More here and here. Amit Varma: a night out in Mumbai.
Members of Obama's transition policy working group named. The national security group is being led by Jim Steinberg and Susan Rice. Members of the national security group below the fold:
Group Members
Jeffrey Bader
Jeremy Bash
Antony Blinken
Gregory Craig
Ivo Daalder
Richard Danzig
Mary De Rosa
Michele Flournoy
Stephen Flynn
Michelle Gavin
Philip Gordon
Scott Gration
Frank Januzzi
Colin Kahl
Liz King
Paul Kurtz
Daniel Kurtzer
Ellen Laipson
Mark Lippert
Denis McDonough
Michael McFaul
Carlos Monje
Erin O'Connor
Peter Ogden
Joseph Paulsen
Daniel Restrepo
Bruce Riedel
Dennis Ross
Mara Rudman
Whitney Schneidman
Eric Schwartz
Sarah Sewall
Daniel Shapiro
Steven Simon
Peter Singer
Gayle Smith
Mona Sutphen
Jennifer Urizar
Toni Verstandig
Jeremy Weinstein
Journalist Anthony Fenton reports in Mother Jones about how Iraq's first post-war administration ret. Lt. General Jay M. Garner, along "with a small group of former US military leaders, officials, and lobbyists, have quietly used their deep connections in Kurdistan to help Canadian companies access some of the region's richest oil fields."
John Brennan withdraws his name from consideration for DCI/DNI. His letter here (.pdf).
WP: "Kurdish officials this fall took delivery of three planeloads of small arms and ammunition imported from Bulgaria, three U.S. military officials said, an acquisition that occurred outside the weapons procurement procedures of Iraq's central government. The large quantity of weapons and the timing of the shipment alarmed U.S. officials, who have grown concerned about the prospect of an armed confrontation between Iraqi Kurds and the government at a time when the Kurds are attempting to expand their control over parts of northern Iraq."
Mother Jones is getting a new website. If you want to sign up to get an early look and kick the tires, go here. I got an early peak last month and it looked pretty beautiful. Suggestions welcome.
NYT Baghdad blog: Iraq security agreement deja vu
... There is some earlier history that might further explain Iraqi skepticism.
The Status of Forces Agreement and the wider Strategic Framework Agreement accompanying it are the latest in a long line of treaties, pacts and agreements negotiated by successive Iraqi governments with powerful western nations dating back to just after the First World War.
Few of these treaties produced terms that satisfied domestic Iraqi nationalists. At least one — in 1948 — ended with riots and the forced resignation of Iraq’s first Shiite prime minister. That fact was unlikely to have been lost on Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s own, Shiite-led, government.
We have collected contemporary reports from The New York Times of some of those previous negotiations. The echoes of today’s headlines are uncanny.
In a treaty signed on Oct. 10, 1922, Britain agreed to prepare the country for independence. But the treaty postponed discussion of exactly how this would happen, and effectively prolonged Britain’s mandate under another form for at least 20 years (a period later reduced). ...
Oct. 12, 1922 –THE NEW YORK TIMES
...
Plus ça change ...
WP: Obama Homeland Security chief pick Janet Napolitano draws praise.
Update: Cabinet shaping up so far:
State: Hillary Rodham Clinton
Defense: Robert Gates (prospective)
Justice: Eric Holder (announced)
Treasury: Tim Geithner (announced)
HHS: Tom Daschle (announced)
DHS: Janet Napolitano (announced)
Commerce: Bill Richardson
Gen. James Jones as National Security Adviser (prospective)
Peter Orszag as head of OMB
Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff (announced)
JTA's Ron Kampeas reports on a post-partisan push for attempting engagement with Iran.
Prince of Marbella. Journalist Aram Roston reports that after his conviction today in a New York courtroom, it appears to be the end of the line for Syrian arms dealer Monzer al Kassar.
NYT: Judge orders five detainees freed from Guantanamo:
The judge was a Bush I appointee, who had been expected to be sympathetic to the government. "The decision, lawyers said, is likely to be seen as a major judicial repudiation of the Bush administration’s effort to use the detention center at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a way to avoid scrutiny by American judges. President-elect Obama has said he will close the prison."After the first hearing on the government’s evidence for holding detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, a federal judge ruled on Thursday that five of the prisoners are not being lawfully held and ordered their release.
The case, involving six Algerians detained in Bosnia in 2001, was an important test of the Bush administration’s detention policies, which critics have long argued swept up innocent men and low-level foot soldiers along with high-level and hardened terrorists.
The hearings for the Algerian men, in which all evidence was heard in proceedings closed to the public, were the first in which the Department of Justice presented its full justification for holding specific detainees since the Supreme Court ruled in June that Guantánamo detainees have a constitutional right to contest their imprisonment in habeas corpus suits.
Ruling from the bench, Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in Washington said that the information gathered on the men had been sufficient to hold them for intelligence purposes, but was not strong enough in court.
A friend notes on today's developments, "The judge, a Bush appointee who was widely believed to have fast-tracked this set of habeas hearings with the notion of giving Bush an early win before others come in, apparently made a pretty emotional appeal to the government not to appeal his decision that five of the six were not enemy combatants, which I presume means there is no longer any basis for holding them - the judge apparently told the government that they would get to make all their legal arguments when the defense (whom the judge did NOT encourage not to appeal) makes their appeal for the one detainee whom the judge ruled did qualify as an enemy combatant. In other words - interpreting - this judge, not exactly the most predisposed toward the defense, emotionally appealed to the government just to let these poor five fellows, who were detained in the first place under very very suspicious circumstances, go after so many years of unjustified imprisonment."
WP:
Bill Clinton has agreed to a series of concessions requested by officials representing Barack Obama's presidential transition team, moving his wife one step closer to potentially becoming the next secretary of state.
Aides to both Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said that a formal job offer had not been made, but the former president's decision to disclose the identities of donors to his charitable foundation and to vet his future speeches and overseas activities with members of the Obama administration appears to have removed some of the biggest hurdles to her nomination.
Obama aides said yesterday that it would be difficult for Sen. Clinton to walk away from the secretary of state post. Obama's staff has thoroughly vetted both Clintons with the understanding that, if he should make an official job offer, she would accept.
As uncertainty continued to surround Sen. Clinton, other pieces of Obama's administration continued to fall into place. Sources confirmed that former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), an early supporter of Obama's presidential bid, would be tapped to lead the Health and Human Services Department.
NYT: "President-elect Barack Obama will face a series of early decisions on domestic spying that will test his administration’s views on presidential power and civil liberties. The Justice Department will be asked to respond to motions in legal challenges to the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program, and must decide whether to continue the tactics used by the Bush administration — which has used broad claims of national security and “state secrets” to try to derail the challenges — or instead agree to disclose publicly more information about how the program was run."
Just Out: From Kurdistan to K Street: Inside Washington's covert foreign policy apparatus, middlemen like Shlomi Michaels are key:
Read on. As Harper's Ken Silverstein says, "There are a few hundred people who make the world work but no one has ever heard of."
... On a spring afternoon in 2004, up the street from the White House, former CIA officer Whitley Bruner was on his way to meet a new contact. An old-school, Harvard-trained Arabist, Bruner had been to a lot of meetings like this—some mundane, some of greater consequence, like the time, back in 1991, when he got instructions to contact an Iraqi named Ahmad Chalabi. ("I told him, 'My name is Whitley Bruner, we have mutual friends, and I'd like to talk to you about Iraq.'") Low-key and efficient, Bruner had retired from the Agency in late 1997 and in 2004 landed a job with the private intelligence outfit Diligence LLC. The assignment, which had him shuttling between Washington and the Middle East for clients seeking opportunities in the Wild West of post-Saddam Iraq, didn't look all that different from his old job, and it brought him into contact with a continuing array of intriguing characters.
That spring day, Bruner was headed for the office of one of the most powerful Republican lobbyists in Washington—Ed Rogers, a former White House aide in the Reagan and first Bush administrations. Rogers had a soft Alabama drawl and an unsurpassed GOP resume; he was also known to like spooks, so much so that his company, Barbour Griffith & Rogers, had acquired a controlling stake in Diligence. Bruner had only to go upstairs.
As Bruner took a seat in Rogers' office, he noticed a man who "radiated clandestinity," he recalls, with close-cropped hair and military bearing. They shook hands, and "He broke every bone in my hand. When I heard his Israeli accent, it was not hard to guess his background."
The intense stranger introduced himself as Shlomi Michaels. He was a former commando with Israel's elite internal counterterrorism force, the Yamam; he had since become one of the middlemen who work the seams between the worlds of security, intelligence, and international business, along with a few more colorful sidelines including a private investigations/security business in Beverly Hills. Even as ex-Israeli commandos turned security experts go, Bruner thought, this one seemed unusually well connected—his business partner was former Mossad head Danny Yatom. Before arriving in Washington, Michaels, a dual Israel-US citizen, ran a string of businesses in Beverly Hills: a coffee/chocolate shop franchise, a martial arts training outfit, real estate investments, and a high-tech security business aimed at "high worth" Hollywood clients. After 9/11 he left Los Angeles, alighting first in New York (where he taught counterterrorism for a semester at Columbia University) and then in DC, where he would soon launch a lucrative venture to cash in on the Iraq War and its aftermath.
But on this day, Michaels had a different proposition for the former CIA officer—one, he suggested, that could make the assembled men a handsome commission and even help President George W. Bush get reelected. He had a well-placed Iraqi source—a former officer in an Iraqi military psychological operations unit, he said—who had gathered hundreds of pages of contracts, maps, and photographs documenting meetings between Iraqi and Ukrainian officials. The information, Michaels said, would prove that Iraq had pursued a covert chemical weapons program. Michaels wanted Bruner to set up a meeting for him and the Iraqi source with the CIA. To turn over the whole dossier, he wanted $1 million. [...]
There was one more story Michaels' Israeli associate in Jordan told me. Yatom, he said, claimed to be working with Michaels in partnership with the former head of the CIA ... and former FBI chief ... Could this be true? I decided to ask the ex-Mossad chief himself. ...
A Done Deal? So this from the NYT suggests:
One sign that many said pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s possible selection was the news that Gregory B. Craig would be White House counsel instead of national security adviser or deputy secretary of state, as some had expected. A law school friend of the Clintons who represented Mr. Clinton during impeachment, Mr. Craig backed Mr. Obama from the start of the campaign and was a scathing critic of Mrs. Clinton’s claims to foreign policy experience. Although some advisers saw no connection, others said putting him in a foreign policy job would be untenable if Mrs. Clinton were secretary of state.
Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have kept their conversations tightly held, but that silence has only convinced some associates that the prospect is serious. “No one has called to say, ‘Don’t get too far on this,’ ” said James Carville, a longtime Clinton friend and adviser. “A silent phone’s sometimes as much of an indication as a ringing phone.”
A former adviser to Mrs. Clinton who spoke on condition of anonymity said, “If it’s a trial balloon, it certainly seems to be floating.” Another said, “I can’t believe they would have her schlep out there with all this publicity unless they were real about it.”
NYT: Iraqi cabinet approves security pact with US. "The draft approved Sunday requires coalition forces to withdraw from Iraqi cities and towns by the summer of 2009 and from the country by the end of 2011. An earlier version had language giving some flexibility to that deadline, with both sides discussing timetables and timelines for withdrawal, but the Iraqis managed to have the deadline set in stone." 10 ISCI cabinet members did not attend the vote, which passed unanimously. Pact now goes to Iraqi parliament for a vote.
WP's Chris Cillizza: "The news that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama huddled yesterday at the president-elect's transition headquarters in Chicago has set off another round of speculation that the New York senator may well be in line to be Secretary of State in an Obama administration. While neither side is offering any official comment, one source close to Hillary Clinton told The Fix today that it is a "very good possibility" that the New York senator would end up as the Secretary of State. Given all of the speculation, we thought it made sense to lay out the arguments for and against Clinton as Secretary of State...." Pros and cons at the link.
Coming out of a press conference last night, I saw Gen. David Petraeus and lots and lots of secret service, uniforms, and I think that was deputy secretary of state John Negroponte heading into the Willard hotel dining room.
New issue of The National, out of Abu Dhabi, but with many writers you'll recognize, out here (.pdf).
WP: CIA Chief Michael Hayden: Iraq Not Main Front. (More in his campaign to team Obama to consider keeping him?)
Rich Lowry McCain campaign autopsy: "On the zaniness surrounding Randy Scheunemann. For those not following it, Steve Schmidt has told people he was fired the last week of the campaign; Scheunemann says he wasn't fired; others say Schmidt tried to fire him (at one point cutting off his e-mail) but was over-ruled by Davis. (Scheunemann's offense was writing an email to Bill Kristol defending Palin and criticizing the handling of her.): 'Schmidt never fired anybody and there was no overruling. Steve Schmidt never spoke to Randy in that period of time. Randy Scheunemann was not fired. His e-mail was cut off and put back on.'”
Obama-McCain meeting. Obama transition spokesperson Stephanie Cutter said in a statement: "On Monday, President-elect Barack Obama and Senator John McCain will meet in Chicago at transition headquarters. It's well known that they share an important belief that Americans want and deserve a more effective and efficient government, and will discuss ways to work together to make that a reality. They will be joined in the meeting by Senator Lindsey Graham and Congressman Rahm Emanual." Emanuel and Graham are reported to be good friends.
CQ:
Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat expected to chair the Senate Intelligence Committee next year, called Thursday for new leadership for the nation’s intelligence community.
“My view is that it’s time for a new start,” Feinstein said in an interview. Her call deals a blow to the prospects of Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA Director Michael V. Hayden carrying over to the administration of President-elect Barack Obama.
Feinstein is poised to take the gavel of the Intelligence panel from John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., who is expected to chair the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. Both McConnell and Hayden meanwhile signaled publicly that they would like to remain in their posts under Obama. ...
WP's Al Kamen and Philip Rucker: Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State?
There's increasing chatter in political circles that the Obama camp is not overly happy with the usual suspects for Secretary of State these days and that the field may be expanding somewhat beyond Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.), Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and maybe former Democratic senator Sam Nunn of Georgia.
There's talk, indeed, that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) may now be under consideration for the post. Her office referred any questions to the Obama transition; Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to comment.
The pick of the former presidential contender and Senate Armed Services Committee member would go a long way toward healing any remaining divisions within the Democratic Party after the divisive primaries. Also, Clinton has long been known for her work on international women's issues and human rights. The former first lady could also enhance Obama's efforts to restore U.S. standing amongst allies worldwide.
And Obama could put her in his speed-dial for a 3 a.m. phone call every morning.
WP: "For Iran's leaders, the only state of affairs worse than poor relations with the United States may be improved relations. [...] Obama would not be welcome in Iran as president, were he to decide to come here, [Ahmadinejad's media advisor Mehdi] Kalhor said. 'He can come as a tourist.'"
WP:
As a transition team for the Obama administration begins work on a Justice Department overhaul, the key question is where to begin.
Political considerations affected every crevice of the department during the Bush years, from the summer intern hiring program to the dispensing of legal advice about detainee interrogations, according to reports by the inspector general and testimony from bipartisan former DOJ officials at congressional hearings. [...]
David Ogden, a chief of the department's civil division in the Clinton years, will lead the transition effort. Thomas J. Perrelli, who was a counselor to Attorney General Janet Reno and a classmate of Obama's at Harvard Law School, will serve as a deputy.
Within the Justice Department, career employee Lee Lofthus and political appointee Brian A. Benczkowski have been preparing binders for the transition team that contain sensitive information about ongoing investigations, positions the department has taken in forthcoming legal disputes and more run-of-the-mill data.
Early signals about Obama's view on presidential powers could come in several ongoing court cases that turn on executive privilege, including a House lawsuit against former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers and Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten that rests with an appeals court in the District. The Obama team could decide to dial back its use of the privilege in that case, and in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the ACLU, which seeks information on detainee issues in New York federal courts.
Moreover, by summer, key provisions of intelligence law are set to expire, including a controversial measure that gives the government more power to seize information from libraries under the USA Patriot Act. Civil libertarians say they will watch how Obama handles such issues and what he does even earlier, to review new guidelines for FBI agents conducting national security investigations that will take hold Dec. 1.
Personnel issues will pose another challenge, given the inspector general's findings in three blistering reports that said hiring by Bush Justice Department officials routinely flouted civil service laws.
The Yes Men envision a "New York Times" of the future. "Torture, rendition 'not such good ideas after all.'" Tom Friedman: "The end of the experts?"
McClatchy's Warren Strobel:
The State Department is preparing to slap a multi-million dollar fine on private military contractor Blackwater USA for shipping hundreds of automatic weapons to Iraq without the necessary permits.
Some of the weapons are believed to have ended up on the country's black market, department officials told McClatchy, but no criminal charges have been filed in the case.
The expected fine is the result of a long-running federal investigation into whether employees of the firm shipped weapons hidden in shrink-wrapped pallets from its Moyock, N.C. headquarters to Iraq, where Blackwater is the State Department's largest personal security contractor.
Since the arms shipment allegations first became public 14 months ago, Blackwater, which has received $1.2 billion in federal contracts, according to the Web site fedspending.org, has consistently denied involvement in illicit arms trafficking.
However, the State Department found that Blackwater shipped 900 weapons to Iraq without the paperwork required by arms export control regulations, one department official said. Of that number, 119 were "particularly . . . erroneous," he said. He and the other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the decision hasn't been announced.
Federal laws require obtaining a license before exporting military hardware, including automatic weapons, overseas.
Niger Forgeries, Rome, and Sismi disinfo artist "Birch Tree". This will only be of interest to a few. But to those who know about the Sismi/Pio Pompa apartment in Rome with the files on the journalists and authorities investigating the provenance of the Niger forgeries and the rendition of Abu Omar, the Italian "journalist"/propagandist/disinformation agent working on the payroll of the Italian service Sismi, Libero's Renato Farina, a.k.a. Sismi codename "Birch Tree," (Betula), and all the Sismi Keystone Cops efforts to cover up the Italian role in the Niger forgeries and Italian leadership's complicity in the CIA's rendition of cleric Abu Omar to Egypt, perhaps of interest. (Since I was one of the journalists whose work Farina/Birch Tree was employed by Sismi to try to put out disinformation on, I naturally find it of interest, as well as the evidence including transcripts below of his tapped phone calls with his Sismi handler Pio Pompa as well as the receipts of his being on Sismi's payroll for about 30,000 Euros.) What was Sismi/Farina's strategy? To blame the Niger forgeries on France. From a memo to journalists tonight from Milan prosecutor Armando Spataro, who is leading the investigation into the rendition of Abu Omar (below the fold):
Man, everybody in Italy must be wiretapped. How do they ever sort it all out?November/12 hearing
Today the prosecutors questioned two Italian journalists, Claudio ANTONELLI (a young journalist who writes, still now, for the newspaper LIBERO) and Renato FARINA, former Deputy Director of the same newspaper. During the investigations, the two journalists were charged as responsible of the aiding and abetting crime with Pio POMPA, a senior officer of SISMi. At the end of investigations, ANTONELLI - on the request of the prosecutors - was acquited by the judge. According to the Italian system and to a special procedure (that gives the possibility to obtain a great discount of the penalty), FARINA agreed with the prosecutors a six months prison penalty (with the possibility to avoid the prison). Instead POMPA is one of the 33 defendants in the trial.
This is the above mentioned charge of aiding and abetting crime for POMPA (and FARINA):
“the offence provided for and punisched by the arts. 81 cpv, 110, 378 of the criminal code, because, after the execution of the abduction to the detriment of the Egyptian citizen Nasr Osama Mustafa Hassan alias Abu Omar, with serveral actions that are executive of the same criminal scheme, they helped Mancini Marco and other SISMI officials to avoid the investigations of the Authority; in particular, POMPA entrusted the journalist Renato FARINA (used as a stable source for the SISMI, with epithet “Birch-Source” to get in touch with the Public Prosecutor in Milan, the diretor of the investigations in the above-mentioned kidnapping, feigning a purely journalistic interest in an interview on the event, actually to make specific questions (suggested by himsel to the journalist) in order to evaluate the level of information of the investigators about the involvment of the SISMI in the event, as well as to turn in the wrong way the investigations of the office of the Public Prosecutor by giving him false information (also in this case suggested to the journalist by POMPA) about alleged organizational responsibility in the abduction of the magistrate dr. Stefano DAMBRUOSO (Public Prosecutor in Milan and director of the inquiry on the kidnapping until his tranfer outside the magistracy in Spring 2004) and of the staff of the Digos of Milan; POMPA, through FARINA and the journalist ANTONELLI (who reported to FARINA), sought illictly to obtain news, also in the Court of Justice of Milan about the progress of the investigations of the Public Prosecutors as well as suggested to other journalists with whom he was in close contact the publication of articles intended to bear out the responsibility of dr. DAMBRUOSO and of the DIGOS of Milan in the organisation of the kidnapping;
FARINA, asked, under the instructions of POMPA, the above-mentiond interview with the Public Prosecutor of Milan, which he carried out on 22.5.06 for the above-mentioned purpose and drew up a specific report - sento to POMPA- about the content of the interview; in addition, he sought illicitly to otain news, also in the Court of Justice of Milan and through the collegue Claudio ANTONELLI, from sources unknown for the time being, about the progress of the investigations of the Public Prosecutors, news which FARINA sistematically communicated to POMPA;
FARINA, in addition, for the above-mentioned aim, informed POMPA also about the physical displacemenst of the Public Prosecutor (displacements he knew about), including meetings for investigative aims which the Public Prosecutor held with the officer of the DIGOS in charge of the inquiries, on Sunday 21.5.06, in the Police Headquaters of Milan;
For POMPA with the additional aggravating factor in accordance with the art. 61 n. 9 criminal code, because he committed the fact in violation the duties pertaning to his office as a public official in the SISMI;
The offence was commited by Pompa in Rome, between May ad June 2006; in particular, also in date 22.5.06 (date of the meeting between the journalist Renato Farina and Claudio Antonelli with the Public Prosecutor of Milan); the offence was committed by Farina, in Milan, in the same period, in particular, also in date 22.5.06 (date of his meeting with the Public Prosecutor of Milan)”.
I want to remember what I wrote in some previous message: the investigations revealed the existence of an office (an apartment in Rome city centre) with links to SISMI, used for “secret operations”. The manager of this secret centre, Pio POMPA, was a close associate of Mr Pollari. In this apartment, following a search ordered by an official mandate, the Police and the Prosecutors seized many reports on Italian and foreign judges and prosecutors, on Italian important politicians, on journalists etc. and other papers also on the Abu Omar case and on Niggergate. The Rome Prosecution Office is leading an investigation into this illegal filing process.
During the investigations, the telephone conversations wiretapped on Farina and Pompa’s numbers (also on telephones installed in the SISMi apartment in Rome, where Pompa stayed), relating to the latter period of inquiries (May/2006 onwards), gave us the evidence on the Pompa’s role. The conversations demonstrated:
a. an attempt to manipulate the prosecutor’s investigative strategy, which Pio POMPA conducted in continuous contact with the SISMI Director, exploiting his close relationship with the reporter FARINA;
b. The attempt to provide conflicting accounts of the events under investigation, through contacts with reporters from other papers;
c. The intention to launch a series of “counter moves” through contacts with many other reporters, who have allegedly received favours of an “extra iuris ordinem” (I sent some news on this incredible point in one previous update).
So, questioning FARINA and ANTONELLI, the prosecutors had today the possibility to reconstructi this part of the story.
One of the most interesting part of the declarations of FARINA and ANTONELLI was about a meeting that they had, on their request, on may/22, 2006 with the two prosecutors (namely myself and my collegue Pomarici), when they tried to obtain informations on the investigations. It should be noted that, having been alerted by Digos as to the contents of the previous telephone conversations, the Prosecutors had ordered that the interview be recorded in full with hidden devices (bugs on my table): the formal transcript has been added to the acquired documents.
On 22.5.06 at 12:32 a call from FARINA was tapped on POMPA’s mobile phone, in which he told POMPA he had managed to arrange the meeting with D.A. Spataro through his fellow reporter ANTONELLI: the two agreed to speak later to decide on the questions to ask the PROSECUTOR.
Thereafter, POMPA told Gen. POLLARI about the reporter’s imminent meeting with the Prosecutor (it is odd that, when speaking with the Director of the Agency, POMPA uses the codename “BETULLA” – Birch - in clear reference to the reporter FARINA)
In the following conversation FARINA tells POMPA that the meeting has shifted slightly, and they agree on the issues to put before the PROSECUTOR so as to garner information and impressions to pass on to SISMi.
After the meeting, FARINA tells POMPA about the contents of the conversation that had taken place from 17.30 in Dr Spataro’s office between the two magistrates (myself and Pomarici), FARINA, and the young Libero reporter, Claudio ANTONELLI. Renato FARINA tells POMPA he has sent him a memo he drafted together with ANTONELLI. Pio POMPA then calls Director POLLARI and tells him what FARINA said.
We seized the meeting’s report in the Sismi’s apartment in Rome city center.
It should also be noted that on 19.5.2006:
- with two calls at 11:20 and 11:28 FARINA told POMPA he had managed to secure (from the Commanding officer of the carabinieri in Bergamo, col. Benedetto Lauretti, former Chief of the Counterterrorism branch of ROS Carabinieri in Milan) pages 46-62 of a report on Abu Omar and repeated that the ROS Carabinieri were “pissed off with Digos” (Digos is the skilled group of the State Police in counterterrorism investigations) and were spreading suspicious rumours on joint responsibility of the Milan Prosecution Office (on the other collegue who leaded the investigations till april/2004). FARINA agreed with POMPA to send him the documents in his possession, i.e. the full report mentioned above;
- At 11:30, POMPA referred to Director POLLARI the news he received from FARINA “basically, the ROS is laying the blame thickly on Digos”. Gen. POLLARI told POMPA to keep him constantly updated.
Today ANTONELLI admitted he went to Bergamo where he received by col. Lauretti the report on Abu Omar that he gave to FARINA. FARINA admitted he gave the paper to POMPA. We seized the Carabinieri’s report in the Sismi apartment in center Rome.
Other telephone conversations revealed attempts to acquire documents pertaining to the investigation unlawfully, as well as actually following, even physically, the moves of the District Attorney office in order to forestall its investigative leads between Pio POMPA and the reporter for the “Libero” daily, Renato FARINA:
Telephone call; dated 19.05.06 at 17.52:
FARINA (to POMPA): yes, well, another thing: today Spataro went away on holiday and comes back Sunday night…and he took his computer with him…well try and get some interviews ready, put some papers together, right?
... omissis…
Telephone call; dated 21.05.06 at 21.04:
POMPA: hello
FARINA: It’s me, Renato
POMPA: hi Renè
FARINA: well then .. the thing is running late because they want to have more… they want to work on it better even if it’s confirmed; at 19:00 tonight Spataro was at the Police station, he went there for a meeting with Megale, head of antiterrorism at Digos..
..omissis..
FARINA: he went there especially as he’s not working today… (it was Sunday) he asked to speak with him
…omissis…
FARINA …according to my very reliable source…they’re working on it, I think they’re trying to establish what is politically viable and what isn’t
POMPA Yes, but..
FARINA : right
POMPA: …Megale is important
FARINA:Anyhow, he went over at 19:00, he was in the office, he saw him, said hello, ok?
POMPA.: he went over then
FARINA: he went to the police station, and saw Megale
POMPA. : oh, ok
FARINA All right
POMPA: Thank Renè, ciao.
Antonelli admitted he saw me casually when I stayed, that Sunday, with Megale on the gate of the Police Station and he communicated the news to Farina, who admitted he called Pompa. We didn’t find the evidence Antonelli lied.
Of course we questioned the two journalist on many other specifics facts and wiretapped conversations, but it would be too long to synthesize every question and answer. If someone is interested I will be able to send the official statements of the hearings (they are not secret).
Anyway, Antonelli confirmed he didn’t know that his Deputy Director of the newspaper, Renato Farina, was closed to SISMi and was named “BETULLA Source”. ANTONELLI gave him any news he obtained (he worked very often in Milan Justice Palace) only because he was a simple and young journalist .
FARINA admitted he choosed to sign with name “BETULLA” the receipts of the expenses reimburments the SISMi gave him (the total amount was, according to his declarations, about 20.000 - 30.000 euro. He received the last payment on the 2006 Easter period). We seized one of those receipts with “Betulla” signature in via Nazionale in Rome. But FARINA told the judge he didn’t know that Sismi called him “Betulla source”!! He didn’t consider himself a Sismi source: he helped the SISMi because he was absolutely convinced of POLLARI’s innocence. POLLARI introduced him to POMPA, “his shadow” . He esteemed POLLARI, a catholic man (as Farina too) and POLLARI told him, many times, to be against any illegal method in fighting terrorism.
At last, on Pollari’s lawyer question, FARINA said he met (in Rome, in summer 2002 or summer 2003) admiral Capra, an important member of the US National Security Agency, who stayed in Rome and Capra told him that Condoleezza Rice didn’t like POLLARI as Sismi’s directors and asked to Berlusconi to remove him. Subsequently, Berlusconi seemed to confirm this circumstance, with a nod, when FARINA spoke with me.
FARINA, in 2007, was struck off the professional journalist register, after a disciplinary process, by National Council of Italian Journalists In the last spring he was elected member of Italian Parliament (Camera dei Deputati) as candidate of the Berlusconi’s party, the Unione della Libertà
Besides:
- as I wrote in the last update, the Constitutional Court set the date of March 10, 2009 in order to start discussing and decide on the issue of conflicts raised by Prodi’s and Berlusconi’s Governments against Milan prosecutors and judges on alleged violations of State secrecy.
The next hearing will be on december/10 (so, there will be a suspension for one month) because, according to our procedural code, we have to wait for the answers by the premier Berlusconi on the questions that the Judge sent him on the State secret opposed by two witnesses (see updates nn. 13 and 14). The dead line for these answers is on december/3.
Probably, on december/10, we will question the last for/five witnesses, all members or former members of the SISMi.
We didn't receive any news on our request - sent to american and egyptian authorities - to question other witnesses, who stay in Usa or Egypt (included Abu Omar).
The last: final numbersTill this moment, the Prosecutors questioned 84 witnesses and renounced to interrogate 22 witnesses more (because their reports or declarations statements during the investigation have been accepted as evidence by the Judge without any oppositions by the lawyers) .
Besides, as I wrote you, the Judge accepted about 320 written papers, reports, official documents, declarations as evidence and very often the lawyers agreed it.
Many thanks for your attention.
Armando Spataro
Obama/Biden Transition Team Agency Review:
The Obama-Biden Transition Team today announced the Agency Review Team leads for the Deperatment of Treasury, Department of State, and Department of Defense. The Obama-Biden Transition Team also announced the Agency Review Team co-chairs, who will oversee the entire review process, as well as the Agency Review Working Group, which will manage and review the Teams' work and coordinate with other transition teams, including those handling personnel, policy and the budget.
The Agency Review Teams will complete a thorough review of key departments, agencies and commissions of the United States government, as well as the White House, to provide the President-elect, Vice President-elect, and key advisors with information needed to make strategic policy, budgetary, and personnel decisions prior to the inauguration. The Teams will begin their efforts by the end of the week, and will ensure that senior appointees have the information necessary to complete the confirmation process, lead their departments, and begin implementing signature policy initiatives immediately after they are sworn in.
Department of the Treasury Agency Review Team Leads
Josh Gotbaum currently serves as an advisor to investment funds, with a special focus on restructurings and management turnaround. He was startup CEO of The September 11th Fund, a charity that serves people, businesses and non-profits. From 1994-2001, Josh held Senate-confirmed positions in Treasury, Defense, and OMB. From 1981-94, he was an investment banker, working on mergers and restructuring in North America and Europe. His clients included major corporations, unions, and government. He also has worked in the White House and at the Department of Energy.
Michael Warren is the Chief Operating Officer of Stonebridge International LLC. He also is on the Board of Directors of the District of Columbia Retirement Board, Catalist, the DC Minority Business Enterprise Center Advisory Board, Southeastern University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, Civitas, Riptopia, and the National Child Research Center. Mr. Warren previously worked at McKinsey & Company, both as a strategic consultant in the technology and financial institutions industries and as a fellow of the McKinsey Global Institute. Mr. Warren served within the White House as Executive Director of the President’s National Economic Council.
Department of State Agency Review Team Leads
Tom Donilon is a partner at the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers and serves on the firm’s global governing committee. Tom served as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of State during the Clinton Administration. Since leaving the Department he has remained deeply involved in the national security arena. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Strategy Group, the National Security Advisory Group to the Congressional Leadership, the Brookings Institution Board of Trustees, the Miller Center of Public Affairs Governing Council, and the Trilateral Commission.
Wendy R. Sherman is a Principal of The Albright Group LLC and of Albright Capital Management LLC. Ambassador Sherman served as Counselor and chief troubleshooter for the State Department, as well as Special Advisor to President Clinton and Policy Coordinator on North Korea. Sherman is a recognized expert on national security issues and serves as a frequent analyst in major news outlets. She was recently appointed by Congressional Leadership to serve on the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism.
Department of Defense Agency Review Team Leads
John P. White is Robert and Renee Belfer Lecturer and Chair of the Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He served as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1995 to 1997, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1978 to 1981, Assistant Secretary of Defense, Manpower, Reserve Affairs, and Logistics from 1977 to 1978, and as a lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps from 1959 to 1961. Prior to his most recent government service, White was the Director of the Center for Business and Government at Harvard University and the Chair of the Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces.
Michèle A. Flournoy is President and Co-Founder of the Center for a New American Security. Previously, she was a senior adviser at CSIS and a distinguished research professor at NDU. In the Clinton administration, she was dual-hatted as principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction and deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy. She is on the board of the Institute for Defense Analyses, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Strategy Group, the Executive Board of Women in International Security, and a former member of the Defense Policy Board.
Agency Review Co-Chairs
Melody Barnes is Co-chair of the Agency Review Working Group for the Obama-Biden Transition Project. She most recently served as the Senior Domestic Policy Advisor to the Obama for America campaign. Prior to joining the campaign, Ms. Barnes served as the Executive Vice President for Policy at the Center for American Progress, Chief Counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee and a Principal at The Raben Group, LLC. Her experience also includes an appointment as Director of Legislative Affairs to the U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Ms. Barnes began her career as an attorney with Shearman & Sterling.
Lisa Brown is Co-chair of the Agency Review Working Group for the Obama-Biden Transition Project. She is on leave from the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy where she is the Executive Director. Lisa served as Counsel to Vice President Gore, with a broad legal and policy portfolio that included serving on the Executive Board of the President’s Committee for Employment of People with Disabilities. Before that, she worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, was a Partner at the D.C. law firm of Shea & Gardner (now Goodwin Procter), and clerked on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals for the Honorable John C. Godbold.
Don Gips is on the Advisory Board of the Obama-Biden Transition Project and is Co-chair of the Agency Review Working Group. He is on leave from his role as Group Vice President of Global Corporate Development at Level 3 Communications, where he leads merger and acquisition efforts and is the Chief Strategy Officer. Prior to joining Level 3, Mr. Gips served in the White House as Chief Domestic Policy Advisor to Vice President Gore. Previously, Mr. Gips was Chief of the International Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission where he was responsible for the WTO negotiations and all spectrum policy. Mr. Gips also helped launch the Americorps Program at the Corporation for National Service. Before entering government, he was an Executive Manager at McKinsey & Company.
Working Group Members
Seth Harris is a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s Agency Review Working Group responsible for the labor, education, and transportation agencies. He is a Professor and the Director of Labor & Employment Law Programs at New York Law School. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Life Without Limits Project of the United Cerebral Palsy Association and a member of the National Advisory Commission on Workplace Flexibility. He served as the Chair of Obama for America’s Labor, Employment, and Workplace Policy Committee and a Co-Chair of its Disability Policy Committee. During the Clinton Administration, he served as Counselor to the Secretary of Labor and Acting Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy, among other policy-advising positions. Before joining the administration, he was a law clerk to Judge William Canby of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Gene Carter of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Review of Law & Social Change at the New York University School of Law.
David J. Hayes is a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s Agency Review Working Group responsible for the energy and natural resources agencies. He is former Global Chair of the Environment, Land and Resources Department at Latham & Watkins, an international law firm. He is a Senior Fellow at the World Wildlife Fund, advising the President of WWF on climate change matters, and he is a Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, specializing on energy matters. Mr. Hayes is the Vice-Chairman of the national conservation group, American Rivers, and he is the former Chairman of the Board of the Environmental Law Institute. Mr. Hayes was the Deputy Secretary of the Interior during the Clinton Administration. During the 2007-2008 academic year, Hayes was a Consulting Professor at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment.
Reed Hundt, is a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s Agency Review Working Group responsible for the international trade and economics agencies. He is a member of various boards of directors, a part-time senior adviser to McKinsey & Company, a strategic consulting firm, and an adviser to a number of firms. He served as the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1993 to 1997. Since that date, he has taught for a number of years at Yale College, Yale Law School, and the Yale School of Management, and Yale University Press has published two books written by him, You Say You Want A Revolution: A Story of Information Age Politics and In China’s Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship.
Sally Katzen is a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s Agency Review Working Group responsible for the Executive Office of the President and government operations agencies. She is a Lecturer at Michigan Law School and teaches American Government at the Michigan in Washington Program. She has also taught at George Mason, Pennsylvania and Georgetown law schools as well as at Smith College and Johns Hopkins University. From 1993-2001, she served as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), then Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, and then OMB’s Deputy Director for Management. She has served on National Academies of Science panels and is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Before 1993, she was a partner at then Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. She clerked for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the District of Columbia Circuit.
Tom Perez is as a member of the Obama Transition Project’s Agency Review Working Group responsible for the justice, health and human services, veterans affairs, and housing and urban development agencies. He is Secretary of the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation under Governor Martin O’Malley. He worked in a variety of civil rights positions at the Department of Justice, including Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under Attorney General Janet Reno. He also served as Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Donna Shalala, and as Special Counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy. From 2001 until 2007, he was Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law, and is an adjunct faculty member at the George Washington School of Public Health.
Sarah Sewall is a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s Agency Review Working Group responsible for the national security agencies. She is on part-time leave from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where she teaches and is Faculty Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Her research focuses on U.S. national security strategy, civil-military relations, counterinsurgency, terrorism and mass atrocity. Sewall served as the first U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance (1993-1996). She previously served for six years as Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.
Louisa Terrell is a Working Group member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s Agency Review Team. Louisa is on leave from her role as Senior Director at Yahoo!’s public policy office in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining Yahoo! Louisa was Deputy Chief of Staff for Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Previously, Louisa was counsel for Senator Biden on his Senate Judiciary Committee staff where she handled criminal sentencing, juvenile justice, child protection, immigration policy and women’s issues, among other areas and before that worked in the Civil Rights Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.
Ray Rivera is a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s Agency Review Working Group. He was most recently State Director for the Obama-Biden Campaign in Colorado. He was also the State Director for the Colorado Caucus and served as Northeast Field Desk out of Chicago headquarters early in the campaign. Prior to the Obama Campaign, Ray was a Political Director for AFSCME, public employee’s labor union and a union organizer. Ray was born in Albuquerque, NM and graduated with a BA from the University of New Mexico in 2001.
Michael Warren is a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s Agency Review Working Group helping to oversee the international trade and economics agencies. He is on partial leave from his role as Chief Operating Officer of Stonebridge International LLC., where he is a member of the firm’s Management Committee. Prior to joining Stonebridge, Warren led corporate development at Horne Engineering Services and served as President of Appfluent Technologies. He also serves as Chairman of Ironbridge Systems. He is on the Board of Directors of the District of Columbia Retirement Board, Catalist, the DC Minority Business Enterprise Center Advisory Board, Southeastern University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, Civitas, and the National Child Research Center. Warren previously worked at McKinsey & Company, both as a strategic consultant in the technology and financial institutions industries and as a fellow of the McKinsey Global Institute, advising corporate leaders in the U.S. and Asian semiconductor industries. He served within the White House as Executive Director of the President’s National Economic Council.
Tom Wheeler is a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s Agency Review Working Group responsible for the science, technology, space and arts agencies. He has taken a leave of absence from Core Capital Partners, a venture capital firm working with early stage technology companies, where he is a Managing Director. For three decades, Wheeler has worked at the forefront of technology, both as an entrepreneur and as a policy specialist. He has been the CEO of the National Cable Television Association and the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, as well as the founder or co-founder of multiple new technology companies. Wheeler is the author of two books: Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails and Leadership Lessons from the Civil War.
Jon Wilkins is a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s Agency Review Working Group. He has taken a partial leave of absence from McKinsey & Company, where he is a partner in the Washington, DC office. Jon first joined McKinsey in 1996. He then worked at the Federal Communications Commission from 1998-1999 before re-joining McKinsey in 1999. He was Managing Editor of the Yale Law Journal.
Obama-Biden transition guidance for Thursday: "The Vice President-elect and Dr. Jill Biden have been invited by Vice President Cheney and his wife Lynne to the Naval Observatory on Thursday at 5:15pm for a private meeting and tour of the residence. ...The meeting will be closed press. An official photo of the Bidens and Cheneys will be released following the meeting."
Obama spokesperson says in a statement this AP story is not correct about Christopher. "'Senator Sam Nunn will play an informal senior advisor role throughout the defense transition process. His expertise and the respect he has earned will be invaluable to ensure a smooth transition. Secretary Christopher is deeply respected in the United States and throughout the international community. However, he is not playing a role in the transition process. There's a lot of disinformation out there. We're working hard to put the agency review teams together and expect they'll be announced this week and inside the agencies by the end of the week,' said Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Spokesperson Stephanie Cutter." (AP)
Transition Humint (a step up from Rumint): Foreign Policy edition. Two people named to Obama's foreign policy transition team, a Hill source who informally contributed advice to a campaign working group informs me: Denis McDonough, the foreign policy coordinator for the Obama campaign, former foreign policy advisor to Senator Tom Daschle and former legislative director for Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado; and Mark Lippert, Obama's foreign policy legislative assistant in his Senate office. Lippert previously worked as Tim Rieser’s deputy on the State/Foreign Ops subcommittee for Appropriations.
David Brooks on conservative traditionalists vs. reformists. "Most professional conservatives are lifelong Washingtonians who live comfortably as organization heads, lobbyists and publicists. Their supposed heroism consists of living inside the large conservative cocoon and telling each other things they already agree with. But this embattled-movement mythology provides a rational for crushing dissent, purging deviationists and enforcing doctrinal purity. It has allowed the old leaders to define who is a true conservative and who is not. It has enabled them to maintain control of (an ever more rigid) movement. In short, the Republican Party will probably veer right in the years ahead, and suffer more defeats. Then, finally, some new Reformist donors and organizers will emerge. They will build new institutions, new structures and new ideas, and the cycle of conservative ascendance will begin again."
WP: "The incoming Obama administration plans to explore a more regional strategy to the war in Afghanistan -- including possible talks with Iran -- and looks favorably on the nascent dialogue between the Afghan government and 'reconcilable' elements of the Taliban, according to Obama national security advisers."
Jeet Heer: "Ninety years ago, the stupidest and wickedest war in human history came to a formal end. I say formal end because even as the surrender was signed, millions continued to go hungry and intermittent conflicts plagued Europe and Asia. And in fact, the botched peace would lead to a larger and more murderous war. ..."
WSJ's Siobhan Gorman on Obama intelligence transition team and policy.
Update: Former senior intelligence official Paul Pillar disputes the article's contention the Obama administration will pursue a status quo intelligence policy as the Bush administration on key civil liberties issues. "I would draw a distinction between some of the more controversial issues that have involved civil liberties or privacy concerns (mainly involving detainees, but also perhaps some aspects of domestic surveillance), on which I would expect some changes," Pillar emailed me, "and everything else under the heading of 'intelligence policies,' where change would not be high on any priority list of the new administration (with so many other things to worry about)."
Coleman, Kazeminy and Bush/Cheney. The Politico:
The Coleman campaign tells the paper that the story is "cheap, sleazy and false."We just received a PDF of the second lawsuit filed against Norm Coleman pal Nasser Kazeminy, who allegedly steered $75,000 to a Minnesota insurance company that employs Coleman wife.
Much of the new material echoes allegations made by its former CEO Paul McKim in a previous lawsuit filed in Texas.
Still, there are a couple of new nuggets in the Nov. 3 complaint in Delaware by investors in Kazeminy-controlled Deep Marine Technology.
The Texas lawsuit quotes Kazeminy saying he needed to get cash to Coleman because "U.S. Senators don't make [expletive]."
But the second lawsuit alleges — and it's breathtakingly stupid if true — that Kazeminy at first ordered DMT execs to pay Coleman directly.
"Our clients were advised that Mr. Kazeminy first sought to have DMT make quarterly cash payments of $25,000 to Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota," writes plaintiff's attorney Anthony Paduano, citing a "confidential" informant.
A Washington lawyer reader writes that Kazeminy has some ties to the Bush/Cheney White House:
Hmm. More than a whiff of the Congressman Duke Cunningham's indicted co-conspirators Brent Wilkes/ADCS (again with the document conversion stuff), Mitch Wade/MZM and MZM's strange 2002 Cheney office contract for screening the Veep office's mail (or email) for threats, including anthrax, MZM's first federal contract ever. Who knew there was such a market in screening Bush/Cheney mail for threats? And that the best qualification for the job was Republican giving? (Kazeminy gave so often and generously to Bush/Cheney's '04 reelection they had to give some of the money back.) Indeed, there are so many similarities to how Wade got the Cheney office contract, the link to SAIC and Cheney's time at the Pentagon, one wonders about the paradigm.Norm Coleman's biggest contributor owns a lot of companies:
Mr. Kazeminy is Chairman of NJK Holding Corporation, an investment company that he founded and owns. Other business concerns which he has founded or acquired include Minneapolis Leasing Corporation, XP Systems Corporation, CENTRA Benefit Services, Quorum Group, Inc., Drake ProMetric, Digital Insight Corporation, Certiport, Creative Publishing International, Deep Marine Technology, Content Analyst and Imaging Acceptance Corporation.
Checkout what Content Analyst does and who it does it for.
And Imaging Acceptance Corporation? Imaging Acceptance Corp. (IAC) specializes in turning high-volume paper mail into Web-retrievable electronic documents. Its services allow government and corporate clients to easily (and safely) access, organize and edit documents from a desktop. The company's mail-to-Web services process incoming mail and convert it into an electronic document, circumventing the safety concerns raised by the Anthrax mail threats in 2001. The company handled mail processing for the 2004 campaign of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. In October 2006 it was acquired by Anacomp, a fellow document storage and services specialist.
The little boutique intel/DHS contractor companies tailor made to provide documentation conversion and information management services. The Palm Beach address. The private plane trips to Paris and Jordan. The patriotic shout out from former FBI director Louis Freeh, hostile to Clinton for among other reasons not highlighting Iran's alleged role in the Khobar towers bombing, and now on the board of a Kazeminy-headed foundation. It all evokes a certain vaguely familiar milieu.
Meantime, if the allegations about Kazeminy essentially trying to funnel money to Coleman are true, what's the alleged, possible quid pro quo? What's Kazeminy possibly allegedly getting from his Senator for all the reported nice clothes, contributions, plane trips, etc. he's according to these lawsuits and some accounts provided? Just nice to have a friendly Senator? Do Coleman's committees and subcommittees provide a clue - SFRC subcommittee on near east and central asia, and homeland security and government affairs. Homeland security contracts?
This worth noting, from a February 1, 2005 press release from a Kazeminy firm Content Analyst Company:
Kazeminy and his family have also given a lot of money (almost $93,000 in the past three election cycles) to Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), of the House foreign affairs (and like Coleman, near east subcommittee) and House oversight committees. Burton's committee highlighted Freeh testimony to suggest poliitcal influence buying in the Clinton administration. Former FBI director Louis Freeh is on Kazeminy-chaired 501c3/non profit NECO's board of directors. NECO board members seem linked to this, United Energy Corp/NV (more associates, USgov contracts).Press Release, February 1, 2005
RESTON, Va., Feb. 1 /PRNewswire/ — Content Analyst Company, LLC today announced that Joe Grano has joined the company as Chairman of its Board of Directors.
Mr. Grano is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Centurion Holdings LLC, and was previously Chairman of UBS Financial Services Inc. (formerly UBS PaineWebber). He also serves as Chairman of the President’s Homeland Security Advisory Council under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In addition to being one of the financial service industry’s leading executives, Joe Grano is involved in a wide range of educational and philanthropic endeavors.
The other members of the Board of Directors of Content Analyst Company are Larry J. Peck, President of the Enterprise and Infrastructure Solutions Group of Science Applications International Corporation, Nasser J. Kazeminy, Chairman of NJK Holding Corporation, and John K. Ellingboe, President of Mergers and Acquisitions of NJK Holding Corporation.
Content Analyst Company was formed in December 2004 to acquire the Content Analyst product division of SAIC and all related intellectual property, including issued and pending patents on Latent Semantic Indexing. SAIC holds a minority interest in Content Analyst Company and will serve as a reseller and preferred, but not exclusive, integrator of the company’s products. ......
Nasser Kazeminy
David Brooks: "You've got half the party waiting for Sarah Palin to come and rescue them. The other half is waiting for Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana governor, to come rescue them. But no set of beliefs. Really a decayed conservative infrastructure. It's just a world of pain." Via Steve Benen.
Fareed Zakaria: McCain's downfall, Republican foreign policy:
The electorate has seemed to sense that there is a new world out there and that the nostrums presented by McCain in his campaign are irrelevant to it. As with economics, these feelings developed after watching the ideas in action. Bush embraced a series of radical policy stances -- many of them long espoused by neoconservatives -- especially during his first term.
But the vigorous unilateralism openly advocated by the administration is recognized by most Americans to have weakened the country's influence abroad. Its excessive reliance on military force has yielded few results worth the costs.
At the heart of Bush's ideology was regime change -- armed Wilsonianism. Whether in Iraq, North Korea or Iran, the basic goal was to refuse any kind of negotiation or diplomacy and instead try to overthrow the government and replace it with a democratic and friendly one. Most Americans now recognize that, however pleasant this sounds in theory, the real world is a complicated place and cannot be transformed by magic or military power.
The most powerful repudiation of Bush's ideas has come from Bush himself. Over the past three years, he has negotiated with North Korea and Libya and even taken a tentative step with Iran; launched a high-profile peace process between the Palestinians and Israelis; and made encouraging proposals about global warming. These are all steps Bush actively opposed during his first term. He has moved in this direction out of necessity. Failure concentrates the mind. ...
NYT: "In the battleground state of Ohio, where Mr. Kerry lost the presidency to George W. Bush, the 2.74 million votes he received almost precisely matched Mr. Obama’s 2008 total. Mr. Obama won because John McCain received 300,000 fewer votes than Mr. Bush did. That points to a cautionary reminder for Mr. Obama and his team: the election turned partly on what they did right, but also on what Republicans did wrong. And there is no assurance that Democrats will confront a similarly star-crossed opposition in elections to come." The upshot? “The lease on the office space is likely very short," says Harold Ickes.
WP: Three Bush appointees likely to stay under Obama. Bernanke, Mullen and Mueller.
Andrew Sullivan: Now we get our lives back. "What is this I'm feeling? ... It isn't euphoria. I haven't felt that since O-Day. It isn't redemption: I don't expect that from politics. I realize what I'm feeling is relief. ... Knowing that the Bush-Cheney-Addington axis will be forced out of power is an immense, slackening relief. I've felt compelled by politics these past few years in ways I don't like or enjoy. With men and women finally back in power I can trust to act reasonably and ethically and within the rule of law, I feel less hesitation in getting on with life."
NYT: Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda in Many Countries:
Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the American officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries. They made clear that there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they suggested that American forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using other classified directives.
According to a senior administration official, the new authority was spelled out in a classified document called “Al Qaeda Network Exord,” or execute order, that streamlined the approval process for the military to act outside officially declared war zones. Where in the past the Pentagon needed to get approval for missions on a case-by-case basis, which could take days when there were only hours to act, the new order specified a way for Pentagon planners to get the green light for a mission far more quickly, the official said.
It also allowed senior officials to think through how the United States would respond if a mission went badly. “If that helicopter goes down in Syria en route to a target,” the official said, “the American response would not have to be worked out on the fly.”
The 2004 order was a step marking the evolution of how the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda terrorists around the world. It was issued after the Bush administration had already granted America’s intelligence agencies sweeping power to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons and to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications.
Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda militants around the globe. By 2003, American intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al Qaeda’s extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash the military’s vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan...
The 2004 order identifies 15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said. ...
American officials said there had been debate over whether to include Iran in the 2004 order, but ultimately Iran was set aside, possibly to be dealt with under a separate authorization.
Transition Rumint: Hill Staff Moves. With the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joseph Biden accompanying fellow SFRC member Obama to the White House, what Hill foreign policy staff moves might we expect? A knowledgeable Hill staffer writes to suggest the following:
The most interesting question surrounds Biden’s senior staff on the Foreign Relations Committee. I doubt he will bring all of them into the VP office – it makes more sense and expands his clout if they are seeded throughout the bureaucracy. Indeed, I expect Biden to have a much pared-down operation in comparison to Cheney – but don’t let that fool you when it comes to the influence he will have.
Look for Tony Blinken, the staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Biden’s closest foreign policy advisor, to serve the Vice President directly. Blinken will be to Biden what Scooter Libby was to Dick Cheney during the first term – the Vice President’s national security advisor.
Brian McKeon, the Chief Counsel on the Committee, is a top contender for State Department Legal Advisor or the senior counsel on the NSC staff.
Puneet Talwar, Frank Jannuzi, and Jonah Blank are likely to go in as DASes at State or Defense for their respective regions of expertise – the Middle East, Asia, and South Asia. Puneet could indeed be a key player in the bureaucracy on Iran.
Ed Levine is a likely pick for Assistant Secretary of State for Verification, Compliance, and Implementation – a technical, but important, position in the arms control/nonproliferation bureaucracy;
Marcel Lettre, Senator Reid’s senior foreign policy staffer, may well move from the Majority Leader’s office into the new Administration.
From Senate Armed Services Committee staff, I could see Peter Levine, Madelyn Creedon, and Richard Fieldhouse all making the jump to mid-level positions in the Administration.
From the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Bob King and Peter Yeo, the staff director and deputy staff director, are leaving in the wake of the [late Tom] Lantos to [Howard] Berman transition. Expect them to end up somewhere. Richard Kessler, formerly with the Senate Homeland Security/Government Affairs Committee (HSGAC), announced what had been rumored for months – he will be the new staff director for Berman on HFAC.
WP: "Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team. A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition." Via Hilary Bok.
Worth reading: Mark Lilla in the WSJ: "So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against?"
As a friend notes, this will probably fall on totally deaf ears.Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives' "disdain for liberal intellectuals" had slipped into "disdain for the educated class as a whole," and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.
George Will derides the boys on the boats:
Some of the Republicans' afflictions are self-inflicted. Some conservatives who are gluttons for punishment are getting a head start on ensuring a 2012 drubbing by prescribing peculiar medication for a misdiagnosed illness. They are monomaniacal about media bias, which is real but rarely decisive, and unhinged by their anger about the loathing of Sarah Palin by similarly deranged liberals. These conservatives, confusing pugnacity with a political philosophy, are hot to anoint Palin, an emblem of rural and small-town sensibilities, as the party's presumptive 2012 nominee.
These conservatives preen as especially respectful of regular -- or as Palin says, "real" -- Americans, whose tribune Palin purports to be. But note the argument that the manipulation of Americans by "the mainstream media" explains the fact that the more Palin campaigned, the less Americans thought of her qualifications. This argument portrays Americans as a bovine herd -- or as inert clay in the hands of wily media, which only Palin's conservative celebrators can decipher and resist.
These conservatives, smitten by a vice presidential choice based on chromosomes, seem eager to compete on the Democrats' terrain of identity politics, entering the "diversity" sweepstakes they have hitherto rightly deplored. We have seen this movie before. Immediately after the 1972 election, some conservatives laid down the law -- the 1976 Republican nominee must be Vice President Spiro Agnew.
Autopsies. Scott Horton writes to the NYT public editor about its Palin propagandist. Woman who said president-elect palled around with terrorists calls her McCain campaign critics who describe her as ignorant "jerks." McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt complains about constant leaks from within the McCain campaign. "Looking forward, Schmidt sees the need for a wholesale reinvention of the party. 'The party in the Northeast is all but extinct; the party on the West Coast is all but extinct; the party has lost the mid south states—Virginia, North Carolina—and the party is in deep trouble in the Rocky Mountain West, and there has to be a message and a vision that is compelling to people in order for them to come back and to give consideration to the Republican Party again.'” Schmidt: "Can I also add to the thought about where we’ll get the ideas of the party? There is a new generation—there are leaders that have emerged from this campaign that are worth paying attention to. Gov. Romney did a fantastic job in this campaign and is certainly an important voice on the national strange. Newt Gingrich is someone that the party in my view must pay very close attention to because he is an idea champion for the future and has many great ideas about how to define 21st century conservatism and how to define the Republican Party and to establish an intellectual base on which a political movement can be rebuilt."
Colbert King: "Now consider the U.S. Census Bureau's population projections. If the GOP does not become more inclusive and open to new ideas, it could take on the image (not the ideology) of F.W. De Klerk's now disbanded National Party of South Africa. If that happens, Obama can thank narrow-minded Republican strategists."
CQ's Tim Starks: Senator Feinstein "offered" Senate Intelligence committee chairmanship.
Shell wins 25 year Iraq energy deal. UPI's Ben Lando and Alaa Majeed exclusively report:
Would be interesting to know who the consultants and middlemen on that deal were and what percent their cut.A joint venture between Royal Dutch Shell and Iraq's state-owned South Gas Co. could give Shell a 25-year monopoly on production and exports of natural gas in much of southern Iraq - the biggest foreign role in Iraq's oil and gas sector in four decades.
The planned venture, spelled out in a 16-page document obtained by United Press International, goes well beyond descriptions provided by Iraqi and Shell officials on Sept. 22, when they held a public signing ceremony in Baghdad.
The officials at the time described the agreement as:
• Limited to Basra province.
• Restricted to capturing gas that is burned off and therefore wasted in extracting and processing oil.
• Primarily intended to supply Iraq's domestic market.
In fact, the two signed what is known as a "heads of agreement" (HOA) - basically a rough draft of a contract - that establishes the management team, scope, purpose and other details of the joint venture's business plan.
Though nonbinding, the confidential document is telling.
The joint-venture company would give Shell the largest foreign role in Iraq's oil and gas sector since the 1960s, when Iraq expelled the world's big oil firms after 40 years of foreign control of exploration, production and exports.
The joint venture will be the "sole gas company engaged in business," as outlined in the HOA, "and providing gas for domestic and export markets and generating revenues from gas marketing activities." ...
First Dude. Time reports that Todd Palin is a closet metrosexual:
On top of the $150,000 first outlined in Federal Election Commission filings, Palin spent "tens of thousands of dollars" on additional clothing, makeup and jewelry for herself and her family, including $40,000 in luxury goods for her husband, Todd, our colleague Michael Shear reports. The campaign was charged for silk boxer shorts, spray tanners and 13 suitcases to carry all the designer clothes, according to two GOP insiders.
Transition Rumint: Security Posts:
More here.... James Steinberg, the highly regarded former Clinton-era deputy national security advisor, is being considered for national security advisor. Long time Obama national security advisor Susan Rice, Clinton's former assistant secretary of state for Africa, is being considered for deputy national security advisor, as well as for US ambassador to the UN. Top NSC appointment announcements could come as early as today, and other White House appointments would be announced after that.
For top jobs at State, the short list is said to include Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Chuck Hagel (R-Neb, ret.), Richard Lugar (R-IN) (all moderate colleagues of Obama and VP-elect Joseph Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations committee), former Senator Sam Nunn (D-Georgia), former Clinton era Balkans envoy Richard Holbrooke, and retired Marine Corps General and Mid East envoy James L. Jones, who is likely to get a top job in the administration elsewhere if not at State. Deputy Secretary of State could go to Greg Craig, a former counselor to President Clinton.
At the Defense Department, conventional wisdom has it that the top job is Robert Gates' if he will keep it, at least initially, and that Clinton's well respected former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig could come in as deputy. Other people named as contenders for top Defense Department posts include former Pentagon officials Ashton Carter, a big-think arms control hand who has arm wrestled with Pyongyang and negotiated post-Soviet nuclear issues and now teaches at Harvard, Michele Flournoy and Kurt Campbell, co-founders of the new think tank, the Center for a New American Security, whose ranks are likely to provide additional security brainpower to the new administration, along with security and regional experts and staff from other think tanks, academe, and the Hill. ...
Also, worth noting that news video of Obama going into his first intelligence briefing yesterday showed him accompanied by Steinberg, former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta (who has indicated he does not want an administration job), and the Obama campaign's foreign policy advisor Denis McDonough. It seems likely that Obama would want to have been accompanied by his would-be national security advisor, presumably Steinberg.
Advisers say that Obama has sent a not-so-subtle message to Congress: President-Elect Obama will not cede much agenda-setting ground to liberals. While outside Democrats are interpreting Emanuel's selection as an institutional message for Nancy Pelosi, Obama advisers concede that Emanuel's ties to key party centrists and blue dog Democrats will be criticial to smoother relationships between the executive and legislative branches. (Emanuel is more liberal than these centrists, but he's not nearly the ideologue that people seem to think he is.)
Behind the scenes, Obama himself and many key aides have been making overtures to conservative Democrats. These Democrats want budget off-sets included with every expensive piece of legislation that Obama sends to the Hill; at the very least, they want the White House to incorporate centrists in decision-making.
Obama is keenly aware of how President Clinton's relationship with Congress was fraught with tension and mistrust; how Clinton allowed Congress to temper some of the Arkansan's more pragmatic, less ideological instincts early on.
KPCC: Rep. Jane Harman calls on Obama to close Guantanamo. “'It is not that hard to figure out what to do with those prisoners whom can’t be released or returned to their own countries. They should be tried either by regular military courts or U.S. civilian courts and we can incarcerate dangerous people in the U.S.' Obama has vowed to close the detention facility."
Bloomberg: "Las Vegas Sands Corp., billionaire Sheldon Adelson's casino company, fell the most in New York trading since went public after saying it may default on debt and face bankruptcy."
Jeff Stein: Who will run the CIA?
More security appointment buzz (or silence) from Helene Cooper.
David Ignatius: "During the transition, Obama won't meddle in the Bush administration's decisions -- and he won't allow other governments to end-run Bush. 'He's not going to do anything that gives the idea they don't have to negotiate with this administration,' says the adviser. This insistence on 'one president at a time' is especially important in the deadlocked negotiations with Iraq over a new status-of-forces agreement. Several Obama aides caution that the Iraqis shouldn't drag their feet and hope for a better deal."
Daily Beast: "Barack Obama's hidden talent: He's a top-notch poker player. Thank goodness—he'll need it."
WP: Rahm Emanuel accepts.
(And a bit of trivia everybody except me already knew. Rahm Emanuel's brother Ari inspiration for Ari on "Entourage.")
Reader DB comments: "That's interesting. There was even a bit of dialogue on the show this week with Ari Gold musing about the time early in his agent career when he almost gave it up and went home to Chicago to be a lawyer."
Update: A friend adds: "Rahm himself was the inspiration for Josh Lyman on the West Wing. And, in yet another instance of the last season of the West Wing foreshadowing the events of the 2008 campaign, Josh Lyman becomes the CoS for President Santos. So the Emanuel brothers are likely the only pair of siblings who can claim credit for inspiring two television characters."
Update II: Linda Hirshman comments: "...The Emanuel appointment reveals much about the direction of the Obama administration. Since the candidacy was built on opacity, ambiguity and generality, this first appointment is disproportionately informative. It shows that Obama is prepared to fight."
More from Dan Froomkin: "In Emanuel, Obama would be putting a force of nature at his side -- a man who, for better and for worse, has a reputation as being one of the most aggressive political figures in Washington."
Cillizza: 10 Things to Know about Rahm. "9. Advice to incoming White House staff from DCCC executive director Brian Wolff: "Develop a thick skin, cancel vacations, weddings and all personal appointments........learn what the term 25/8 means......25 hours a day .....8 days a week......expect to be available."
More from MJ Rosenberg.
CQ's Tim Starks with Senate Intel and House Intel committee priorities and news.
NJ posts an election night letter to intel community staff from DNI Mike McConnell on transition plans. NJ notes: "In a departure from past transition custom, the incoming administration's intelligence team is likely to set up shop at the DNI's headquarters, at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington. Usually, the transition team has sent representatives who get up to speed on current activities and then report back to the incoming administration. Obama's team, it seems, wants to get into the details right away in preparation for the handoff."
The end had not been in doubt for weeks. McCain had expected to do better in Pennsylvania and Ohio — he lost both states — but he knew in his head he wasn’t going to pull off some stunning upset, even though he had been hoping for one in his heart.
“An army lives on hope,” Salter told me Wednesday afternoon. “Our polling showed that more than 60 percent of voters identified Obama as a liberal. Typically, a candidate is not going to win the presidency with those figures. But I think the country just disregarded it. People didn’t care. They just wanted the biggest change they could get.”
And they got it. Obama was seen as the change candidate. McCain was seen as the guy who wanted to stop the change candidate.
NYT: How Internal Battles Divided the McCain and Palin Camps:
Sheesh. The stuff of sit-com. If not of governing.The disputes between the campaigns centered in large part on the Republican National Committee’s $150,000 wardrobe for Ms. Palin and her family, but also on what McCain advisers considered Ms. Palin’s lack of preparation for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric of CBS News and her refusal to take advice from Mr. McCain’s campaign.
But behind those episodes may be a greater subtext: anger within the McCain camp that Ms. Palin harbored political ambitions beyond 2008.
As late as Tuesday night, a McCain adviser said, Ms. Palin was pushing to deliver her own speech just before Mr. McCain’s concession speech, even though vice-presidential nominees do not traditionally speak on election night. But Ms. Palin met up with Mr. McCain with text in hand. She was told no by Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, and Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain’s top strategist.
On Wednesday, two top McCain campaign advisers said that the clothing purchases for Ms. Palin and her family were a particular source of outrage for them. As they portrayed it, Ms. Palin had been advised by Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain aide, that she should buy three new suits for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in September and three additional suits for the fall campaign. The budget for the clothes was anticipated to be from $20,000 to $25,000, the officials said.
Instead, in a public relations debacle undermining Ms. Palin’s image as an everywoman “hockey mom,” bills came in to the Republican National Committee for about $150,000, including charges of $75,062 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue. The bills included clothing for Ms. Palin’s family and purchases of shoes, luggage and jewelry, the advisers said.
The advisers described the McCain campaign as incredulous about the shopping spree and said that Republican National Committee lawyers would likely go to Alaska to conduct an inventory and try to account for all that was spent.
Ms. Palin has defended her wardrobe as the idea of the Republican National Committee and said that she would give it back.
“Those clothes, they are not my property,” she said. “Just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the R.N.C. purchased.”
Advisers in the McCain campaign, in suggesting that Palin advisers had been leaking damaging information about the McCain campaign to the news media, said they were particularly suspicious of Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy aide who had a central role in preparing Ms. Palin for the vice-presidential debate.
As a result, two senior members of the McCain campaign said on Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had been fired from the campaign in its final days. But Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, and Mr. Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, said on Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had in fact not been dismissed. Mr. Scheunemann, who picked up the phone in his office at McCain campaign headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, responded that “anybody who says I was fired is either lying or delusional or a whack job.”
Mr. Scheunemann was referring to widely disseminated criticism by Mr. McCain’s advisers in the final days of the campaign that Ms. Palin, as first reported in Politico, was a “whack job.”
Whatever the permutations, the advisers said they strongly believed that Mr. Scheunemann was disclosing, as one put it, “a constant stream of poison” to William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a columnist for The New York Times. ...
And in all honesty, it's clear Kristol has long been more than a mouthpiece but an active player for one faction of the apparently bitterly internally divided McCain campaign. What business does the Times have to publish an active campaign player like that? Seriously? It's not that he's not allowed to have an opinion and have an ideology and a conservative ideology and even a controversial ideology, but the role he played was clearly far more directly connected to a specific internal campaign than any other columnist at a major place that I can think of. He's a campaign activist, a campaign internal player from that perch, as has been obvious for months, whoever is paying the bills. Times looks totally foolish for publishing someone who so lacked any degree of independence from what he was reporting and commenting on, whose conflicts of interest were so overwhelming.
Not that it matters now. But CNN reports that McCain campaign top foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann had been fired last week. Suspected of dissing McCain campaign aides in favor of Palin.
Would have been nice if someone had noticed?
Update: Fox News now apparently reporting that McCain reversed the firing decision to avoid a paralyzing development during the final week of the campaign.
Update II: Cnn:
In another sign of drama and disarray inside camp McCain, former campaign senior adviser Randy Scheunemann responded late Wednesday to CNN and insisted he was "not fired and never [have] been fired."
In addition, Michael Goldfarb, a McCain press aide and Scheunemann ally, also insisted he was not fired.
However, Goldfarb did concede that Scheunemann's campaign e-mail was cut off, and his blackberry was taken away late Friday. Goldfarb admits that senior McCain aides were mad at Scheunemann, and wanted to fire him, but he insists they stopped short of that, and instead simply turned off his campaign communication.
Goldfarb says Scheunemann was in the office on Saturday. He was, however, noticeably missing on election night when top aides to John McCain and Sarah Palin gathered in Phoenix, Arizona.
This is a couple days' old, but here's what Mike Allen was hearing about possible Dem cabinet. And check out if you didn't see it my piece on one possible security chief contender. Obama starts getting intelligence briefings tomorrow.
JTA: Condy Rice names undersecretary of state for political affairs and US Iran envoy William Burns to State Department transition team.
Time: Obama-Biden Transition announcement:
With Barack Obama and Joe Biden's election, this planning process will be now be formally organized as the Obama-Biden Transition Project, a 501(c)(4) organization to ensure a smooth transition from one administration to the next. The work of this entity will be overseen by three co-chairs: John Podesta, Valerie Jarrett, and Pete Rouse.
The co-chairs will be assisted by an advisory board comprised of individuals with significant private and public sector experience: Carol Browner, William Daley, Christopher Edley, Michael Froman, Julius Genachowski, Donald Gips, Governor Janet Napolitano, Federico Peña, Susan Rice, Sonal Shah, Mark Gitenstein, and Ted Kaufman. Gitenstein and Kaufman will serve as co-chairs of Vice President-elect Biden's transition team.
Supervising the day-to-day activities of the transition will be:
Transition Senior Staff:
Chris Lu – Executive Director
Dan Pfeiffer – Communications Director
Stephanie Cutter – Chief Spokesperson
Cassandra Butts – General Counsel
Jim Messina – Personnel Director
Patrick Gaspard – Associate Personnel Director
Christine Varney - Personnel Counsel
Melody Barnes – Co-Director of Agency Review
Lisa Brown – Co-Director of Agency Review
Phil Schiliro – Director of Congressional Relations
Michael Strautmanis – Director of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs
Katy Kale – Director of Operations
Brad Kiley – Director of OperationsThe phone number for the transition headquarters is 202-540-3000. The official website for the transition is www.change.gov and it will be live later today.
Hacked by whom? Newsweek:
The computer systems of both the Obama and McCain campaigns were victims of a sophisticated cyberattack by an unknown "foreign entity," prompting a federal investigation, NEWSWEEK reports today.
At the Obama headquarters in midsummer, technology experts detected what they initially thought was a computer virus—a case of "phishing," a form of hacking often employed to steal passwords or credit-card numbers. But by the next day, both the FBI and the Secret Service came to the campaign with an ominous warning: "You have a problem way bigger than what you understand," an agent told Obama's team. "You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system." The following day, Obama campaign chief David Plouffe heard from White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, to the same effect: "You have a real problem ... and you have to deal with it." The Feds told Obama's aides in late August that the McCain campaign's computer system had been similarly compromised. A top McCain official confirmed to NEWSWEEK that the campaign's computer system had been hacked and that the FBI had become involved.
Officials at the FBI and the White House told the Obama campaign that they believed a foreign entity or organization sought to gather information on the evolution of both camps' policy positions—information that might be useful in negotiations with a future administration. The Feds assured the Obama team that it had not been hacked by its political opponents. (Obama technical experts later speculated that the hackers were Russian or Chinese.) A security firm retained by the Obama campaign took steps to secure its computer system and end the intrusion. White House and FBI officials had no comment earlier this week.
The Guardian: More Trouble Than a Pitbull
Right. Election decided: "Forward, Send."So now we know what John McCain really thinks of his running mate Sarah Palin – and that's not just because of the awkward body language between them during his concession speech in Phoenix, Arizona.
An exasperated McCain has been telling friends in recent weeks that Palin is even more trouble than a pitbull.
In one joke doing the rounds, the Republican presidential candidate has been asking friends: what is the difference between Sarah Palin and a pitbull? The friendly canine eventually lets go, is the McCain punchline.
McCain's joke is a skit on Palin's most famous line after she was picked as his surprise running mate. Palin delighted the Republican base when she said the only difference between a pitbull and a hockey mom was lipstick.
We owe the new glimpse into the tense McCain/Palin relationship to Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the British ambassador to Washington. Sheinwald recently wrote a lengthy assessment of McCain in a telegram that winged its way across the Atlantic to Whitehall.
The jaws of senior mandarins dropped when they read Sheinwald's account of McCain's thoughts on Palin which the ambassador reportedly picked up from a military friend of McCain's. The telegram was restricted to an even smaller group of people than usual for fear of another embarrassing leak. "We took one look at this and hid it away," one Whitehall source said.
Politico's Mike Allen with more transition buzz:
President-elect Barack Obama is strongly considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a Cabinet post, Democratic officials told Politico.
Obama’s transition planners are weighing several other celebrity-level political stars for Cabinet posts, including retired Gen. Colin L. Powell for secretary of defense or education, the officials said.
Kennedy's cousin, Caroline Kennedy, who helped Obama lead his vice presidential search, is being considered for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, although some Obama officials doubt she would take the post. Obama is indebted to the Kennedy family for a hearty endorsement at a crucial point in the Democratic primaries.
WP: Rahm Emanuel mulling Obama chief of staff offer.
More:
Some Democrats have warned that Emanuel’s take-no-prisoners style could hurt Obama. But the president-elect wants to move fast to push his legislative agenda through the Democratic-controlled Congress — and Emanuel knows the Hill and power politics as well as anyone in town.
“Obama wants a bad cop, so he can be good cop 90 percent of the time,” an adviser said.
Emanuel, who at 49 is two years older than Obama, is the Democratic Caucus chairman, the fourth-highest-ranking member of the House Democratic leadership.
Emanuel was known for his hard-nosed tactics as a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton. After leaving the White House, he returned to Chicago as an investment bank managing director.
Friends of both men say that Obama likes Emanuel, and that Emanuel would be totally loyal. And Obama respects Emanuel’s knowledge of Washington, including the legislative process, and his reputation for getting things done.
Emanuel's first big assignment in Clinton's White House was helping pass the North American Free Trade Agreement, which riled many Democrats. He was a consistent voice for anti-crime measures, welfare reform and other initiatives that pushed against liberal orthodoxy.
In his personal views, he's a centrist, and despite a combative political style, he has good relations with many congressional Republicans, such as Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.).
Given how things are going and the complications of plotting a comeback, does the GOP really want Norm Coleman and Ted Stevens in the Senate?
Some things still shaking out. But Nate Silver seems to have called this stunningly well. Projection: 348.6 to 189.4. Result so far: 349 to 159. Popular vote projection: 52.3% to 46.2%. Popular vote so far is just about that.
Kevin Drum: "I had a weird dream last night. Really vivid too. Obama had already won the election and he was giving a big victory speech at Grant Park. Crowds were cheering, people were crying, and there were celebrations around the country. I swear, it felt as real as if it had really happened.
"But enough of that. So what do today's tracking polls look like? Has McCain made up any ground since yesterday?"
Already miss Sarah Palin?
Get this. "NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin's shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain's top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family — clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent ‘tens of thousands’ more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide … said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.”
(Apparently the GOP donor to Norm Coleman got stuck with some of the Palin family wardrobe expense).
"McCain himself rarely spoke to Palin during the campaign, and aides kept him in the dark about the details of her spending on clothes because they were sure he would be offended. Palin asked to speak along with McCain at his Arizona concession speech Tuesday night, but campaign strategist Steve Schmidt vetoed the request.”
That's Bill Kristol's gal.
The public has, however, clearly rejected the Republican party in its present configuration. It is always difficult for a party to maintain control of the White House after two terms in office. But both President Bush and Senator McCain made the task harder. Bush took too long to change course in Iraq and botched the response to Hurricane Katrina. McCain rarely stuck to one message or strategy. The financial crisis, for which we do not primarily blame either man, sealed the party’s fate.
But Republicans have been so unpopular for so long, and their failure has been so sweeping, that it is a mistake to dwell too long on the flaws of specific men or the consequences of particular events. Neither Bush nor McCain nor congressional Republicans gave much sign that they understood the frustrations that average Americans have felt over the last few years toward the economy and Washington, let alone that they had solutions. The exit polls demonstrate this failure again and again: in the questions about which party and candidates voters consider the most sympathetic to regular people; in the questions about who would do best for the economy; in the breakdown of the vote by income. ...
Recriminations have their place, and we look forward to a lively debate among conservatives about our future. But the most urgent task for conservatives is not to second-guess what decisions should have been made in 2003, 2005, or 2008. It is to devise an agenda — on health care, on taxes, on transportation, on energy — that Americans in the middle of the income distribution can be persuaded serves their interests going forward. If we can do that, we will not be, as so many pundits have said, at the end of a conservative era, but at the midpoint between two such eras. Doing that will take a great deal of wit. We will, alas, have plenty of time.
John Judis: The realignment.
... But there is another dimension to the new political geography created by the new post-industrial economy. If you look at a map of where the post-industrial metropolitan areas are concentrated, this is where the Democrats are now enjoying the greatest success. That includes high-tech metropolitan areas and regions like Boston, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area. But it also includes areas in what were the Republican south, such as Charlotte (a financial center), the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill research triangle in North Carolina, the northern Virginia suburbs, Orlando, and south Florida. That explains why a state like Colorado, with the Denver-Boulder metro area, has turned Democratic, or why metro areas within red states have done the same.
If you look at states Obama won, and compare them to the states that have the highest percentage of people who have completed an advanced degree, you find Obama won the 19 top states--all of them, which together account for 232 electoral votes. He won 21 of the top 24, accounting for 280 electoral votes. Conversely, McCain won the six states that had the lowest percentage of people with advanced degrees. That's almost a perfect match between Obama's and the Democrats' new majority and the contours of the new post-industrial economy.
In Colorado, for instance, Obama won post-grads, who make up 22 percent of the electorate, by 62 to 35 percent. In Pennsylvania, where they make up 24 percent, he won them by 61 to 37 percent. In New Hampshire, where they are 25 percent of the electorate, he won them by 68 to 31 percent. If you add those kind of numbers to Obama's and the Democrats' edge among minorities and working women, that is a good basis for winning elections.
To be sure, Obama and the Democrats needed to win about 40 percent of the white working class that used to be the bulwark of the party's New Deal majority. And the recession and financial crisis certainly helped bring them home. But the heart of the new majority is no longer blue-collar workers, but the professionals, minorities, and women who live and work within post-industrial metropolitan areas. And they are a growing part of the overall electorate, while the traditional working class is shrinking. According to Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira, the traditional white working class (who don't hold managerial, professional, or sales jobs) has already gone from 58 percent of the work force in 1940 to 25 percent in 2006. [...]
If Obama and the Democrats in Congress act boldly, they can not only arrest the downturn, but also lay the basis for an enduring majority. As was the case with Franklin Roosevelt, many of the measures necessary to combat the recession--such as spending money on physical and electronic infrastructure, adopting national health insurance--will also help ensure a Democratic majority. The rural South remained Democrat for generations because of Roosevelt's rural electrification program; a similar program for bringing broadband to the hinterland could lead these voters back to the Democratic Party. And national health insurance could play the same role in Democrats' future prospects that Social Security played in the perpetuation of the New Deal majority.
Americans, to be sure, are always reluctant to undertake ambitious government initiatives. This is, as historian Louis Hartz once demonstrated, a country founded on Lockean liberalism. But as Roosevelt discovered when he was elected, a national crisis creates a popular willingness to entertain dramatic initiatives. Obama and the Democrats will also not face the same formidable adversaries that Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton had to face. The Republican Party will be divided and demoralized after this defeat. Just as the Great Depression took Prohibition and the other great social issues of the 1920s off the popular agenda, this downturn has set aside the culture war of the last decades. It wasn't a factor in the presidential election. And the business lobbies that blocked national health insurance in 1994 will incur the public's wrath if they once again try to buy Congress.
If, on the other hand, Obama and the Democrats take the advice of official Washington and go slow--adopting incremental reforms, appeasing adversaries that have lost their clout--they could end up prolonging the downturn and discrediting themselves. What could have been a hard realignment could become not merely a soft realignment, but perhaps even an abortive one. That's not the kind of change that America needs or wants--and, hopefully, Obama and the Democrats understand that.
Britons awoke Wednesday to headlines like the Daily Express’ "A New World Dawns," and The Independent’s "Mr. President" in bold print below a full-page picture of Barack Obama wearing a winning grin.
From all-night television coverage to special, late editions of the morning papers, not printed until most polls had closed, the U.S. election has eclipsed all national news here. Although Obama’s win wasn’t announced until 4 a.m. GMT, early morning commuters across the capital already knew the verdict from across the pond.
"It’s fantastic news; great for the U.S., great for the world – just an absolute milestone in history," 41-year-old Londoner Jamie Davies said as he sipped a coffee from Starbucks before heading to work.
WP:
...In a heavy drizzle shortly after midnight, several thousand people filled the barricaded segment of Pennsylvania Avenue between 15th and 17th streets in front of the White House dancing and chanting "O-ba-ma!" and "Whose house? Obama's house!" Some sang "America the Beautiful" and "Star Spangled Banner."
At 14th and U streets NW, hundreds of Sen. Barack Obama's supporters chanted, "Yes, we can!" People danced on bus shelters. Strangers hugged.
And Greg Rhett emerged from the Madison Hotel, pumping his fist as tears welled.
"Now the healing begins," said Rhett, 50, a consultant who lives in Ward 7. Now I can tell my 4-year-old you really can be whatever you want to be," he said. "We're going to get it right this time." Behind him, his wife, Candace, screamed at the top of her lungs:
"President Obama!" ...
The most remarkable scene unfolded after midnight in front of the White House. Under the watchful eye of the Secret Service and the Park Police, a predominantly young crowd waved huge American flags and sported signs that said "Yes we did!" Some climbed fences around the construction site where inaugural reviewing stands are going up.
A group of about a half-dozen Georgetown athletes said they jogged spontaneously from campus after hearing of Obama's victory. "This might be the best day of my life," said Danielle Bailey, 18, a freshman from Florida.
Kyle Poole, 48, a financier, said he brought a flag because he felt "honored and proud."
"I was once a Republican," he said. "Then George Bush came to the White House and now I'm thrilled to be here with the flag."
As late as 2:30 a.m., revelers were streaming south on 16th St. by car and foot. In front of the darkened White House, chants of every stripe continued.
"Biden! Biden!"
On a chain link fence erected by inaugural construction crews, someone hung the sign: "Welcome Home Malia and Sasha!"
While many of those at the White House came from the celebration on U Street, others marched over from the 9:30 Club, where the hip hop group Flobot halted its concert when Obama began speaking. Club patrons headed to the White House.
"It's the moment of change," said Ana Sarmiento, 19, of Colorado. "I've never seen anything like it."
In neighborhoods throughout the District, celebrations spilled onto the streets and filled the air. Police reported the sound of gunfire in four of its seven patrol districts, but said there were no injuries.
Revelers turned U Street between 10th and 14th Streets into a virtual Mardi Gras with music and dancing. "The good guys won!" shouted Jay Freni, 36, a waiter. "This is the moral arc of Martin Luther King. This is justice and people want it." ...
NPR: Popular vote close to 52% to 46%, EV close to 350 to fewer than 200, more than two to one.
Like many conservative writers, my good opinion of Barack Obama diminished somewhat over the course of the campaign. Part of this was the inevitable hardening of the partisan arteries that takes place during a Presidential year, but part of it was that Obama's particular gifts - his combination of charisma and thoughtfulness, and his ability to project sympathy for positions he does not himself hold - created unreasonable initial expectations for the kind of actual compromises he might make with conservatives. [...]
So I was disappointed in Barack Obama, but I also realize that his campaign wasn't addressed to me: It was addressed to the constituents of a potential center-left majority, and that's the majority he won tonight. Whether this majority holds together will depend on how he governs, but for the moment he has achieved something that no Democratic politician has achieved in a generation: He's carved out a mandate to take America at least some distance in a leftward direction, and he has left the conservative opposition demoralized, disorganized, and arguably self-destructing. Obviously, this achievement was made possible by the blunders of his predecessor, the floundering of the McCain campaign, and the good fortune of running against the incumbent party during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But great politicians are almost always lucky politicians, and Obama's good fortune does not diminish the magnitude of his triumph tonight, and the credit that he and his campaign deserve for the race they've run.
And then, of course, there's the fact that Obama has just been elected President of a nation in which he could have been bought and sold as a slave just seven generations ago. I don't think there are any words adequate to the occasion of America electing its first black President, so I'll just say this: This may be a bleak day for the Republican Party and for conservatism, but come what may in the years ahead, it's a great day for our country. Barack Obama deserves congratulations, tonight, but so does the nation he's about to govern: We've come a long, long way.
Ha'aretz editorial: US election democracy at its best. BBC: The United States has seen the biggest transformation in its standing in the world since the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in November 1960. Politico: History happens, Obama wins. NYT: OBAMA: Racial barriers fall as voters embrace call for change. McCain loses as Bush legacy is rejected. NYT: For many abroad, an ideal renewed. WP: Magnitude of Obama's win suggests the country itself might be in a gravitational pull toward a rebirth that some were slow to recognize.
WP: The Transition:
Avoiding the same mistakes is one reason Obama is eager to have the hard-nosed Emanuel become the White House gatekeeper. (Podesta, former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle and ex-commerce secretary William M. Daley remain other possibilities if Emanuel unexpectedly says no.) The Chicago lawmaker, elected in 2002, moved rapidly up the House leadership ladder and aspires to become speaker. Obama would be asking Emanuel to give up that ambition because he believes that his tenure in the Clinton White House, combined with his Capitol Hill experience, make him uniquely qualified for the job, sources close to Obama said. Emanuel has wrestled in recent days over whether to take the job, sources close to him said.
The transition process started quietly about 10 weeks ago, when Obama asked Podesta to begin a full-scale review of the federal government and to compile lists of potential hires. Podesta, who now runs the Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive think tank, created a transition board that included Clinton administration alumni, CAP colleagues and several of Obama's outside advisers. Obama has participated little in this exercise beyond urging aides to look at all sorts of candidates, including Republicans (retiring Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska is most often mentioned) and individuals from the business community.
Among those under consideration who would mark a departure from the tradition of rewarding loyalists and party leaders include New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein for education secretary and retired Marine Corps commandant Jim Jones for national security adviser. Both are viewed as non-ideological and have the potential to rankle liberal Democrats. Obama officials said they would look at innovative firms such as Google for potential applicants. One prospect for a top administration job, possibly at the Office of Management and Budget, who would test the Washington establishment is Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), a crusader for government reform who annually publishes a dire alternative report on the federal budget.
The Obama shortlist includes plenty of traditional names: former Treasury secretaries Lawrence H. Summers or Robert E. Rubin could be tapped for that post again. Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is another possibility. Alternatives to Jones include Susan Rice and James B. Steinberg, Obama advisers who also served under Clinton. Eric H. Holder Jr., another Clinton veteran and Obama friend, is a candidate for attorney general, as is Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano. Other prominent women likely to be approached for Cabinet posts include Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and Michigan Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm.
Obama will also have to decide what roles many of his top political aides might play in the White House, such as campaign manager David Plouffe, chief strategist David Axelrod, and Robert Gibbs and Dan Pfeiffer, who led his communications team. Plouffe, for one, has announced internally that he will return to private life, at least for the time being.
While Obama contemplates how to fill the top jobs, Podesta and his team will size up the bureaucracies these individuals would inherit.
One group, led by Donald Gips, former domestic policy adviser to Gore, and Melody Barnes, a CAP senior executive, is overseeing an agency-by-agency review that will be conducted on-site by small teams. Their aim is to identify budget issues, administrative problems and policy priorities, and their findings will be presented in written reports to every Obama Cabinet secretary and administrator.
Separate policy working groups are evaluating Obama campaign promises in the context of current budget realities. One team, chaired by Steinberg and including Rice and Harvard University professor Sarah Sewall, is evaluating international scenarios that Obama may confront. ...
Grant Park. President-Elect Barack Obama: "We are and always will be the United States of America.... Change has come to America. ... I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. ... This is your victory. I know you didn't just do this to win the election. You didn't do this for me. We know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are greatest in a lifetime. Two wars. A planet in peril. The biggest financial crisis in a generation. ... We may not get there in one year or in one term. But America I promise you, we as a people will get there." Crowd: "Yes we can." Obama: "There will be setbacks and false starts. ... Above all I will ask you to join in the remaking of this nation block by block.... What began 21 months ago cannot end on this autumn night. Only chance for us to make this change. It can't happen without you, a new spirit of sacrifice. ... While Democratic party had a great victory tonight we do so with intention to heal the divide. ... We are not enemies, but friends. .... For those Americans whose support I did not yet earn, I need your help ...I hear your voices, and I will be your president too. ...To those who would tear the world down, we will defeat you... That is the true genius of this country, America can change. ...America, we have come so far, .... but there is so much more to do. ... This is our chance, this is our call. To reaffirm that out of many, we are one.... Yes we can. ..."
MSNBC: Obama won Colorado, and Florida.
A decent McCain concession speech.
1135pm: Nevada went for Obama.
CNN projects that Barack Obama elected president of the United States.
NYT: Obama wins election.
10pm: CNN projects Obama wins Iowa.
McCain wins Utah and Kansas.
10:12: CNN projects McCain wins Arkansas.
MSNBC Chuck Todd saying Florida Rep. Rep Rick Keller went down, Dem won, Todd's "canary in the coal mine." Todd: "That's what tells you what's going on in Florida."
10:30: NBC reporting that Rahm Emanuel has been offered chief of staff job in an Obama White House.
Wow. Connecticut moderate Republican rep. Chris Shays loses. Northeast has gone completely blue.
Daily Show coverage hilarious. Asif Mandhi reporting from Al Qaeda headquarters. Not very happy about Obama. "His madrassah turned out to be Harvard Law, which is pretty liberal."
10:45: NPR projects Obama wins Virginia. Fox calls Virginia for Obama.
NPR: Virginia now has two Democratic Senators and went for a Democratic presidential candidate.
11pm: CNN calls Virginia for Obama, 51% to 49%. Not gone Republican for president since LBJ in 1964.
Fox reporting that Democrat Tom Udall wins Senate seat from New Mexico. Fourth Dem pick up in Senate tonight (NC, New Hampshire, Virginia, NM).
Fox's Brit Hume seems in a haze.
CNN: McCain wins Georgia. Oklahoma. Already won Kentucky.
CNN: Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell reelected from Kentucky.
FOX projects Ohio for Obama. NBC projects Ohio for Obama.
930pm: CNN calls Ohio for Obama.
So much for Joe the Plumber.
MSNBC saying Florida looks like it will go for Obama.
MSNBC: Louisiana for McCain.
MSNBC saying New Mexico will go for Obama.
940pm.
CNN just did a projection which makes it seem as if McCain can't win, even if he picks up Virginia, Florida, Iowa, Montana, New Mexico, etc. etc.
NPR projecting Kay Hagan beats Elizabeth Dole for Senate from North Carolina. Shaheen beats Sununu in New Hampshire. Mark Warner wins Senate seat from Virginia.
NPR projects Obama wins big in Pennsylvania.
NYT:
The Iranian Parliament voted to dismiss a top minister on Tuesday, in a setback for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad eight months before he faces presidential elections.
The Parliament dismissed the official, Ali Kordan, the interior minister, after he admitted to faking his university degree and tried to bribe members of Parliament not to impeach him.
The dismissal underlines the assertiveness of the Parliament at a time Mr. Ahmadinejad is struggling to cope with a growing economic crisis. Inflation is running at 30 percent and falling oil prices in a country that has the second largest known oil reserves in the world are undermining the budget.
Analysts said the vote confirmed the division between conservative forces in Iranian politics ahead of the presidential vote in June next year when Mr. Ahmadinejad faces re-election.
Out of 247 present at the vote in Parliament, 188 members voted to dismiss Mr. Kordan while only 45 legislators voted against his dismissal. Fourteen members abstained.
The dismissal means that Mr. Ahmadinejad must now submit his whole cabinet to a vote of confidence before Parliament.
NYT: "The diplomatic tangle between Venezuela, Argentina and the United States reached a new pitch on Monday when a jury in Miami convicted a wealthy Venezuelan businessman of acting as an 'unregistered agent' of Venezuela on American soil."
Just Out: Transition RumInt/ Intelligence: A profile of Congresswoman Jane Harman, a contender for a top security job in the next administration:
Go read.Petite, blond, elegant in a nubby suit, a vaguely patrician accent hinting at her Harvard Law School and Smith College education, Jane Harman has a polished, camera-ready exterior, but an inner core of grit, discipline, and unquenched ambition. An avid runner who completed the Marine Corps marathon last year, the high-powered seven-term California Democrat is a frequent fixture on the Sunday television-news talk shows, where she holds forth on intelligence and terrorism issues and jousts with Republican lawmakers. The television appearances are part of the congresswoman's official duties (she chairs the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, and is the former ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee), but they have also been part of Harman's strategy of auditioning for a role as a security chief for the next president [...]
At a forum on reforming the intelligence community held at the elite Council on Foreign Relations in June, Harman and Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee, sat in facing chairs on the dais, their banter as well practiced as that of a long-married couple. "[The next administration has to] repair the relationship with Congress," Hoekstra told moderator Joseph J. Helman. "It is broken." "I actually agree with every single thing Peter said," Harman echoed, wryly leaving the Republican to do the Bush bashing. "I think the next administration needs to have a public dialogue…about a legal framework around all of our post-9/11 policies." [...]
Harman has done what few of her fellow Democratic lawmakers found possible or even desirable: She built strong, working friendships not just with Republicans across the aisle but with key officials in perhaps the most obstructionist Republican White House that Congress has ever encountered. "Her focus is always on national security first, and her partisan leanings always are much farther down the list," says a congressional intelligence staffer. "She has criticized Democrats who she thinks are not putting national security issues first. But she has also preserved definite criticism on the Bush administration. She has taken on people when they have abused their power and violated the Constitution. She is not a shrinking violet." [...]
Now Harman has set her sights on a higher goal: an appointment as director of national intelligence, overseeing the vast almost $50 billion, 16-agency US intelligence community—or, alternatively, Homeland Security secretary. ...
Reuters: Jury selection begins for trial of suspected arms dealer Monzer al Kassar.
St. Pete Times: Tampa McCain rally, where is everybody? "About 30 minutes before John McCain is scheduled to lead a rally outside Raymond James Stadium, looks like there's maybe 1,000 people here. What's up with that? On the day before the election? Bush drew at least 15,000 people to a rally just across the street on the Sunday before the 2004 election. 'We are the quiet majority that goes out and gets things done. ... I smell victory,' said state Rep. Kevin Ambler. Good thing he smells it, because it's hard to see it with this crowd." More from CNN: "Republican Gov. Crist, who had previously agreed to do interviews with CNN and various local affiliates, bolted right after the rally with no explanation." Update: WSJ: Mark Salter is smiling.
Artist Peter Kuper's brilliant sketch of his election anxieties.
Via my colleague Tim Luddy.
Update: Here's the other side.
Christopher Hitchens: McCain's Shameful Slur, against Rashid Khalidi:
...My main point, though, is not to call attention to the bullying and demagogy of McCain's attack. It is to observe how completely it undermines any claim on his part to foreign-policy experience. Khalidi has been known to me for some time and can easily be read and consulted by anyone with the remotest curiosity about the Israeli-Arab dispute. He is highly renowned, well beyond the borders of his own discipline, for his measure and care and scruple in weighing the issue. If he is seriously to be compared to a "neo-Nazi," then the Republican nominee has put the United States in the unbelievable position of slandering the most courageously "moderate" of the Palestinian Arabs as a brownshirt and a fascist. What then has been the point of every negotiation on a two-state solution since President George H.W. Bush convened the peace conference in Madrid in 1991? Nazis, after all, are to be crushed, not accommodated. One would have to think hard before coming up with a more crazy and irresponsible statement on any subject. Once again, it seems that McCain utterly lost his bearings....
McCain saw a chance to deal a cheap and low blow, and he had the ideally ignorant deputy to reinforce him. The slander, after all, might get them through another news cycle and perhaps adhere some defamatory mud to their opponent. Who cares that it made the United States of America look thuggish and ignorant and petty in the eyes of any thinking person in the Middle East? Anyone who does care should be getting ready to vote against this humiliating ticket, a team that so farcically and horribly unites the senescent and the puerile.
Check out journalist Jeb Sharp's series on "How Wars End" at the BBC/PRI public radio program the World.
Paul Krugman speculates on the future of the Republican party, and says it's likely to become more extreme:
More thoughts on the future from Kevin Drum.You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.
Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.
Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place. [...]
I’m not saying that the G.O.P. is about to become irrelevant. Republicans will still be in a position to block some Democratic initiatives, especially if the Democrats fail to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. ...
But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.
This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. ...
Wired's Nathan Hodge:
Thanks, but no thanks.CIA-linked private military contractor Evergreen Defense & Security Services offered to post sentries at Oregon polling stations on election day, "detaining troublemakers" and making sure voters "do not get out of control."
In an e-mail to local election supervisors, obtained by the McMinnville, Oregon News Register, Evergreen president Tom Wiggins said he "recognized the potential conflict" that could occur on November 4th. "Never has there been a more heated battle in the race for president."
The company, he said, 'proposes to post sentries at each voting center on November 4th to assure that disputes amongst citizens do not get out of control. All guards will be unarmed, but capable of stopping any violence that may occur and detaining troublemakers until law enforcement arrives.'
Evergreen's website describes its security arm as having "nearly five decades of experience working with the U.S. Armed Forces, the Department of Defense, the Department of Interior, the United Nations, NASA, and the U.S. Air Mobility Command. Many of our contracts include highly sensitive work-scope, and take place in locations ranging from the deserts of the Middle East to the jungles of South America to the highest peaks of Mt. McKinley in Alaska."
According to the News Register, Evergreen "exudes the gung-ho patriotism that is associated with the company founder, a political conservative who enjoys close ties with the federal government and military."
No kidding. Back in the late '80s, the company "acknowledged one agreement under which his companies provide occasional jobs and cover to foreign nationals the CIA wants taken out of other countries or brought into the United States." More recently, Evergreen's parent company flew Bill O'Reilly into Kuwait in 2006, according to SourceWatch.
But rest easy: The Oregonian reports that the company struck out with its sales pitch.
Update: Reader PS notes, "Since all polling in Oregon is done by mail, I wonder what 'polling stations' they were going to post sentries at?" Wired's Noah Shachtman points out that, "Ballots are mailed, and can then be returned to local election offices by 8pm on Tuesday."
The WP's Chris Cillizza final electoral map prediction: "In our final Fix electoral map, we put Barack Obama at 319 electoral votes and John McCain as 219 electoral votes -- a significant margin of victory for the senator from Illinois. Our final map splits the two states that decided the last two presidential elections -- Florida and Ohio -- between Obama and McCain. In the final analysis we put Florida in Obama's column -- based on the massive voter registration and turnout operation built by the Democrat in the state -- and gave Ohio to McCain due to a belief that Obama's ability to grow the electorate in a state so closely targeted in 2004 is far more limited than in other places."
TNR: McCain Keating Five leaker. "The two investigations into the leaks suggested McCain's involvement but were officially inconclusive. New evidence, obtained in recent weeks, again points back to the McCain camp. The investigator of those leaks now says that he does not doubt that they came from McCain or his team. A reporter who possessed evidence in the Keating case now says he believes that McCain was the source and got away with it. Finally, a senator who has emerged as a key backer of McCain's presidential campaign turns out to have authored a letter stating flatly that McCain was the source of the damning leaks. Put together, a large record of evidence now points in the direction of Senator McCain. Far from McCain's reputation of putting 'country first,' these leaks depict a formidable politician willing to go through great lengths to maintain his standing. More than McCain's relationship with Keating, it is the story of the Keating investigation leaks that voters should know." Must-read. More from Mike Tomasky. Some parallels in how McCain used Abramoff investigation to his political benefit too, no? And McCain's campaign to destroy those Republican party forces which hurt him in 2000, while bolstering his "reformer" image?
Abramoff's old firm Greenberg Traurig hired McCain foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann to advise it on the Senate investigation.Perhaps no episode burnished Mr. McCain’s image as a reformer more than his stewardship three years ago of the Congressional investigation into Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Republican Indian gambling lobbyist who became a national symbol of the pay-to-play culture in Washington. The senator’s leadership during the scandal set the stage for the most sweeping overhaul of lobbying laws since Watergate.
“I’ve fought lobbyists who stole from Indian tribes,” the senator said in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination this month.
But interviews and records show that lobbyists and political operatives in Mr. McCain’s inner circle played a behind-the-scenes role in bringing Mr. Abramoff’s misdeeds to Mr. McCain’s attention — and then cashed in on the resulting investigation. The senator’s longtime chief political strategist, for example, was paid $100,000 over four months as a consultant to one tribe caught up in the inquiry, records show.
Nate Silver: "Polls conducted since our update last evening suggest some tightening toward John McCain, but he sits well behind both nationwide and in many key battleground states and remains a long-shot to win the election. ... Overall, our model shows McCain closing Obama's gap in the national popular vote to about 5.4 points. His win percentage has increased to 6.3 percent, from 3.8 percent last night."
Economist and Predator State author Jamie Galbraith to the NYT's question, "What do you think the future holds for Vice President Cheney?" Galbraith: "I suspect that Cheney will spend much of his life fending off legal challenges, but that is a different area. I'm quite sure that the human rights issues will follow him for the rest of his life."
Sen. Barack Obama holds a sizable advantage over John McCain just two days before the longest and most expensive presidential campaign in history comes to a close.
After nearly two years of ads, rallies, debates and barnstorming, Obama is up 54 to 43 percent among likely voters, in the new Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll. And the ranks of persuadable voters has dwindled to 7 percent heading into the final day. One part of McCain's steep challenge is that more than a quarter of the probable electorate has already voted - among these early birds, 59 percent said they voted for Obama, 40 percent for McCain.
Obama has firmly reestablished his advantage on handling the economy (back up to 15 points) and beaten back a challenge on taxes (he's +11 there). On handling an unexpected major crisis, what had been a double-digit McCain lead to start the fall campaign, is now a 6-point advantage for Obama.
The Bush administration must give to a federal court documents related to government wiretapping of domestic communications without a warrant after the September 11 attacks, according to a recent court order.
U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy signed the order on Friday requiring the U.S. Justice Department to provide the court for private review certain documents that were sought in lawsuits filed by the civil liberties groups.
Kennedy ordered the administration to provide the documents from the White House Office of Legal Counsel by November 17, and said he will review them in private to see if their release would endanger national security.
The department argued that it was serving as the attorney for the administration and thus attorney-client privilege would allow it to keep classified information from public viewing, but Kennedy said its arguments were too vague.
San Diego Union-Trib: Cunningham co-conspirator Tommy Kontogiannis federal informant for USA/SDNY
Judge Larry Burns' brief here (.pdf).In a previously sealed court filing from a federal judge in San Diego criticized prosecutors for inaccurately describing the details surrounding the secret guilty plea of a figure in the Randy “Duke” Cunningham scandal.
In a highly unusual move, U.S. District Judge Larry Burns sent a 15-page brief of his own to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, curtly noting that the court filings of prosecutors “mischaracterizes substantial, relevant portions” of the case.
The brief by Burns also reveals some new details about the guilty plea of Thomas Kontogiannis, a Long Island financier who pleaded guilty to money laundering during a highly unusual secret hearing in February 2007.
Kontogiannis was cooperating with federal officials in an “investigation implicating national security,” Burns wrote.And he was cooperating with Justice Department lawyers from the Southern District of New York – not, as some thought at the time, with prosecutors in San Diego. [...]
Ray Granger, a defense attorney who represented a Kontogiannis nephew who also was charged in the case, said the brief makes it clear that San Diego prosecutors had to take the brunt of the criticism for a secrecy arrangement done at the behest of New York prosecutors.
"Sarkozy" to Palin: "From my house I can see Belgium." More via Hilzoy and commenter Editor: "Funny bit: He said the French equivalent of 'Joe the Plumber' is 'Marcel the guy with bread under his armpit.'"
Gallup: "Barack Obama leads John McCain in Gallup Poll Daily tracking interviewing conducted Wednesday through Friday by an identical 52% to 42% margin among both traditional likely voters and expanded likely voters. Obama leads by a similar 52% to 41% margin among all registered voters."
Former World Jewish Congress chairman Edgar Bronfman endorses "tough idealist" Obama:
Here's some of Bronfman's piece:Bronfman, a former head of the World Jewish Congress, wrote in the piece titled "Israel's Best Interest is a Morally Strong America" that an honest broker was needed to push Israelis and Palestinians toward a two-state solution.
He said the Illinois senator could fill this role, being "a tough idealist who has the courage to imagine an America that may inspire hope, not fear, in the Middle East and around the world."
Conversely, Bronfman scathingly criticized President George W. Bush's policies in the region, which he said McCain would continue, as only increasing the dangers Israel faces from its enemies. The philanthropist said the most immediate of them was from a nuclear Iran, adding that, "Under the Bush administration, conversations with the Iranians began only at the end of May 2007 and have been badly mishandled."
John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as running mate is the towering example of his poor judgment. Palin's ignorance of public affairs is monumental. Especially disturbing to the Jewish voter should be her willing acceptance of the campaign assignment of demagogy, which has stirred up racism and hate. The prospect of our having a 72-year-old president in poor health raises the real possibility that Palin could be our president, a thoroughly frightening thought. (I am well aware, in my eightieth year, of the flagging energy of any 72-year-old.) McCain's choice of Palin was a bid to the extremists in the Republican party, not the considered choice of a man who puts his country first.
Barack Obama is the leader who can begin to undo some of the damage done by Bush's policies. His background as an American who has lived among diverse cultures makes him sensitive to the cultural and religious motives that shape conflicts. He is cerebral, measured, calm, and pragmatic. By his character, he will engage these issues with more than stonewalling and weapons. He is brilliant in his choices of advisors. He is a tough idealist who has the courage to imagine an America that may inspire hope, not fear, in the Middle East and around the world.
Yossi Sarid in Haaretz: McCain would be as bad for Israel as Bush was:
Only one state is still interested in McCain's services - Israel. Only Israel insists on continuing to live in a bubble. It is wrong, as usual. Bush was bad for the world and especially for us. America's ongoing wallowing in Iraq and its loss of deterrence power are bad for Israel, which isn't pulling out of anywhere. Israel is staying here, in the Middle East.
Bush has forgotten us and the Palestinians. He refused to advance the talks with Syria and ignored - like us - the pan-Arab peace initiative lying on the table since 2002. McCain will be another such friend, whose friendship ensures calamity. Nobody can say what kind of president Obama will be, but at least he has the benefit of the doubt. McCain, on the other hand, does not bring new hope. Not even dubious hope.
Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan:
The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes:
He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice. ...