Barack Obama sought to stamp out signs of discord yesterday as his team blamed Bill and Hillary Clinton for tarnishing the presidential transition with the type of psychological drama and leaks that marked their years in the White House.

As the uncertainty over whether Mrs Clinton would accept the job of Secretary of State dragged on, aides from both camps were engaged in anonymous briefings that echoed the bitter exchanges of their marathon primary battle earlier this year.

After the Obama camp let it be known that one potential stumbling block for the former First Lady was her husband’s overseas financial ties and list of foreign donors to his presidential library, Mr Clinton said he had agreed to all the conditions that had been sought by the transition team - including handing over a list of more than 200,000 benefactors. “I’ll do whatever they want,” he said.

Some in the Obama team saw that as a manoeuvre to box in the President-elect by forcing him formally to offer Mrs Clinton the post. Mr Obama is said to have known exactly what he was getting into when he discussed the job with Mrs Clinton during a meeting in Chicago last week, and is confident enough in himself to make such a bold gesture to his former rival. A Gallup poll showed that 57 per cent of Americans favoured the move.

The excitement that greeted Mr Obama’s victory little more than two weeks ago has not yet disappeared. But it is increasingly mingled with other emotions, ranging from frustration to a faint sense of dread.

Mr Obama has scarcely been seen this week while he puts together his administration. Instead, news has been dominated by a series of leaks about Cabinet appointments: Eric Holder for the post of Attorney-General; Tom Daschle for Health; Janet Napolitano, the Arizona Governor, for Homeland Security; and possibly Penny Pritzker for Commerce.

There was growing speculation last night that Mr Obama might keep Robert Gates, President Bush’s Defence Secretary - a decision that will be unpopular with the liberal, antiwar wing of the Democratic Party.

Such disclosures are a departure for Mr Obama’s team which for two years ran an extraordinarily tight campaign but is now struggling to maintain discipline as it moves, in the words of one senior Democrat, “from a family business to multinational corporation”.

In vain, advisers have been ordered to shut up. John Podesta, the head of the transition team, said: “If you leak, you’re gone.” Even so, murmured complaints can be heard about the number of Clinton-era officials who are being lined up for top jobs. Having campaigned so hard and for so long on a message of change rather than experience, Mr Obama appears to have reversed course in the past fortnight.

This week, though, has been overshadowed by the psychological “will-she, won’t she?” drama surrounding Mrs Clinton. It does not augur well for cooperation between his much vaunted “team of rivals” that the Clinton and Obama camps are already pointing the finger of blame at each other.

Source:  Times Online

Watch Eric Holder get nailed with the truth:

The last cog is the "individual mandate." This requirement that everyone buy coverage has grabbed most media scrutiny of the Baucus plan, because Mr. Obama opposed it during the campaign. But the many moving parts don't work together unless the young and healthy foot the bill for care of the older and sicker — one reason Hillary Clinton kept nagging Mr. Obama about the individual mandate during the primaries.

(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com …

Most notable among the petitions for clemency granted during Holder’s tenure is the request from 16 members of a Puerto Rican Marxist terrorist group, the Armed Forces of National Liberation, known by its Spanish acronym FALN, which engaged in a robbery and terror campaign in both the U.S. and Puerto Rico during the 1970s and 1980s.

The clemency petition, which was supported by Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-N.Y.), Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) and Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.), became the subject of fiery controversy after it was revealed that none of the convicted terrorists had renounced violence and that their victims had not been consulted during the clemency process.

The clemency petition was opposed by the FBI, the U.S. attorneys who had prosecuted the terrorists, and even the Justice Department’s own Office of Pardon Attorney – an office that was established to deal with the Clinton administration's overwhelming number of pardon requests.

(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com …

POLITICO - What is Barack Obama thinking?

We’ve heard all the rational arguments: Hillary Rodham Clinton has more star power than Richard Holbrooke, more discipline than Bill Richardson, fewer bad jokes than John F. Kerry. She’s tough and competent. She’s a woman and a Democrat, making space for a Republican guy at Defense. It would get her out of the Senate. Both Obama and Clinton loved Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, “Team of Rivals.”

But the sum of those parts seems something less than the whole explanation for Obama’s first great presidential gamble: his move toward giving his former adversary, whose judgment on foreign policy he criticized relentlessly, by offering her the most important Cabinet position in his administration.

Neither Holbrooke, Kerry nor Richardson would bring Clinton’s downsides: Her towering, volcanic husband; her own ambitions; and the endless speculation about the two of them.

“She brings so much to the table,” said Abner Mikva, a former Clinton White House counsel and an Obama mentor. “On the other hand, there are the obvious downsides, the conflicts that that her husband has.”

Insiders around Obama say the X factor at play is Obama’s icy tolerance for risk, and his belief in the power of the grand gesture.

Throughout his political career, Obama has had a tendency to “go big,” as his aides say, with dramatic moves and giant spectacles punctuating his run for president — his head-on race speech, his presidential-style tour of the Middle East and Europe, an acceptance speech held in a football stadium.

The Clinton move, like those, marries an arguably practical choice with lofty symbolism: He’s enlarging his own administration by bringing in one of the leading figures in American politics, and delivering on a promise of a new politics that doesn’t play favorites or hold grudges.

“It says that he has the personal confidence to engage someone of the notoriety and substance of Sen. Clinton,” said Democratic Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida, an early Obama supporter and prominent campaign surrogate. “Implementing change is an exciting exercise.”

Indeed, Obama’s transition appears suffused with a sense that the actors are living a historic moment, for which extraordinary gestures are appropriate.

“This would really give her a very unique platform to really be a part of this historic time we’re living in right now, even greater than her role as a powerful senator,” said Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan of Missouri, another early Obama backer.

Read More Here

Just as ex-President Bill Clinton pledged Wednesday to prove there are no new skeletons in his closet that could derail his wife's chances of becoming secretary of state, top Obama sources suggested loose-lipped Clintonistas abide by their rules: If caught leaking, you will pay the price.

"They have been strategic about what they leak each day," said an Obama insider, who acknowledged word around the transition office in Chicago is that Obama himself is miffed at the leaks. "This [leaking] isn't coming out of our shop," added another irked Obama official.

(Excerpt) Read More in the New York Daily News

Holder was the Clinton administration’s last deputy attorney general, succeeding Jamie Gorelick in 1997 under Janet Reno. That appointment marked the final elevation in a series of Clinton-era promotions that punctuate his résumé. Holder’s rise, like Obama’s own, is of symbolic significance, as he now has been nominated to be the nation’s first black attorney general. Symbolism, however, cannot camouflage the fact that Holder is a conventional, check-the-boxes creature of the Left.

He is convinced justice in America needs to be “established” rather than enforced; he’s excited about hate crimes and enthusiastic about the constitutionally dubious Violence Against Women Act; he’s a supporter of affirmative action and a practitioner of the statistical voodoo that makes it possible to burden police departments with accusations of racial profiling and the states with charges of racially skewed death-penalty enforcement; he’s more likely to be animated by a touchy-feely Reno-esque agenda than traditional enforcement against crimes; he’s in favor of ending the detentions of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay and favors income redistribution to address the supposed root causes of crime.

In any other time, Holder would simply be an uninspired choice. But these are not ordinary times — we face a serious, persistent threat from Islamist terrorists. At the same time, Democrats have expressed outrage over both the alleged politicization of the Justice Department and the reckless disregard of its storied traditions. For these times, it is difficult to imagine a worse choice for AG than Eric Holder.

Much has been made, and appropriately so, of Holder’s untoward performance in the final corrupt act of the Clinton administration: the pardons issued in the departing president’s final hours. Of these, most notorious is the case of Marc Rich, an unrepentant fugitive wanted on extensive fraud, racketeering, and trading-with-the-enemy charges — but granted a pardon nonetheless thanks to the intercession of his ex-wife, a generous donor to Clinton’s library and legal-defense fund.

Holder’s role was aptly described as “unconscionable” by a congressional committee. He steered Rich’s allies to retain the influential former White House counsel Jack Quinn (Holder later conceded he hoped Quinn would help him become attorney general in a Gore administration); he helped Quinn directly lobby Clinton, doing an end-run around the standard pardon process (including DOJ’s pardon attorney); and he kept the deliberations hidden from the district U.S. attorney and investigative agencies prosecuting Rich so they couldn’t learn about the pardon application and register their objections.

There’s more. In 1999, over the objections of the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and prosecuting attorneys, Holder supported Clinton’s commutation of the sentences of 16 FALN conspirators. These pardons — of terrorists who even Holder has conceded had not expressed any remorse — were issued in the months after al-Qaeda’s 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, when the Clinton administration was pretending to be the scourge of terrorism. The commutations were nakedly political, obviously designed by Clinton to assist his wife’s impending Senate campaign by appealing to New York’s substantial Puerto Rican vote.

Equally noxious were the stealthy pardons of Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans — Weather Underground terrorists associated with Obama’s friends Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn — issued on the same day as the Rich pardon. Rosenberg and Evans had been serving decades-long sentences for bombings targeting American government facilities. With Holder again helping to circumvent the pardon process and to evade objections from prosecutors, the terrorists’ jail terms were commuted just weeks after the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

Under Holder’s stewardship, moreover, the Justice Department chose, in the Dickerson case, to oppose its own prosecutors and seek reversal of the conviction of a bank robber whose voluntary confession had been elicited without Miranda warnings. Taking the Justice Department's signal, the Supreme Court overruled the lower courts and vacated the conviction, upending 30 years of precedent which had held that Miranda was not part of the core Fifth Amendment guarantee. Thanks to this ruling, rendered in the comfort of pre-9/11 complacence, terrorists tried in civilian courts — which is where Obama and Holder want them to be tried — will enjoy a powerful argument against the admission of critical confession evidence.

To be blunt, Holder is a terrible selection. If there’s any Obama cabinet nomination that Republicans feel moved to oppose, this should be it.

Source:  National Review

Obama is enlisting former Senate leader Tom Daschle as his health secretary. Hillary Rodham Clinton seemed more likely than ever to be his secretary of state. Clinton is deciding whether to take that post as America's top diplomat, her associates said Wednesday.

Obama is ready to announce that his attorney general will be Eric Holder, the Justice Department's No. 2 when Clinton's husband was president. Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, is another veteran of the Clinton White House.

A few names that have bubbled up for Cabinet posts don't have strong Clinton connections. Several news organizations reported Thursday that Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano is Obama's primary choice to be secretary of the Homeland Security Department. The New York Times, citing Democrats with knowledge of the process, said Napolitano was about to be offered the job. The Washington Post and The Politico Web site also reported that she was Obama's choice.

Chicago businesswoman Penny Pritzker, who was national finance chairman for Obama's presidential campaign, is his leading choice for commerce secretary, the Times reported. The newspaper said Pritzker was in the final stages of vetting by Obama's transition team.

Daschle's selection to head the Health and Human Services Department — confirmed Wednesday but not yet announced — isn't at the same level of Cabinet prestige as the top spots at the State and Justice departments. But the health post could be more important in an Obama administration than in some others, making Daschle a key player in helping steer the president-elect's promised health care reforms.

Daschle could push Obama for quick action on health care reform next year, if he follows his own advice.

Daschle said efforts during the Clinton administration, led by Hillary Clinton, took too long and went into too much detail, giving every interest group an opportunity to find something they didn't like about the plan.

"The next president should act immediately to capitalize on the goodwill that greets any incoming administration. If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it," Daschle wrote in a book he released this year, "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis." "This issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol."

The former South Dakota senator's return to the government will be a vindication of sorts. He was the Senate Democratic leader when he was defeated in 2004 by Republican John Thune, who convinced voters back home that Daschle was more concerned with Washington than with them.

In fact, Daschle stayed in the capital city after his defeat, becoming a public policy adviser and member of the legislative and public policy group at the law and lobbying firm Alston & Bird. Daschle isn't registered as a lobbyist. He advises clients on issues including health care, financial services, taxes and trade, according to the firm's Web site.

Health care interests, including CVS Caremark, the National Association for Home Care and Hospice, Abbott Laboratories and HealthSouth, are among the firm's lobbying clients.

Daschle's appointment was not formally announced, but Democratic officials said the job was his barring an unforeseen problem as Obama's team reviews his background. One area of review will include the lobbying connections of his wife, Linda Hall Daschle, who has worked mostly on behalf of airline-related companies over the years. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Republicans sniped at what they saw as an unwelcome trend. Alex Conant, spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said, "Barack Obama is filling his administration with longtime Washington insiders."

Source:  AP

Next time you move to another state and need a new driver's license, try this: Refuse to produce the birth certificate or any other personal information required by the department of motor vehicles. Just explain that a facsimile of the required document is posted on your website and give the clerk the domain name.

Tell them: "I'm following the example of President-elect Barack Obama. If he didn't need to produce a birth certificate to establish his eligibility to be president of the United States, why would you require me to produce one to get a lousy driver's license?"

See if it flies.

Your new employer requests a Social Security number he can provide the Internal Revenue Service so the federal government can be sure to grab its share of your money before you ever get a chance to touch it or see it, let alone spend it. Just explain that it would be an invasion of your privacy to give it to the company for identification purposes because your Social Security number was never intended for that purpose by act of Congress.

Tell them: "I'm following the example of President-elect Barack Obama. If he didn't need to produce a birth certificate to establish his eligibility to be president of the United States, surely you cannot require me to produce a Social Security card to be employed."

See if you get that job.

Better yet, all you illegal aliens out there, apply for any high-security government job. When the agency asks you to prove your citizenship, take the Obama position.

Tell them: "I'm following the example of President-elect Barack Obama. If he didn't need to produce a birth certificate to any controlling legal authority to establish his eligibility to assume the highest office in the land, how dare you ask me to prove my eligibility for this lousy job?"

I don't see how it can fail. Do you?

These are some of the thoughts going through my mind as I sit in bemusement at the prospect of the swearing in and inauguration of the next president two months from now – when a president-elect (assuming the Electoral College gives him the same kind of free pass election authorities and my colleagues in the "watchdog press" have given him to date) takes over the leadership of the executive branch of government.

There's just two months left before we witness one of the gravest attacks ever on the literal meaning of the U.S. Constitution.

Isn't it fitting that a so-called "constitutional scholar" – a former law professor – will be the one to deliver this fateful blow?

At that point, those who subscribe to the theory that we have a "living Constitution," one that means different things to different people at different times in history, will have experienced their crowning achievement – the induction of a president whose very eligibility for the office is questioned by millions of Americans who are told they don't have any standing in courts to demand actual proof.

There are only three plausible explanations, I have been able to come up with, as to why Barack Obama steadfastly refuses to produce the portion of his alleged Hawaiian birth certificate that actually shows where he was born and when:

He doesn't want to do so because he deliberately seeks to undermine the specific constitutional requirement.

He has something else to hide that would be revealed by making this document public – perhaps.

He can't because it would show conclusively he was not born in a Hawaiian hospital.
Can anyone think of another reason?

I've put that challenge out there for millions of readers and not one has provided another possibility.

Yet, here we are – and here we go.

Personally, I think Barack Obama can establish his eligibility to be president. At the end of the day, I think we'll learn the truth. But, in the meantime, the man likely to become the next president is sure providing a lousy example of openness, leadership and citizenship for the rest of us.

Source:  Worldnet Daily

When millions of Americans as well as billions of people world-wide woke up the morning after Barack Obama was elected President, they probably expected the dawn of a new age. Sorry to disappoint all you Obama-kool-aid drinkers, but America's enemies still hate us and do so regardless who occupies the White House.

This morning our friends from Al-Qaida posted a message on militant websites aimed at persuading Arabs and Muslims to not believe that Obama's election will change U.S. policies. While I have sounded the alarm bell that an Obama Presidency will weaken America and be detrimental to the State of Israel, my argument that our enemies hate us because of our freedom and tolerance, regardless of our leadership and policies, stands proven.

If Islamofacists had any goal besides destroying America and the Western World, they surely would have embraced Obama's opposition to the war, determination to remove our troops in Iraq and his sympathy for the Palestinians. Instead they decide to insult him with racial epithets, calling him a "House Slave" in Arabic and referring to him as a "House Negro" in the video subtitles.

For decades I have come across so-called Progressives who claim that if America didn't support Israel there would be no Islamic threat toward the United States. They believe 9/11 would have never happened and Jewish control caused the war in Iraq. On the surface and to the laymen-thinking it's a rational argument. However Israel as well as America and other western nations having any presence in the Middle East are just an excuse and rallying cry for murder.

The undeniable truth is that they hate us for who we are. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and every belief system on earth living side by side in America. Women are educated, while at the same time we don't systematically torture and murder homosexuals. Our freedom and our tolerance is why they wish death upon us.

These fundamentalists will soon have a President who I fear will drop our defenses and offer these murderers legitimacy by granting them a seat at a discussion table. Its bad enough Columbia University does it; I fear the White House will soon do it as well.

President-elect Obama, please take note to what has just occurred. You are not even President yet and they have offended you with a vile racist attack. They have no interest in peace and are looking at history and recalling how Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet Union walked all over Jimmy Carter. Please prove me wrong and that you will not be Jimmy Carter's Second Term.

As my soon to be President, I also take offense to what they have called you. I only hope you do as well.

Source:  American Thinker