Change is not accepting money from federally registered lobbyists for your transition and inauguration.

Change is about limiting donations to $50,000 for those who want to donate to your transition and inauguration.

Change is not allowing anyone on your transition team to be a federally registered lobbyist.

Change is about not allowing anyone who was a registered lobbyist to work on policy for their former industry for at least a year.

Change is picking your cabinet before Christmas, which Present-elect Obama is on track to do.

Change is about considering an openly gay person to a cabinet post.

Change is about picking a cabinet and a staff that look more and more like a coalition government everyday.

We don't have to like all the Clinton administration faces. I don't like one in particular. But we do need to consider the entire picture.

Change is not accepting money from federally registered lobbyists for your transition and inauguration.

Change is about limiting donations to $50,000 for those who want to donate to your transition and inauguration.

Change is not allowing anyone on your transition team to be a federally registered lobbyist.

Change is about not allowing anyone who was a registered lobbyist to work on policy for their former industry for at least a year.

Change is picking your cabinet before Christmas, which Present-elect Obama is on track to do.

Change is about picking a cabinet and a staff that look more and more like a coalition government everyday.

Change is about considering an openly gay person to a cabinet post.

I, on the other hand, question Obama's commitment to change. If the country took a chance on him because he promised change, why wouldn't he take a chance on outsiders in his cabinet? He's nominating the same people who got us in this mess-that's not just Clinton-it's majority of people he has tapped.

As for progressives throwing their the vast majority of their support behind him, name one unapologetically liberal among his picks. They are all right of center.

He won the election, hopefully people please get their head out the clouds now. Did you want change or Clinton, part three?

Painting a problem black isn't change.

Obama denied him that defacto third term. So legacy she has to worry about is whether or not it remains tied to Bill or she creates her own, separate from Bill, which is hard to do, since we only know about her because of her legacy appointments as a result of Bill.

Don't make me call it what it is, but Black people catch hell if we even TRY IT…

Um, wait – he can't use her position to solicit money; I'm sure there's a conflict of interest as well as a constitutional violation somewhere…

<<<shakes head and LOL>>>

If she gets through the hearing in less than a day (four hours' max), she'll get confirmed. If it goes longer, there may be problems in confirming her.

And I don't like the fact that Joe Lieberman is still around to gum up the works. Now that Saxby Chambliss won his run off, Al Franken has to pull off an upset in Minnesota to get the last Senate seat in the Democratic column, and Lieberman has made himself some friends in the GOP who would love to tank this nomination, and Lieberman is a vindictive little weasel who will still try to extract revenge on any Democrat he believes didn't support his re-election.

Politics,Politics. Politics. Charge it to the Game.

I don't like it, but as it was already said, it's Obama's Administration to Eff-Up.

I felt sorry for Michael Douglas, and I remember that movie scared a lot of guys into faithfulness for a hot minute.

I'm also looking at the challenges ahead of him, more daunting than any president in modern history, and I don't think it's necessary or fair to be undermining him with petty bull shit. I don't think OR fear Hillary Clinton as a threat, and if she is, he damn sure can handle her. He's already proven that. I initially expressed by befuddlement, but how long do we have to keep this going? What's done is done!

Now if you take that as a defense of Clinton, that's on you.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/i...

CHICAGO – Senate Democrats were working Tuesday to put together legislation making it possible for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to become secretary of state despite a constitutional clause that some critics argue should bar her from joining the cabinet.

The issue may seem esoteric but it generated attention Tuesday among legal scholars and bloggers arguing over whether it would be unconstitutional for Mrs. Clinton to serve as President-elect Barack Obama’s secretary of state because the salary for her new office was increased while she served in the Senate.

Judicial Watch, a watchdog group that made a name for itself investigating the Clinton administration in the 1990s, raised the matter Tuesday with a statement asserting that Mrs. Clinton was ineligible to become secretary of state because of the so-called “Emoluments Clause” of the Constitution. By the end of the day, Senator Harry M. Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, was consulting with Republican colleagues in hopes of putting together a bill to address the issue.

The issue stems from Article I, Section 6, of the Constitution, which says: “No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time.” Emoluments refers to compensation.

After Mrs. Clinton’s last Senate election in 2006, the salary for secretary of state and other cabinet positions was increased to $191,300 from $186,600. In the past, Congress has gotten around this by passing a resolution cutting the salary for the office at stake back to what it was before the nominee’s most recent election.

This became known as the “Saxbe fix,” after it was used to facilitate President Richard M. Nixon’s appointment of Senator William Saxbe of Ohio as attorney general. It happened most recently 16 years ago when incoming President Bill Clinton made Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas his treasury secretary.

“It’s been dealt with each and every time,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Mr. Reid. “We’re confident it can be dealt with this time.” Mr. Manley said it was unclear whether the measure could be passed during a lame-duck session next week. “We’re trying to work on this as quickly as possible,” he said.

Judicial Watch, and some legal scholars, argued that the Saxbe fix is insufficient because the constitutional clause says a senator is ineligible if the salary was raised, which it was in this case, even if it is subsequently cut again.

“There’s no getting around the Constitution’s Ineligibility Clause, so Hillary Clinton is prohibited from serving in the Cabinet until at least 2013, when her current term expires,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. “Barack Obama should select someone who is eligible for the position of secretary of state and save the country from a constitutional battle over Hillary Clinton’s confirmation.”

AND ….

this other true thing you point out: Sure, Barack likes her. That much i evident

fits into the analytical pattern I am working with now. Specifically, it is a bit more information that shows how gravely gravely wrong I was about the dynamics around truth in the election.

Barack Obama was positioned strongly against deception (the functioning of Clinton, then McPain) as a matter of expediency — because being positioned in that way was useful to his goal of getting elected.

It is not that he's aversive to truth, it's just that he is not actually accountable to it.

So all that stuff I was saying during the election season about the cultural physics changing related to truth/deception … maybe it was accurate in the moment and on a shallow level. But it was not accurate beyond that.

And so it turns out that my deepest support for him was support in the moment, because “in the moment” was the actual nature of his strong and effective opposition to deception.

This is the core of my shift in perception, by the way. Seeing that what appeared to me (incorrectly) as Obama's “loyalty” to truth wasn't really long term, and so wasn't actually loyalty. Instead, it was a strategic positioning related to another goal, which was the main focus.

I'm trying not to beat too hard on myself for my pathetic inability to grasp this obvious thing at the time. I suspect that nearly everyone but me understood this piece, consciously or not.

But whoa, I am kind of reeling because I was I so deeply wrong in how I understood what was going on. Incredibly and profoundly wrong.

So my thinking now is that all I can hope on this is that over time, it will more often be expedient for him to be on the side of truth rather than deception. That's all I can hope for, and I have no say whether that occurs or not.